No Dark Valley (74 page)

When ten o'clock finally rolled around, he was watching from his bedroom window as Celia received the first delivery at her front door. Celia knew a lot about him by now, but he had never told her about the good view he had of her front door from his side window, about how often he had stood here over the past months and watched her through the blinds, which he could adjust so they appeared to be closed yet still allowed him to see out.

The first delivery was flowers, and from his vantage they looked exactly like what he had specified—red roses, the deep crimson red of blood, not an orangey red, and a dozen of them, naturally. No baby's breath—that stuff cheapened an arrangement in his opinion—but a few fronds of fern instead.

Bruce watched Celia take the vase of roses from the delivery man. He saw her smile and put her face close to them. So here it was—this was the beginning. He left the window, sat down at his desk, uncapped a pen, and began writing on the first page of a small black notebook he had bought especially for today.
On February 14 at 10:00
A.M.
Celia opened her front door
, he wrote,
and received her first delivery, a dozen red roses
.

This was part of his plan for the day also, to record in writing every detail of the planning and execution of each delivery, which was the main reason he had to stay home today. Later he would give the notebook to Celia. He wrote now about how he had gone to the florist's shop in person to place his order for the roses.

This was going to be fun. He would try to recreate it all for Celia. In the years to come they could read back over it together. After the woman handed him a small gift card and a fine-tipped black pen, Bruce carefully printed these words:
“But the greatest of these is love
,” then added only his first initial,
B
, below. Then he offered to pay whatever extra fee it would take to have the roses delivered as close as possible to ten in the morning on Valentine's Day. The woman studied him for a moment before saying she would see what they could do. Then she wrote 10:00
A.M.
DELIVERY!!! at the bottom of the order and underlined it three times.

Bruce was glad he had thought to add a PS on the back of the gift card, which said,
I'll see you tonight. Don't try to call today. I'll be in and out
. And it was true in a sense. He was going to be in and out, mentally, as he wrote all this down, traveling between now and the past several weeks. It was going to take a lot of concentration, and he wanted to relieve her of feeling like she had to call and thank him every time her doorbell rang throughout the day. He wanted to wait until the whole campaign was over before getting her response.

Bruce decided early on that this writing business was harder than he had expected. He stopped often to think about the best way to say something. He wanted the pages to be as neat as possible, not full of crossed-out words and details stuck in as afterthoughts. He barely finished with the story of the roses before eleven o'clock rolled around.

Watching again from his bedroom window, he saw Ollie pull his van into the Stewarts' driveway and park right behind Celia's Mustang. He watched him remove a large painting-sized present, which had been artfully wrapped in swaths of silver foil paper and white ribbon by Ollie's wife, Connie, who worked at the same florist where Bruce had ordered the roses. It was Macon Mahoney's painting of
The Last Time I Saw Her
, the one that reminded Celia of her own grandmother, the painting she had specifically chosen for the postcard mailing because she liked it so much. Though she had pronounced it the best piece in the whole show, it hadn't sold right away.

Celia came to the door after Ollie rang the bell. She looked bewildered, glancing up and down between Ollie's face and the painting resting against his leg. Finally she came to her senses and invited him inside. Bruce wished he could see her eyes as she unwrapped the painting, but for now he had work to do. He sat down at his desk again and uncapped his pen. There was so much he could write about this gift.

At 11:00 Celia found her friend Ollie standing at her door with the second delivery of the day
. From there he went on to record how the idea had first come to him after going to the gallery back in late December and standing beside Celia in front of the painting.

“It's too bad so many people are in the market for something pretty,” Celia had told him that day. “So look what gets ignored,” she continued. “Something truly beautiful.” And he understood exactly what she meant. People probably looked at
The Last Time I Saw Her
and saw the dead bug on the floor, the dirty apron, and the rusty chair legs, while completely missing the old woman's face.

That was okay, though. It had kept everybody else from buying it. That, and the hefty price tag. But it was worth every cent he paid for it. Bruce knew that his own grandmother would have approved of such an expenditure, and because he was using her money, it gave him all the more pleasure.

Celia told Bruce she was thinking about buying the painting herself
, Bruce wrote,
but Ollie showed up at the gallery one day and put a red dot by it, saying he had an anonymous buyer. Bruce pretended to be disappointed for her when she told him, never letting on about the talk he'd had with Ollie
.

But she was also glad in a way, she had gone on to tell Bruce, that somebody else, some lucky intelligent sensitive person, had recognized the value of the painting and was going to get to enjoy it for the rest of his life. Anonymous buyers, she told him, were quite common in the art world, and they always fascinated her. Maybe the buyer of this painting was afraid everybody would laugh at him for buying what amounted to the ugly duckling of the show.

The noon delivery was modest—a heart-shaped pizza from Pop's Pizza Palace over in Derby, where they were running a Valentine special for only ten bucks. Bruce was watching for the delivery car and met the kid in the driveway to give him a tip and to stick a note to the top of the pizza box that said,
Save room for dinner tonight. See you at six
.

At one o'clock Bruce saw Elizabeth Landis knocking at Celia's door with a long, flat, triangular-shaped gift, wrapped in white paper with little red hearts all over it and a tag, which read,
Looking forward to many more love matches
. No doubt Celia would know at first glance what this gift was, and furthermore, she might even suspect the ulterior motive behind it. If he gave her a new racket, Bruce figured, he could use her old one, the one with which she had whacked Matt's wrist, instead of borrowing Milton Stewart's ancient wooden racket again.

From his bedroom window, Bruce saw Celia smile when she opened the door to let Elizabeth in. She laughed when she read the message on the gift tag, and they both disappeared inside.

Milton Stewart's wooden racket had provided Bruce with a good excuse for not winning a single game out of the twelve he and Celia played during their first match several weeks ago, which in turn had provided Celia with the opportunity to explain to him that the term for that particular score in tennis lingo was “double bagel.”

“Well, just wait till I get a better racket, one with a decent sweet spot,” he had said, waving the wooden one around. “Then you'll have to eat a few of those double bagels yourself.” Whereupon she had insisted on trading rackets with him for another set, then proceeded to find the sweet spot on Milton's wooden racket time and time again while winning another six easy games in a row.

Bruce's main problem right now
, he wrote in the black notebook,
is keeping the ball inside the lines, but as soon as he learns to control his massive power, Celia will have trouble on her hands
.

He wrote about driving to Greenville to talk in person with the pro at the Greenville Country Club, who recommended the Dunlop 900–G racket, advertised as “heat refined” in a “hot-melt carbon process,” producing a racket with “explosive power and strength.” For strings he had chosen natural gut, which was the best according to the pro, and for tension he selected something midrange between high, which he was told resulted in greater control, and low, which was for power.

“Let me tell you, she will love this racket,” the pro said, “and with a little luck, some of that might transfer to you.” And how did he know she didn't already love him? Bruce asked. The savvy pro replied that Bruce's very personal interest in every aspect of this gift didn't strike him as coming from a man who already had the cat in the bag, so to speak. Bruce took issue with the pro, telling him that he would always be as particular about the gifts he bought this woman as he was being right now. And though the wise pro only smiled as he took Bruce's money, Bruce could tell he was thinking, Oh yeah, right, I hear you. (Bruce is therefore putting this in writing so that Celia will someday be reminded to pay that pro a visit and inform him that not every man becomes careless and forgetful over time.)

Promptly at two o'clock Bruce watched Patsy Stewart plod down the driveway holding a present wrapped in shiny red paper topped with a silver bow. He had asked her to please deliver it to Celia's front door instead of going down through the basement.

One night a couple of weeks ago Bruce had looked in Celia's bedroom after she had paused
The African Queen
and gone to the kitchen to pop another bag of popcorn, right after the scene where Katharine Hepburn had pulled all the leeches off Humphrey Bogart's back. He was looking to see if Celia had a jewelry box, and as far as he could see, she didn't unless she kept it hidden in a drawer somewhere.

He had gone shopping the next day and found one at a gift shop in Greenville—not one of the tacky imitation leather kind stacked up with multiple little drawers, nor one of the more expensive tall wooden ones, some of them very pretty but still with all the drawers and doors, like miniature armoires. This one was a small elegant silver case. A scroll design was worked into the metal, and in the center of the lid was a plain oval silver nameplate for monogramming.

He had given a great deal of thought about what to have inscribed on the plate and had finally chosen a verse reference—Proverbs 1:9. It was a verse he and Celia had discussed almost two months earlier on the day of the ice storm, when they had met by God's design, as Bruce always described it, outside Cracker Barrel, the day Bruce discovered that Celia had, as she put it, “been sought, found, and brought back” during her recent trip to Georgia over Thanksgiving. What a day of surprises that Cracker Barrel day had been.

“For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head,” the verse in Proverbs said, “and chains about thy neck,” the “they” referring to the wise instruction of parents, grounded in the fear of God. Celia had told him about her grandmother that night, haltingly at first but gradually with greater freedom, after which she had gone on to speak of her parents.

“And you know what I've finally realized?” she had said. “Even though my grandmother's way of loving was totally different from my parents', it was still love, through and through. And even though I thought her way of looking at life was hard and cold and stern, she was right about a lot of things. Behind all her rules was a heart that wanted to please God more than anything in the world.” She had realized, she said, that Christians weren't perfect, that some of their methods weren't the best, but that you couldn't throw out God's truth because of man's faults. Besides, she'd had plenty of faults herself during the three years with her grandmother.

From the pages of her grandmother's diaries, she told him, she had gotten a glimpse of what their three years together had cost her grandmother, not only in the careful scrimping to put away every penny she could in order to provide for Celia's welfare after high school, but also in the countless hours spent in prayer on her behalf, and finally in the deep sorrow she carried to her grave over failing to “keep my precious Celie safe.” She had written about the dread of facing her daughter in heaven someday with the news of that failure.

Over Thanksgiving, three weeks before their meeting at Cracker Barrel, Celia had visited her grandmother's church again and talked at great length with the pastor's wife, with whom she had been corresponding by letter since August, a woman who, according to Celia, “had a lot more to her than you'd ever guess from just looking at her.” Denise Davidson had met Celia's every question head on. “Never once did she look shocked at anything I said,” Celia told him.

One thing Celia had wrestled with in particular was how sad her parents would be if they knew the things she had done. “I couldn't figure out,” she told Bruce, “how I could have turned my back on everything they taught me if I had ever really been converted in the first place. So I kept struggling over whether I needed to start at the beginning and ask God for salvation, or if maybe I was just what everybody used to call ‘backslidden' and needed to repent. I wasn't really sure I had ever understood that salvation was more than keeping a long list of rules. I don't think I had ever really caught onto the concept of God's grace.”

And the answer to her quandary was so simple, she said, that she was a little embarrassed that Denise Davidson had to spell it out for somebody who had always considered herself well educated, somebody with a healthy IQ and a master's degree, not to mention years and years of churchgoing in her background. And would she please spell it out for him, too, Bruce requested. What exactly had Denise Davidson told her?

“She said why don't we leave it up to God to decide, that if I bowed my head and confessed my sins and repented and asked for his grace to be poured out on me, I didn't need to worry about which category I fit into. He would take care of it.” Celia shrugged and smiled. “So I did exactly that.”