laid her hands on his cheeks. "I'd love a backyard wedding. I'd love to share this house with you. I don't know how anything that scares me this much can make me so happy."
He took her lips with his, soft, soft, spinning the kiss out in the perfumed air, with the sun streaming through the trees. "I believe in us." He kissed her again, swayed with her. "You're the one I can dance with."
She laid her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes.
THE LITTLE FARM
1973
"I believed in love," Janet said as she sat back on the white silk pillows on the lipstick-pink couch. "Why else would I have thrown myself into it so often? It never lasted, and my heart would break, or close. But I never stopped opening it again. Again and again. You know that. You've read all the books, heard all the stories, and the letters. You have the letters so you know I loved, right to the end."
"It never made you happy. Not the kind that lasted." Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Cilla sorted through photographs. "Here's one taken the day you married Frankie Bennett. You're so young, so happy. And it fell apart."
"He wanted the star more than the woman. That was a lesson I had to learn. But he gave me Johnnie. My beautiful boy. Johnnie's gone now. I lost my beautiful boy. It's been a year, and still I wait for him to come home. Maybe this one will be a boy."
She laid a hand on her belly, picked up a short glass, rattled the ice chilling the vodka.
"You shouldn't drink while you're pregnant."
Janet jerked a shoulder, sipped. "They didn't make such a to-do about it when I was. Besides, I'll be dead soon anyway. What will you do with all those pictures?"
"I don't know. I think I'll pick the ones I like best, have them framed. I want pictures of you in the house. Especially pictures of you at the farm. You were happy here."
"Some of my happiest moments, some of my most desolate. I gave Carlos-Chavez, my third husband-his walking papers right in this room. We had a vicious fight, almost passionate enough to have me consider taking him back. But I'd had enough. How he hated it here. 'Janet,' he'd say in that Spanish toreador's voice that seduced me in the first place, 'why must we camp out in the middle of nowhere? There isn't a decent restaurant for miles.' Carlos," she added and lifted her glass, "he could make love like a king. But outside of bed, he bored me brainless. The problem there was we didn't spend enough time outside of bed before I married him. Sex is no reason to get married."
"Ford never bores me. He made me a goddess, and still when he looks at me, he sees me. Too many of them didn't see you."
"I stopped seeing me."
"But in the letters, the letters you kept, he called you Trudy."
"The last love, the last chance. I couldn't know. Yet maybe some part of me did. Maybe I wanted to love and be loved by what I'd lost, or given up. For a little while, I could be Trudy again." She stroked her fingers over one of the white pillows. "But that was a lie, too. I could never get her back, and he never saw her."
"The last chance," Cilla repeated with photos spread before her, and Janet on the bright pink couch. "Why was it the last? You lost your son, and that was horrible and tragic. But you had a daughter who needed you. You had a child inside you. You left your daughter, and that's haunted her all her life-and I guess it's haunted me too. You left her, and you ended the child when you ended yourself. Why?"
Janet sipped her drink. "If there's one thing you can do for me, it would be to answer that question."
"How?"
"You've got everything you need. It's your dream, for God's sake. Pay attention."
Part Three. FINISH TRIM Chapter Twenty-Nine
Crazy. She had to be crazy hosting a party. She didn't have any furniture, or dishes. She didn't own a serving spoon. She was at least three weeks out from delivery on her stove and refrigerator. She didn't own a goddamn rug. Her seating consisted of a single patio set, a couple of cheap plastic chairs and a collection of empty compound buckets. Her cooking tools were limited to a Weber grill, a hot plate and a microwave oven.
She had