Everything She Ever Wanted (4 page)

story.
 
Pat and Tom, as Scarlett and Rhett in their antebellum finery,

smiled for the camera as they were united in marriage in a huge

flower-bedecked building: the lovely slender woman with feathers in her

hair and an ivory fan open in her small gloved hands, the huge man with

the tremendously proud grin.

Why Pat had pulled directly into the path of an oncoming car remained a

mystery.
 
She might have been blinded by the sun, but she was probably

only careless.
 
She was not a particularly good driver, and she was

easily distracted.
 
Driving a truck and pulling a horse trailer behind

cut most of her side and rear vision.
 
She may well have been exhausted

after three whirlwind days at the Stone Mountain horse show, but it was

an exhilarating fatigue; she had gone from being "left at the chapel"

to being a bride whose wedding was the focal point of the whole show.

It had turned out better than even she could have envisioned.

It was even kind of romantic that she and Tom had both suffered broken

collarbones-they shared everything.
 
His own injury was long since

healed, but Tom remembered how painful it had been, and he was

especially tender with Pat, never letting her lift anything heavy or

reach for something if he could get it for her.

Gradually, she resumed her riding lessons, and Tom divided his time

among his work at Ralston Purina, shoeing horses, and fixing up their

place.
 
As their fortunes increased, they planned to buy more and more

Morgan horses.
 
They would have the finest Morgan stables in the state

of Georgia.
 
They already had the finest marriage.
 
That, Tom was sure

of.
 
"Two human souls joined together for life .
 
. ."

There was only one cloud over their happiness.
 
While Pat's family was

pleased with her marriage to Tom, and Tom's grandparents found Pat a

sweet and thoughtful woman, his parents were another story entirely.

Walter and Big Carolyn Allanson wanted nothing to do with Tom's third

wife.
 
In fact, they had sided with Tom's exwife during the divorce,

and resisted all his efforts to let them see what a fine woman Pat

was.

Hoping to ease the situation a little, Margureitte Radcliffe made

overtures to the Walter Allansons.
 
She called and invited them to join

her and Colonel Radcliffe for dinner at the officers' club at Fort

McPherson.
 
"They were not interested," Margureitte later said, "and I

thought, How can they not be interested when they do not know us?"

Margureitte, who always prided herself on her sense of propriety and

her impeccable social grace, was shocked to find Tom's parents so

hostile.
 
Using a phrase she often sprinkled through her conversations,

she sighed, "I never in this whole wide world thought people could act

like that."

Then Tom lost his job at Ralston Purina, and he suspected it was his

father's fine hand interfering in that too.
 
He tried to make up for

his lost salary with his blacksmith work, but that caused a bit of a

problem in his relationship with Pat He was surprised to find that his

bride was not only jealous of his exwife, she was jealous of any woman

who might cast an appreciative eye on him.
 
She plain didn't want him

around other women, not unless she was with him.
 
He tried to explain

to her that horse barns were not exactly prime spots to find other

women and that he spent 95 percent of his life around men, but it did

no good.
 
Pat insisted on accompanying Tom on his farrier rounds.

He was proud of her, but she sure put a damper on male conversation.

Instead of jawing easily with the good old boys who hung around as he

shod horses, Tom worried whether Pat was comfortable and feeling

okay.

Her presence made his customers uneasy too.
 
But he loved her too much

to ever feel smothered by her attention.
 
If she wanted to be with him,

then she was always welcome.

He wouldn't have dreamed of telling her to stay home.

Lavished with Tom's love, Pat's health improved-at least enough so she

was able to help on the elaborate grounds of Kentwood; she could manage

the riding mower.
 
She gave a few horseback lessons, and they sometimes

rented their surrey or the sulky and their horses for shows and

parades.
 
She and Tom went often to horse shows.
 
But they both soon

realized that they would have to budget tightly and worle harder to

make Kentwood the kind of place they visualized.
 
Pat wanted everything

now, and Tom had to gentle her down and explain they Just couldn't

afford all thata bigger barn, a grandstand for horse shows, more roses,

chandeliers, more horses and more buggies, more elegant livery for

their drivers.

All of it took money, and the money would have to come from somewhere

outside their household.
 
Without his job at Ralston Purina and with

the broken collarbone that had kept him from shoeing horses for a

couple of months, Tom had lost ground financially.
 
Now he could work,

but his blacksmith business was going downhill instead of up-mostly

because of Pat's insistence that she always be present, or because he

so often had to drop everything and rush home when she had a spell of

fainting.

Tom could never tell when Pat was going to pass out.
 
Sometimes she

would be driving their jeep around the place and she would just faint

at the wheel and fall out the driver's door; sometimes he would race

home to find her lying by the telephone.

No, it was impossible to even think of Pat working fulltime; he didn't

want her to do that anyway.
 
He wasn't even sure she should be giving

so many riding lessons.

Tom wanted to get his grandparents moved onto the place too.

He had promised to do that, and that promise, he thought, should be

honored before the big expansion of Kentwood.
 
But even with worries

about money and feuds with his parents, Tom was happy.

When he and Pat saddled up their horses and rode over their own land,

he thought he was probably the luckiest man who had ever lived.

Sometimes Pat wore one of her costumes for a ride around their place,

and the sight of her with the burgeoning spring trees behind her was

enough to make him want to weep with joy.
 
They called each other

"Sugar" and eventually that was abbreviated to "Shug."
 
They had

special songs and little sayings that were just for them to know

about.

"First things first, Shug," they would say.
 
They would see to what was

important and the rest of their plans would fall into line.

Tom had never told Pat how bad things were with his parents especially

with his father.
 
Walter Allanson could have a crude mouth, and he had

used it to talk about Pat.
 
Although he had never met her, his father

detested Pat.
 
When Tom was first living with her, he had told his son

she was a slut, a woman whose bad reputation was common knowledge.

"She'll lie down with any man with a truck and a horse trailer.
 
You

damn fool, can't you see that?"

Pat had had affairs that were no secret, Walter Allanson had pointed

out.
 
If Tom had anything to do with her, he was a bigger idiot than he

had already proved he was.
 
"Stay away from that, Tommy," Walter had

argued.
 
"That's bad stuff there."

Of course, his father's warnings had only made Tom want Pat more.
 
It

wasn't true what he said about Pat; Tom didn't believe a word of it.

That was his father's way of ruining things for him, the way he always

had managed to tarnish those things that meant the most to him.
 
Pat

would be heartsick if she heard what Walter Allanson had said about

her, and Tom wasn't ever going to tell her.

It was difficult though, because Pat kept urging Tom to make peace with

his family.
 
She suspected-correctly-that there was money in Tom's

family, even though-except for his aunt jean Boggs, Walter's

sister-they lived rather austerely.
 
Tom had told her that Paw was

shrewd and had hidden money stashes all over his place on Washington

Road.

The way Pat understood it, Paw had sold the back part of his land to

Tom's father, and Walter had seen to getting it zoned for

multidwellings, then sold it to builders who had put up the Forest

Apartments, the Gray Estates, and the Club Candlewood Apartments.

There had to have been a great deal of money coming into the family

from those transactions.
 
Tom didn't seem to care a hoot about it, but

he was the Allansons' only son, and Paw and Nona's favorite grandson,

and eventually, she figured, it would all belong to him.
 
Heaven knows

they were never going to make Kentwood what it should be if Tom didn't

get his rightful inheritance.

Tom's aunt jean Boggs and her husband, Homer, had a fine house in East

Point and she dressed as if she were a wealthy woman.
 
Tom told Pat

that Jean hadn't had anything to do with her brother Walter after some

fuss over their father's property-not for seven or eight years.
 
She

had children too, but they hadn't been raised by the elder Allansons,

the way Tom was; he was almost like Paw and Nona's own son.

Now that she and Tom were married, Pat was sure Walter and Big Carolyn

Allanson would accept her.
 
She came from the Silers on her mother's

side, a fine old family.
 
She had parents to be proud of-Papa was,

after all, a retired colonel.
 
Pat considered herself far superior to

Tom's ex.
 
She was a lady, whose children were riding champions, a lady

who had met Governor Jimmy Carter and the Japanese royal family

personally.
 
The Allansons had to recognize that and be grateful that

she had married their son.
 
It would all work out.

Tom wasn't optimistic about that happening anytime soon.
 
He knew how