Once and Future Wife Read online

  Once and Future Wife

  Text copyright 2016 David Burnett

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Deborah Bradseth, Tugboat Design

  Once and Future Wife is the second volume in a series concerning Jennie Bateman and her family. The first volume, Those Children Are Ours is also available from Amazon. Both are stand-alone books and each volume can be enjoyed with no knowledge of the other one. There are no cliffhangers in ether book!

  Other Books by David Burnett

  Those Children Are Ours

  To Fall in Love Again

  The Handfasting

  The Reunion

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Charleston

  Whitesburg

  Thomas

  Thomas Calls

  Dinner

  Home from College

  Whitesburg

  July Fourth

  Labor Day

  October

  Birthday Present

  Party and Shopping

  November

  Early December

  Christmas Party

  The Rusty Anchor

  Tasha

  Confession

  Epilogue

  Other Books by David Burnett

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Those Children Are Ours

  Prologue

  “Hump day, hump day,” Jennie Bateman sang as she sauntered down the hall. It was Wednesday afternoon, halfway through the week, two more days before she slid into the weekend with a mother-daughters dinner in Atlanta on Saturday.

  Lunch had just ended and her third-grade class was with the music teacher. Because of a quirk in this week’s schedule, they would go from music class directly to art, and, as a result, Jennie had almost an hour to herself. She was headed to the school’s office for coffee.

  She glanced through a window in one of the outside doors as she passed and saw the fountain in the fourth-graders’ garden. The janitor had forgotten to turn off the water the night before and it had frozen in place as it popped into the frigid night air, resulting in long arches of ice. Some of them ended abruptly in midair, while others made complete half-circles, reaching the bowl beneath the fountain. In other cases, the water had bounced over the edge of the bowl, and these arches ended in long icicles which almost touched the pavement below.

  She shivered. It was possibly the coldest day this winter and the furnace in her little house in Whitesburg had worked overtime the night before just to make things bearable. It would be cold this weekend in Atlanta too, maybe even snow, but that would not be a problem. They’d be inside most of the day.

  Jennie’s daughters, Alexis and Christa, and their stepsisters, Tasha and Amy, all attended college in Georgia, making visits such as the one on Saturday so much easier than they had been when she’d had to drive seven hours to Charleston if she wanted to see them. Jennie had invited Tasha and Amy to join them for dinner. While she knew Amy would be there, she doubted that Tasha would show, since she rarely accepted Jennie’s invitations.

  She caught the aroma of fresh coffee as she opened the door to the office. The coffee Kara brewed was good, not quite Starbucks quality, but almost, since she had worked as a barista when she was in school. Ms. Watkins, the principal, joked that her experience had weighed heavily in her favor when she had interviewed to be her secretary.

  As Jennie entered the office, Kara was listening on the telephone, a frown on her face. Jennie waved and started toward the workroom for coffee, but Kara caught her eye and motioned for her to come.

  “It’s Alexis,” she said, holding the receiver out to Jennie. “She’s crying so hard I can barely understand her.”

  Jennie took the telephone from her outstretched hand.

  “Alexis, I’m here. What’s wrong, sweetie?” Jennie pulled a chair over to Kara’s desk, preparing to hear that her daughter had received a “B” on some English paper rather than her accustomed “A.”

  Their father had certainly raised daughters who were driven to achieve.

  Jennie smiled, thinking of Thomas. Just like him. Her former husband was an English professor at the college in Charleston.

  Alexis swallowed hard as she choked off her tears. “Jennie, it’s Emma. She…”

  Jennie held her breath a moment. She should have known it was more than a grade on a short story. Complaints about grades generally involved shouting, name calling, and veiled threats rather than tears. Her mind went to the worst-case scenario.

  “Oh, Alexis, did Emma lose the baby? I’m so sorry.” Jennie bit her lower lip. Emma was Thomas’s second wife. Jennie well recalled how excited the entire family, Thomas, Emma, and all four girls, had been when she had announced she was expecting.

  “These things happen, you know, especially when a woman is older, and…”

  “It’s worse.”

  What could be worse than losing a baby?

  “Jennie, Emma is…” Alexis let out a shuddering breath, “Emma is dead.”

  Jennie froze. Surely she had heard Alexis wrong. “Emma is what?”

  “She’s dead, Jennie.” Alexis began to sob, and her words came out choked with emotion, but this time there was no mistaking it.

  Jennie sank slowly into the chair now. There was a good reason people always told someone to sit down before they delivered bad news. Her legs had gone completely weak.

  Alexis must be devastated. She loved her stepmother. Although Emma had married their father only a little over three years earlier, she had been mother to Alexis and Christa long before their marriage, filling the void that Jennie created when she had abandoned her family. Her heart ached for her daughter, and she began to cry to.

  “What happened?” she whispered after she had composed herself a little.

  Alexis’s soft voice was almost a monotone. She could have been relaying any bit of news, from word of a new neighbor moving in down the street to the birth of a baby—or the death of a loved one. Jennie could imagine her sympathetic eyes, up-turned face, a bit of a smile, the “everything-is-going-to-be all-right mask” that Southern ladies wear in times of trouble, the mask that makes it possible to cross any bridge, confront any problem without breaking down. Jennie had never learned to use the mask, but she felt certain that Emma had modeled it well.

  “It was this morning, just after first bell at her school. The father of one of her students appeared at the door of her classroom, demanding that his daughter leave with him.” Alexis took a deep breath and released it slowly. “He wasn’t supposed to be there, Jennie. He didn’t have a visitor’s pass or anything, and Emma told him to leave. He shouted for the girl to come with him, but she ran away, toward the back of the room. When he followed her, Emma blocked his path. He was a big man, they said, and he grabbed her shoulders and just threw her out of the way. Then he started toward his daughter…” Alexis’s voice broke, but she regained control.

  “Emma screamed for help. The kids were shouting, some of them were running, some were helping the girl, a couple of them grabbed at the man, but he shrugged them off. Emma slipped back in front of him and barred the way. When he couldn’t get past her…when he…he…” she sobbed as the mask began to slip, “…he punched her. Hard, Jennie.”

  “He didn’t.” Jennie covered her mouth to stifle a cry and Kara hurried over, concern showing on her face.

  “Jennie, he hit her in the jaw, an upper cut, like a boxer,” she exclaimed. “She fell backwards, lan
ded flat on a desk, then rolled onto the floor and hit her head.”

  Jennie winced. “Oh no. Stop. I don’t want to hear…”

  Alexis rolled on, accelerating as she spoke. “It was a mess. Everybody started to scream. Two kids ran for help. The girls were crying. Tommy Padget, Robbie’s brother—he’s the one that told me most of this—tackled the guy and pinned him on the ground. Someone put a pillow under Emma’s head and laid a coat over her.

  “An ambulance came. They said it only took five minutes. It came and rushed Emma across the river to the med school. The principal called Dad and he made it to the hospital before Emma did.”

  Alexis began to sob again. “The EMT told Dad they were going full speed across the bridge, the siren was blaring, cars were scattering. About halfway across, the man said Emma regained consciousness. That she reached out and grasped his collar, begging him to save her baby. That’s just like Emma. She was more worried about her unborn baby than herself. Just like she was more concerned about that man getting to her student…”

  Alexis went silent a moment, but Jennie had no idea what to say. Before she could come up with something, Alexis started talking again.

  “Jennie, Emma…her back was broken and her skull was…and…and…Emma was dead when they reached the hospital,” Alexis sobbed. “Dad never got to see her.”

  “Oh, Alexis, that’s terrible.” Jennie began to cry again too. She wanted to reach out and hold her daughter. She wanted to tell her not to worry, that everything would be all right, that all would be better in the morning, but she knew it would be a lie.

  “He was a bad man, Jennie. He abused his wife, he beat his daughter—everyone in school knew. We saw the bruises. All that is bad, and I feel sorry for his family…but, Jennie…he…he killed Emma,” Alexis wailed. “I feel like I want to kill him, Jennie. Pound his head against a concrete floor. Break his back…”

  “I feel the same way, Alexis, the same way.” Jennie wiped the tears from her eyes. “What about the baby, Alexis? What happened to the baby?” Her voice shook as she spoke. She couldn’t control it. Losing Emma was bad enough for Thomas and the girls, but if they lost the baby too…

  “They took the baby in the ER. She’s at least a month early and she may have been hurt when Emma…when Emma fell. She’s in NICU, in intensive care. She might not make it either, Jennie.”

  “No. This is awful, it’s…it’s…” Jennie could think of no word bad enough to describe what had happened.

  “Hold on.”

  Alexis began talking to someone in the background, but Jennie couldn’t understand the words.

  “I need to go, Jennie. We’re going by Athens for Christa and Amy.”

  “Is anyone with your father?”

  “With Dad? Uncle Richard is at the hospital. Aunt Elizabeth is at the house. We’ll be there soon.”

  “Alexis, I’m so sorry…I…”

  “You will come to the funeral, won’t you, Jennie?”

  “I don’t know, Alexis, I…”

  “You’ve got to come.”

  “I’ll see. Drive carefully, Alexis. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Jennie sat staring at the telephone for a moment as Kara finally approached her from where she’d been standing, giving Jennie space to talk. A thought flitted unbidden through her mind. Thomas was no longer married. That meant Thomas was free to…

  She shook her head to clear her thoughts. “Don’t be a stupid witch,” she mumbled to herself.

  ***

  “I’m going to need a substitute on Friday, Kara.”

  Kara raised her eyebrows. “You’re really going to your former husband’s second wife’s funeral?”

  Jennie had filled her in on what had happened, and on her decision to attend.

  “What are people going to say, Jennie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you attending to say your good-byes to Emma or to see Thomas?”

  Jennie felt herself blushing, and she glared at Kara for a full thirty seconds before speaking. “You’ve known me since grade school.”

  Kara nodded.

  “You were a bridesmaid at my wedding, and you know everything…the whole story.”

  “Yes. You were madly in love, you were blissfully happy, you and Thomas had two beautiful daughters. It was perfect.”

  Jennie stared at the floor, shaking her head. “So perfect that one morning during a manic attack, I screamed at those beautiful children, shouted obscenities as I cursed one of the best husbands a woman could have, stomped down the steps and drove away, never looking back.”

  “I know.”

  She raised her eyes to look at her friend now. “I became a foul-mouthed, alcoholic tramp.”

  Kara didn’t respond to that.

  “You stood by me, Kara, even when I ignored you because I was too caught up in my own drama. And you waited…you were there when I quit work at the Rusty Anchor, when I swore off the bottle and went back to school, when I started therapy. You were the one who talked Ms. Watkins into hiring me as a teacher in the middle of the year when no other principal even dreamed of giving me a job.

  “You cheered me on when I asked for visitation with Alexis and Christa…You know me better than anyone in the world does, better than my own mother…so how can you ask me if I’m going to Emma’s funeral in order to see Thomas? How can you imagine that I want to chance going through all that a second time? How I would dare put him, my children, through it all again?”

  “That’s exactly why I’m asking, Jennie. Because I do know you so well.” A sympathetic smile played around Kara’s lips “So, are you going to the funeral to see Thomas?”

  Jennie hesitated before responding.

  “You think I have feelings for him.”

  Kara shrugged her shoulders.

  “If you must know, Kara, Alexis begged me to come. Christa too. Even Amy, Emma’s child, called. ‘Please, Aunt Jennie,’ she said. ‘Mama would want you to be there.’ What could I do?” She threw up her hands. “I couldn’t refuse the children.”

  “Emma’s daughter calls you Aunt Jennie?” Kara seemed about to laugh.

  Jennie sighed. “All of the children, mine and Emma’s, call—called—Emma Mom. I had a hard time with that for so long. Alexis was really slow to warm up to me. She was so angry at first, angry at being abandoned, angry that I returned. She seems to think of me as big sister now, I think. She calls me Jennie.”

  “Right.” Kara nodded.

  “Christa and I bonded within months. She calls me Jennie-Mom. I cried the first time I heard her say it. And yes, Amy, Emma’s younger daughter, calls me Aunt Jennie. Don’t know why, but it’s rather nice.” She sighed. “Then there is Tasha. She doesn’t like me at all. I hate to think what she calls me behind my back, but to my face she’s always polite and insists on calling me Ms. Bateman. I can’t complain, but she does seem to go out of her way to avoid me.”

  “How about Thomas?” Kara pressed.

  “Thomas calls me Jennie, of course.” She rolled her eyes. “When he speaks to me at all.”

  “I wasn’t asking what Thomas calls you.” Kara gave a disgusted sigh. “Are you going to the funeral to see him? Aren’t you concerned that people in Charleston might think you’ve made that trip in order to see Thomas?”

  “You sound like a scratched disk. Of course I’ll see Thomas. It’s his wife’s funeral.” She caught Kara’s eye. “Whatever anyone might think,” she declared, “I am not chasing Thomas Lindsay.”

  Charleston

  The pine trees on the frontage road swayed in the wind and a sudden gust shook Jennie’s car, nudging it toward the shoulder. She moved her foot from the accelerator as she struggled for control and her speed dropped to seventy-five.

  She was going to be late.

  At least the rain had stopped falling. An hour ago, as she had driven away from her hotel, cold drops had pinged the roof of her car and she’d watched as they bounced off the hood. Sleet, she had guessed.
The thermometer had hovered near freezing and the forecast had promised it would move little before noon.

  All in all, a terrible day for a funeral.

  Jennie glanced at the dashboard clock. If the black cloud to the south moved away and the rain held off, if she did not need to creep through another fog bank, if there were no traffic accidents, then she might just make it.

  If she encountered no more delays she might even reach Charleston and make her way to Saint Phillip’s Church before ten o’clock.

  Before they buried Emma.

  As she passed the junction with interstate ninety-five, the sky seemed to brighten a bit. Jennie sighed in relief. Traffic was moving well, and she ought to arrive in time.

  Her friendship with Emma had been improbable, at best. Jennie’s petition for visitation had been filed two weeks after Emma’s engagement to Thomas was announced. In fairness, Jennie had known nothing about Emma when she filed her petition, but the sudden appearance of a former wife is not the engagement present of which any woman dreams.

  Jennie’s first reaction to Emma had been envy. A Greek goddess, she had called her. Emma was beautiful. Emma was smart. Emma was fearless. When her first husband had threatened the lives of her children, Emma had shot and killed the man.

  Jennie well recalled her gasp when Emma told the story in court. She had then looked Jennie in the eye, proclaiming that she would protect her children against any threat, and that Alexis and Christa were hers.

  Jennie had been certain that Emma despised her, seeing her as a threat to the family she was forming, as a woman intent on stealing Alexis, Christa and, probably, Thomas from her.

  In the end, Jennie had withdrawn her request for the visitation order, and, over the last four years, without the compulsion of a court order, she had been accepted by her children, by Amy, and even by Emma.

  Twenty miles from the city traffic became heavier, and the speed limit dropped. She checked the time, then slowed even further. The roads were slick and she feared she might encounter patches of ice. Few of the other drivers seemed to be concerned, though, and she winced as an SUV dashed past, almost side-swiping her car as it skidded and swerved while the driver attempted to keep it in its lane.