Chapter 34

Harvey Sayers insisted that Della decorate the large master bedroom at the lake house according to her taste and he would consider the smaller room at the head of the stairs his, maintaining he would be more comfortable in it since he never brought female guests for visits. Aside from a mention buried deep within the prenuptial agreements his family insisted be drawn up every time he became engaged, his fiancées and wives had no inkling the house he escaped to for fishing trips 'with the boys' had actually been built by his father. And if they did somehow find out, the deed was filed under someone else's name, so it was doubtful they would ever discover its location or value. He called it protecting a family treasure and found nothing wrong with keeping its existence a secret. Besides, if the house remained a secret, his good friend Perry would have a place to go that was far from reporters and gossip mongers who dogged him and his lovely secretary to define their relationship in more sensational terms than employer/employee. That is if they actually enjoyed a more sensational relationship. Harvey could only surmise about the couple – that is until he saw the size of the bed Della bought.

Della had taken great delight in fixing up the bedroom, and thought it had turned out quite well for having been pieced together from local estate sales and second-hand shops. The king-size four poster bed of sturdy oak fit the size of the room and Perry was thrilled that his feet didn't hang over the edge of the mattress. So thrilled in fact, that he didn't complain about the lemon yellow walls and yellow, white, and green block patterned quilt and the overabundance of matching pillows in various sizes she had chosen. Della did love pillows. Two bedside tables, a fifty-four inch wide six drawer dresser, a five drawer tallboy chest, and a writing desk, all generously bankrolled by Harvey, made their way into the room. The previous year she had added a large green rag rug, sheer white curtains, and two white hobnail milk glass hurricane table lamps. It was a pretty room, but the scale and strong grain of the oak furniture kept it from being too feminine for a man of Perry's size and decidedly masculine personality. Although she suspected he would have slept perfectly fine surrounded by frills, she was proud of the fact he felt comfortable in the room.

Perry insisted upon emptying the trunk of the car completely before heading upstairs, stacking their luggage just inside the French doors and heading back out one last time to heft the metal cooler from the trunk. It was empty save for a few soft drinks, so he left it on the deck before heading back into the house and closing and locking the French doors behind him. He picked up the two largest suitcases and strode across the expansive great room to the stairs, pausing briefly to get a better grip on the luggage and to take a deep, purifying breath.

They had finally made it. The week spent in Della's home town, in the soulless mansion where she had grown up with not only a harridan of a grandmother, but a distant, unloving father and an excessively self-important brother as well, was now four days behind them. No long-lost mothers, kidnapping step-grandmothers, best friend burglars, or cheating boyfriends would intrude on their time together. They had four days alone with one another to wash the film of antipathy from their bodies, to cleanse their souls of impassivity, and to fully appreciate what it was about each of them that made life together so grand. He jogged up the stairs and headed for the large master bedroom at the end of the catwalk hallway they delighted in referring to as 'theirs'.

A trail of feminine clothing led to the bathroom and he could hear Della humming happily over the sound of running water as she drew a bath. She had been talking about a bath since the first day of their car trip, as none of the cabins or motels or rooms in stately Victorian houses had provided a tub. Perry dropped the suitcases and stood listening to her. When was the last time she had hummed? The day her mother had first appeared? Yes, that was it. They had stopped off at the office following the satisfactory end to their latest trial to deposit brief cases and collect messages from Gertie, along with a breathless synopsis of the goings-on of the office in their absences, and she had hummed nearly the entire twenty minutes of their stay. Perhaps she had an inkling of what lay of ahead of them that evening, that the door of her apartment would barely close before he swept her into his arms and over his shoulder, carrying her to the bedroom where he would make exhaustively complete, intensely sweet love to her. She was an incredibly physical woman, perceptible of his slightest touch, and she may have detected his intent before the thought had fully formed in his own mind from the way he held her elbow or placed his fingers at the small of her back in the briefest caress.

He tapped his knuckles on the door and walked in without an invitation just as she was stepping into the tub, treating him to a breathtaking view of her deliciously rounded bottom and magnificently sculpted back. He involuntarily sucked in a breath.

"You've seem my rear end before," she said without turning around, lowering herself into the fragrant water skimmed with a layer of frothy bubbles.

"And every time I'm amazed." He crossed to the commode and seated himself. "I wanted to hear more of the concert. But I'm wondering why 'Over the Rainbow'?"

She leaned back against the cast iron tub and sighed in utter ecstasy. "Because there's no place like home." She sighed again. "And don't you dare split hairs about it being the song Dorothy sings about how much better the world must be away from home."

He grinned. "I wouldn't dream of it." He bent to retrieve something from the floor. "'Over the Rainbow' makes more sense than this. Why did you bring this in here?"

Della closed her eyes but Perry detected the sparkle of tears on her lashes anyway. "I haven't seen it in a long time," she said, her voice rough with emotion.

"Tell me. We're not in a car going sixty miles an hour anymore."

She pulled her arm out of the water and draped it over her face, covering her eyes. "His name is Mr. Kitty," she began and stopped, moving her arm just enough to peek at Perry and the stuffed tabby kitten he held in his hands. "Aunt Mae gave him to me for my fourth birthday. He was my favorite toy, especially since Grandmother wouldn't let me have a real cat or toys that you could actually play with. I took him everywhere with me and slept with him every night."

Perry turned the kitty in his hands. "There's a tag in the ear. Good Lord, it's a Steiff. Mae must have paid a fortune for it."

"I'm sure she did. She tried very hard to make up for Grandmother's…practicality when it came to what constituted fun for a little girl. Grandmother was almost obsessive about my clothes and my hair, and I had a closet full of beautiful dresses and more hair ribbons than any girl in town, but I had no toy chest. All I had were fancy porcelain 'look at' dolls lined up on the shelves in my bedroom and a hundred books kept in a small case in Father's study. She would dress me up and shoo me into the parlor to practice the piano or to read a book and some days all I did was weep. Five year olds aren't supposed to spend their days weeping."

"Mr. Kitty looks to be in pretty good shape," Perry observed, still turning the little stuffed toy in his hands, admiring the workmanship of the venerable Steiff company. He hoped he could keep himself from breaking down during her story. He feared it was heading toward something as traumatic as when her father had thrown her painstakingly gathered pretty stones onto the ground, and despite his contention that he wanted to know more about her childhood, each subsequent story dwarfed the last in pathos.

"I took good care of him," Della replied. "Sometimes he was the only…sometimes I had only him to talk to. He never told me to sit up straight or to stop biting my lip or to comb my hair and fix the ribbon. He was mine and I loved him."

"What happened? Why haven't you seen him in a long time?" He could hardly bear the pain he felt emanating from her as she continued to hide behind her arm, refusing to look at him.

"When I was nine Grandmother told me I was too old to play with baby toys and she gave him to the church charity drive."

Perry suspected her answer to be true, as far as it went. "After everything we've been through, you still don't trust me?"

She let herself slip deeper into the water before continuing. "I wanted to be a Girl Scout when I was eight. Grandmother said that troop meetings and activities would interfere with schoolwork as well as with piano and ballet lessons. But I begged and begged and finally she allowed me to join the troop Miranda belonged to only if I could keep up my grades and lessons. I loved being a Girl Scout and thought I was keeping up with everything. The summer I turned nine I wanted to go to Camp Merrie Woode with the other girls in my troop, and after more begging and some support from June, Grandmother let me go."

"And…?"

"And they fed a hundred little girls spoiled sauerkraut and sausages for dinner on the third night. At least seventy of us, including the camp counselors, troop leaders and even the nurse, got violently ill. They called all the parents and Grandmother was the first to arrive. She bundled me into the back seat of the car, plunked a bucket in my lap, and drove me home. The only words she said to me the entire way were 'open the window' when I got sick in the bucket."

"My God Della, you were just a kid! It wasn't your fault you got sick."

"Oh, I found out it wasn't just the fact I was sick. I had to drag myself upstairs and not only clean myself, but the bucket too before I could get into bed. And when she came to make sure I had followed all of her instructions, I asked for Mr. Kitty. Oh, I forgot to mention that she wouldn't allow me to take him to camp because only babies slept with baby toys and I was a big girl who made her own decisions."

Dread crept over Perry as his mind skipped ahead to what Della was most certainly about to tell him. He wanted to know about her childhood and the grandmother who had possibly loved her but whose brutal disregard for affection had devastated her granddaughter, but there was a limit to the devastation he could endure reflected in her eyes. "Della, I – "

"Let me finish the story, Perry," she fairly barked at him. "This is what you've been whining about for me to do, so just sit there and listen, okay?" She uncovered her eyes and used both arms to pull herself into an upright sitting position. "She told me she gave Mr. Kitty to the church for a charity drive because some little girl who respected her elders and didn't have the advantages I had deserved him more."

"Della, please –"

"I got a 'B' in math," she said, lifting huge, pain-filled eyes to his equally pain-filled eyes. "I got a 'B' in math and she took away my only toy as punishment for not keeping up. I thought he was gone forever…Perry, how could anyone be that cruel to a child? How could anyone think a nine year old who just wanted to be a lousy Girl Scout didn't deserve to keep her only damn toy?"

Perry stood, yanked a towel from the bar and held it out in front of him. Della pushed herself up and out of the tub, burrowing into the towel and allowing Perry to engulf her in a hug. He held her, rocking her gently, as she trembled uncontrollably in his arms. Too angry and confused to shed a tear, all she could do to express the overpowering hurt her grandmother had caused was to stamp one foot over and over in abject frustration.

"And then I open that keepsake chest and there Mr. Kitty is, after all these years. She didn't really give him away. What purpose did it serve to hide my toy in that box? A child deserves to be loved and I wasn't loved, not the way I should have been." The repetitive stamping of her foot ceased. "All my life I've fixated on why she couldn't love me, why she pushed me relentlessly into things I didn't want to do, why she knowingly caused so much pain for so many people, and it's gotten me nowhere."

Perry crushed her to him when she couldn't finish her tortured thought. "I don't know what to say, Della," he whispered into her hair. "Tell me how I can help you with this."

"You know what to say. You've already said it. We discussed it not two hours ago when you took being called a good man as an insult."

He set her away from him to look at her intently before drawing her close once again. "It doesn't matter why she did what she did," he said, pressing his lips to her forehead. "It only matters that she did it."

"I've had a lot of time to think recently." She hugged him hard. "You don't have to say it. No shit, huh? But when I think about my childhood and what my family did to me, if I think about it merely as things that happened and not torture myself with trying to apply intent or make myself crazy looking for reasons for unreasonable behavior, I'm much more at peace with myself. For a while I thought I had been born bad and therefore deserved to be controlled and punished, and I truly tried to be what everyone wanted me to be…and I was miserable until I accepted that there wasn't anything wrong with me – so phooey on them. If they didn't like me, tough toenails. I liked me."

Perry realized he had been holding his breath during her entire speech and let it out slowly. "And I like you," he told her shakily.

"Yes you do," she affirmed with confidence. "It took running two thousand miles away from home and finding friends like Janet and Evelyn and Estelle, and even Paul and that band of miscreants you pal around with to confirm what I had been telling myself."

"What about me?" He leaned back slightly and placed his hands on either side of her face, her beautiful, beloved face.

"You," she cooed softly, "are my reward for staying true to myself."

He opened his mouth to say something, because he felt he should, that she deserved a reply as extraordinary as what she'd said, but no sound emerged. This time there really was nothing he could say that would approach the import of her words – no sincere affirmation of his feelings, no joke, nothing. All he could do was hold her and hope she could feel that his heart beat for her and her alone.