In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [81]
“Because of me, and for urgent financial reasons, Ed was forced to take a sabbatical from college. By the time I finally got out of that hospital, he had fixed up the old beach house. He personally hauled all my old favorite bits of furniture there.” She ran a hand lovingly across the little antique table, with its white ring marks where her glass had stood for so many years. “He created a new home for me. Of course, I couldn’t tell him that I was a city dweller, that I hated living at the beach, and that without the old familiar streets of Charleston, without my secret nooks and crannies, without my favorite liquor stores, without my old home—I was lost.
“Hot damn, I told myself, hold your sharp tongue for once, woman. He has sacrificed college for you, worked his fingers to the bone for you, cared for you. And what other man in your miserable life ever did that? Not even your Creole daddy, who loved you to pieces. But not like this. Oh, no, he never loved like this.”
She held out her glass for a refill and again Camelia obliged.
“You should know,” she said, with a hard look at Mel, “that when Ed Vincent gives his heart, he gives all of it. And forever.”
Mel nodded. She knew all right.
Dorothea sipped the bourbon. “Ed did see his brother again,” she said. “Quite by chance, at the university, the same day he heard that I was in the hospital and near death’s door. I’m not sure which event shocked him more. He told me about it later. Said as far as he could see, Mitch Rogan hadn’t changed one bit, only now he looked successful. He never mentioned his brother to me again, after that day.”
Mel’s eyes met Camelia’s; they were both thinking the same thing. That Mitch Rogan was Ed’s would-be assassin.
“They told me the big old Jefferson House was worthless, though eventually somebody bought it—too cheaply, but what could I do? It stayed exactly the way it was, dilapidated and tumbling down, for many years. I heard recently it had been sold again and restored, and looks just like in the old days, but I have no desire to see it. It’s part of the past, and when Ed rescued me, just the way I had rescued him, I decided to join him in his philosophy. I became a woman who lived for today. Unlike me, the past was dead and gone.”
“But you are still with us.” Impulsively, Mel got up and hugged her, but Dorothea gave her an impatient little shove.
“Hot damn, gal, don’t go doing things like that. I almost spilled my drink.”
She glowered at her for a second before continuing. “Ed took that sabbatical from school. He found employment where he could, sometimes working as many as three jobs at once. He was a handyman, a construction worker, gardener, field hand. Anything he could get. It made me doubly sad because I knew he was right back where he came from. He promised me he would go back to college next year . . . and the next year . . . and the year after that.
“Then we were told he would have to forfeit the beach house in lieu of unpaid property taxes. I knew an antiquarian book dealer, and I sent Ed into town with what remained of the old books. We raised just enough to pay the taxes and to buy an ancient truck. Ed drove around Charleston, canvassing the residents to see if they wanted him to haul away their garbage, offering them a cheap rate. A bargain. He picked up those garbage cans himself and tipped them into the truck. Then he drove to the dump and shoveled the stinking garbage out.”
Dorothea’s eyes met Mel’s. “My heart was breaking for him,” she said simply. “I had thought to make a better life for him. And now he was reduced to this. But Ed had no false pride. He did whatever was needed to keep our little home together. It was not a good life, but he was his own master.
“The next year he was able to buy a second truck, and he hired a young man to help him. Over five years, those trucks grew into a fleet of fifty and soon he had the monopoly on the garbage collection in all the new developments, as well as in the old town, and all across North Carolina. But he was like a well-kept secret. For work, he used the name Theo