joke that Roger laughed at with such a pained expression, Nicholas winked at her. "Don't wait up, gang," he said and banged out the back door.
Chapter Thirteen
Even the weather conspired to make up for the early cold Easter that year. The cold snap in the middle of March faded to a brief, bitter memory now. With Easter lost to cold and rain, spring was at last poised to attack in earnest. Clumps of daffodils nodded their agreement with the plan, and a warm, steady rain over the weekend had wakened the fields of grass for the battle for the green.
But Trissa was blind to all this. She had lost the strand of hope she held so briefly and sank into silence for the short drive to the park. Nicholas tried to call her attention to a star magnolia ready to burst into flower but her head came up too slowly to see it. She cast her eyes down again and studied her hands clenched in her lap. She did not even look up to count the brash pink flamingos that mobbed one corner of the giant iron birdcage marking the boundary of the zoo.
Nicholas drove the winding roads in the park without apparent destination. Despite the many times he'd driven through, he'd never mastered the layout of Forest Park, but instead relied on getting where he was going by luck and chance. Trissa's navigation skills were better, but she was too absorbed in her thoughts to help.
The weather had drawn walkers and bikers. Horses and their riders dotted the bridal path winding between bright, yellow slashes of forsythia, and golfers were hurrying through their last holes before the waning twilight failed them.
"Spring is taking over, Trissa. It can get the best of you if you let it," he said with futile enthusiasm.
"No, I don't think so," was her absent reply.
The car swooped round the circle at the amphitheater of the open air Municipal Opera complex. Swans sent ripples of gold in the sunset-tinted lake across from its entrance. In honor of the holiday, someone had looped pastel streamers through the lacy grillwork of the Victorian band shell in the middle of the lake. They fluttered gaily in the slight breeze. Trissa didn't notice.
Silently, Nicholas cursed her father and turned up the drive toward the Art Museum. In the pavilion that crowned the terraced hill near the zoo, picnickers basked in the glory of the patchwork quilt of red bud, pear, and crabapple blossoms stretched out below them in the glow of sunset as they had every spring since the 1904 World's Fair. Trissa didn't see them.
Every site they had explored with cameras and laughter on other excursions melted in the long, sharp shadows of the melting sun. Trissa didn't care.
"Are you getting hungry?" he asked.
"If you are."
Nicholas pulled through the small, stone gates at the rear garden of the Jewel Box and parked. She looked up at the Art Deco style conservatory, startled, as if waking from a sleep. "I'm sure it's closed. It's after five."
"I thought we'd eat by the floral clock."
"If you want to," she said, slipping the strap of her purse on her shoulder, and opening the door to get out.
The clock was at the far end of the rose garden. The rose bushes still wore the mounded mulch of winter but tiny green leaves poked through here and there. Trissa walked quickly through the garden, with arms folded and head down, and Nicholas abandoned the picnic gear to catch up with her. He put his arm around her shoulder and she let him.
Their pace seemed more a march than a lover's stroll. At its end, the pansies and grape hyacinth that formed the face and numbers of the clock still winked in the swiftly lowering sun. Below the clock, spelled out in flowers were the words "Hours and flowers soon fade away." Trissa raised her head to the sky and blinked back tears.
"Hey, I thought you said pansies always made you smile."
"Not today. Not here." Nicholas felt her shiver against him. "The army took my brother Lonny from me. A different war. He was in Viet Nam."
Nicholas looked down at the stone and bronze marker at the base of the clock, a war memorial to honor fallen heroes and realized his stupid mistake.
"I'm sorry, Trissa, I didn't know." His hapless efforts to cheer her were only making matters worse. Still, he refused to give up. "It's getting chilly. Let's get someplace warmer."