A Wedding To Remember

“Savannah!” his sister screamed over the din of voices.

Everyone at the table stopped talking and turned their attention to the entrance to the dining room.

Bruce had caught the expression on his sister’s face, lit up with happy surprise, before he turned his head to look at the doorway to the dining room. Savannah, her slender body engulfed in one of his denim button-down shirts, was standing in the doorway appearing peaked and frail. She had an uncertainty in her body language, a nervousness in her half smile and forward-slumped shoulders that Bruce read right away. Savannah knew in her mind that she had been absent from Sunday breakfast for a long time; it would be normal to wonder about how the family would receive her. And she had some reason to be concerned—several of his siblings were still raw with Savannah and her lawyer, so they weren’t ready to welcome her back to the fold with open arms. Their father had no such reservations.

“Daughter!” Jock bellowed as he thrust his seat back and out of his way so he could wrap a possessive, welcoming arm around Savannah’s shoulders. Sugar Creek was Jock’s ranch—if he said Savannah was welcome, she was welcome.

“Good morning, everyone,” Savannah said with an unusually shy smile and a quieter than normal voice. She leaned into her father-in-law’s embrace, but her eyes had sought out his.

Bruce had stood up at the same time as his father; it was instinctive, natural, to protect his wife—to stand between her and her critics in the room. Even if those critics were his own kin.

“You need something to eat,” Lilly observed.

Before his wife could respond, Jock waved his hand over the table. “Everyone move. Move! I want Savannah to sit down right here next to me.”

“No, don’t do that...” Savannah tried to intervene, but Jock’s will was the will of the family.

Everyone on the right side of the table, including him, moved one seat down to make room for their father’s most-favored daughter-in-law.

Bruce had gathered up his dishes, swapped them for a clean set and held the chair for his wife to sit down.

“Sorry.” Savannah apologized to the table at large.

“Don’t you go apologizing for nothing,” Jock ordered gruffly. “It’s been far too long since we’ve had you at this table.”

The mood at the table changed; the conversation seemed stilted and stiff to Bruce, with his siblings focusing more on their food than talking. Savannah, who used to be a ray of sun shining on Sunday breakfast, had now become a bit of a spoiler. One by one, his brothers finished their meals and dispersed. Liam, his junior by only one year and always the peacemaker, made sure to say a kind word to Savannah, wishing her a speedy recovery, before he left. Jessie was the only sibling who seemed to have made a seamless pivot now that the divorce was on hold; she talked in a stream of consciousness, bouncing from one topic to another, seeming to want to catch Savannah up on the missing years in one sitting.

“Come up for air,” Bruce told his sister. “She’s not going anywhere.”

Had he just spoken the truth? The truth from somewhere deep inside? Or was that hopeful thinking?

Instead of making a quick appearance at breakfast as he had planned, Bruce sat beside his wife while she ate two full helpings of scrambled eggs, a heaping scoop of cheese grits, a biscuit slathered with butter and honey, and drank a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He’d never known her to be much of a breakfast person.

“I’m stuffed.” Savannah groaned, her hands on her stomach.

“You sure you can’t eat a few more spoonfuls of grits?” Bruce teased her. “I’d hate for those couple of bites to go to waste.”

Savannah pushed her plate away and scrunched up her face distastefully. “I may not eat for the rest of the day.”

“I haven’t seen you eat that much in a day before,” Bruce mused.

“A hearty breakfast is exactly what you needed.” Jock gave a nod of approval.

Rosario, the house manager for years, and one of her subordinates, Donna, came into the dining room to begin clearing the table.

“Breakfast was good?” Rosario asked, her hand affectionately on Jock’s shoulder, while Donna began to clear. Rosario had been with the family for decades, and the house manager had long since become more family than employee.

“It was damn good.” Jock tossed his crumpled napkin onto his plate.

“I’m glad.” The house manager’s eyes crinkled deeply at the corner when she smiled. “It’s good to see you at the table again, Miss Savannah.”

Savannah placed her neatly folded napkin on top of her empty plate. “It’s good to be seen, Rosario.”

“We all missed you,” Donna said as she reached around in front of Savannah to get her plate.

“Oh...” his wife said, and he could tell by the confused look in her eyes that the memory of Donna had been ripped away, like so many others, by the crash. “Thank you.”

“I think I’d like to go home and rest now.” Savannah put her hand on his arm.

Bruce gave her a nod of understanding; he said, as he pushed back his chair, “You outdid yourselves as usual, ladies.”

Savannah gave Jock a hug and a kiss, said goodbye to everyone in the room, and then, arms crossed in front of her body, she walked into the grand, circular, three-story foyer.

“Hold up.” Jock stood up so he could say what he intended to say in a lowered voice.

Bruce waited for his father’s next words; the patriarch made a little motion near his mouth. “She sounds kinda funny when she talks. You gonna get that fixed?”

“It’s in the works. We’re just waiting for insurance to shuffle things around. I’m hoping to get her to therapy starting next week.”

Jock gave a nod of understanding accompanied by a single pat on the shoulder.

Savannah was waiting for him on the wide porch that ran the length of the expansive main house. She was sitting on the top step of the wood stairs with their three canines gathered around her; she was staring out at the fields in the distance with the slow-moving herd of cows as they grazed in the early-afternoon sun.

Bruce knelt down so he could greet the dogs. “You all right?”

It took her a couple of seconds to nod “yes,” but he didn’t believe it. The breakfast had rattled her; being with his family had rattled her.

Her body was curled forward like a turtle shell; it seemed to him like she was trying to disappear into his shirt. Acting, not thinking, Bruce held out his hand to his wife.

“Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

Savannah had turned her head away from him; when she turned it back, there were tears clinging to her eyelashes. She lowered her head and wiped the tears on the sleeve of her borrowed shirt.

“I don’t want to go back to bed,” she finally said.

Bruce looked down into her face—a face he had both loved and resented. “What do you want to do, then?”

“I don’t know.” Savannah’s eyes returned to the horizon, her arms locked around Hound Dog’s thick neck for comfort. “Sunday was always our day.”

Bruce stood up to full height and slid his hands into his front pockets. Sunday had always been their day—a day they reserved for their relationship. But that had been a long time ago.

“When’s the last time we spent a Sunday together?” she asked him without looking at him.

With a frown, Bruce answered her honestly. “I can’t remember the last time.”

Savannah gave a little sad shake of her head. “For me, it was just last week.”

* * *

Her husband had offered to stay with her—to reboot their Sunday tradition. But it felt forced to her, so she declined. Bruce had a list of chores he had planned for his Sunday, and she didn’t want to keep him from his work. Murphy and Buckley followed behind her husband; Hound Dog stayed with her. Perhaps he sensed that she was new to the dog pack, like he was. She was grateful for the company, now that she was feeling, for the first time, like a stranger in her own home.

Her sisters had always been her solace, so she called her youngest sister, Joy, who had returned to Nashville, Tennessee where she was attending graduate school at Vanderbilt University.

“It was terrible,” she recounted for her sister. “Everyone stopped talking when I walked in, half of his brothers looked at me like I’d grown devil horns and a tail—they hate me now—and I didn’t recognize this lady, Donna, who works there who obviously knows me. I felt so nervous that I ate enough food to feed a small army...”

“I’m sorry, Savannah.” Her sister, Joy, said in a sympathetic tone. “It’s like a bad dream.”

Savannah was standing by the picture window, watching Bruce unload wood from the back of his truck and carry it to his workshop.

“It was like a bad dream,” she said of the breakfast. “Like that dream when you wake up late and you rush to work and everyone is staring at you like you’re a freak, and then you realize that you’re naked.”

“I’ve never had that dream before.”

“Well, I have. It’s the worst.” She sat down on the couch with Hound Dog faithfully parked at her feet.

Savannah sighed, noticing that her head was throbbing again. “I don’t know, Joy. I didn’t know it was going to be this way. I don’t know what I was expecting...”

“For things to be normal.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah. I guess so.”

After a silent moment, her sister probed. “Do you still think you’re ready to find out why the marriage fell apart?”

Before she had left the hospital, she had argued with her family about just this topic. She had been so certain that she could handle anything that she found out about her marriage. But now? One awkward breakfast had made her feel so depressed, so disconnected from the Brand family. She used to be a favored sister to Bruce’s brothers. Now, the way Gabe and Hunter had looked at her...

Joy added when her sister didn’t respond right away, “If you want me to tell you what happened, Savannah, you know I will.”

“No,” Savannah said with a definitive shake of the head. “I’m not ready. Not yet.”

* * *

She had sulked for a while after she had placed calls to both sisters and her mother. But then Savannah decided that moping wasn’t her idea of making use of a beautiful Sunday. She found her way out to a patch of ground that was her kitchen garden; she loved to cook with fresh, homegrown vegetables picked right out of the garden. The garden was overgrown with layers of weeds; the pretty little white picket fence Bruce had built and painted as a surprise for her was dirty and unkempt. With her hands on her hips, Savannah shook her head. The fence, once her pride, was leaning in places; pickets were broken from animals and weather.

“What a mess.”

The garden seemed to be a metaphor for her marriage. Would she ever get used to seeing things so changed, when in her mind, it was just yesterday when her life was perfect? Her marriage had been full of laughter and romance and lovemaking; she’d been a beloved member of Sugar Creek Ranch and her garden had been teeming with fresh veggies, ripe for the picking.

“How do you eat an elephant, Hound Dog?” she asked her companion.

She was going to clean up this garden, one weed at a time. Savannah found her toolshed virtually untouched; she pulled on her gloves, and retrieved hand tools and a sturdy hoe. Armed with her weapons to beat back the weeds and decay, she stepped into the garden, reclaimed the ground as her own, dropped to her knees and began to yank out the weeds. A couple of weeds into the process, sweat began to form on her forehead and on her neck. It felt good to sweat; it felt good to take out her frustration on these stupid, creeping weeds that had ruined her beautiful garden.

“What are you doing?”

Savannah had been deep in thought, focused on ripping as many weeds from the ground as possible; she hadn’t heard her husband approach. She sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her brow before it rolled down into her eyes.

“Pulling weeds.”

Bruce—to her, the most handsome man in the world—had his shirt unbuttoned and his stomach, chest and neck were covered in sweat. Normally—at least the normal she remembered—she would have stood up and wiped that sweat from his neck and chest with her hands, stealing a kiss along the way. It hadn’t taken her long at all to figure out that this sexual flirtation wouldn’t be welcome. Not long at all.

“You have a concussion, Savannah,” he reminded her in a slightly condescending way.

She stared at him in response.

He added, a little less bossy, “The doctor said you needed to rest.”

“This is how I rest,” Savannah argued. She turned back to her weeds. “If I go to bed now, I’ll be awake all night. You know that’s true.”

Silence stretched out between them, and then she heard him walk away. She didn’t glance behind her to watch him; she focused on the blasted weeds instead. She hadn’t expected him to join her—they didn’t spend Sundays together anymore. And yet, he did return. Wordlessly, Bruce came back to the garden with Buckley and Murphy following at his heels. He knelt down in the dirt and began to pull out the weeds in the second row.

They worked like that silently, side by side, until they had completely cleared the first two rows of her garden of the layers of overgrowth. Bruce stood up and then offered his hand to her, which she accepted. Toward the end of the row, she was beginning to feel exhausted and woozy. But she was determined to finish at least one row before she gave in to her body.

“Well,” Savannah said, more to herself than to Bruce. “It’s a start.”

Bruce was staring at her face with an inscrutable expression in his slightly narrowed, bright blue eyes. “Yes,” he agreed after a moment. “I suppose it is.”

Chapter Four

During the first week that Savannah was back at the ranch, Bruce watched her slowly, day by day, reclaim their log cabin as her own. She had unearthed their framed wedding pictures in one of the drawers in the living room and put them back in their original spot on the fireplace mantel. One of her antique bud vases, a least favorite that she had left behind, was back on the kitchen windowsill with a sprig of wildflowers soaking in the morning sun. The more his wife settled back into their marital home, the more accustomed to sharing the space Bruce became.

He was becoming accustomed to having Savannah’s toothbrush, face creams, perfumes and deodorant on the bathroom counter next to his small array of toiletries; he was becoming accustomed to the sound of music playing when he arrived home. It was good to have music back in the house.

“Smells good in here.” Bruce hung his cowboy hat on the hook inside of the door.

Today his wife was in the mood for Fleetwood Mac.

Savannah appeared from the kitchen, surprised by his early arrival.

“I wasn’t expecting you until later,” she said with a small smile, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

Bruce walked the whole way to her side; he had been trying to open up more to Savannah. She had, understandably, pulled away from him once she began to live the truth of their separation, even when her brain wouldn’t remember. So they stood, rather awkwardly, a foot apart, without kissing each other in greeting as they always had.

“I decided to knock off a little early today.” He leaned down to pet Hound Dog, who was now glued to Savannah’s side.

She nodded wordlessly, her smile not completely reaching her eyes.

“What’s cooking?”

Now her smile widened. “Guess!”

Bruce played along, looking upward in thought. “It’s not... Buffalo Pockets?”

Beef, assorted vegetables and seasonings baked in foil pockets. One of his favorite meals—easy, hardy, but so damn good.

“I wanted to say thank-you—for helping me with the garden.” Savannah turned to walk back to the kitchen.

Hound Dog left him and followed behind her.

He wasn’t sure how to respond. How many times had he looked out at that garden feeling guilty about letting the elements and the wild animals have their way with it? Savannah had loved that garden, and it was one way, a petty way, to strike back at her.

“I’m gonna clean up,” Bruce told her. “For dinner.”

On the way into the bedroom, the bedroom he hadn’t slept in since Savannah’s return, he picked up a pair of socks and a pair of boots—she had never been able to get her clothes in the hamper or her shoes back in the closet. She often just left her clothes where she stripped out of them; it had always annoyed him, and perhaps it still did, but not with the same force as before. How many times had he missed her jeans on the floor after she left? Many times.

What Savannah lacked in housekeeping motivation, she made up for tenfold when it came to cooking. Man, had he missed his wife’s cooking, and he told her so.

The good smells emanating from the kitchen had gotten him to speed up his shower, get dressed quick, so he could take his seat at their kitchen table. While Savannah had been gone, this table had been used as a catchall for the mail and any junk he accumulated in his pockets during his workday.

“I love cooking for you.” Savannah smiled at him sweetly as she collected his empty plate.

“That was one hell of a good meal, Beautiful.” He leaned back, feeling stuffed after two heaping servings. Bruce had been subsisting on frozen meals for a year. Yes, he could have had dinner at the main house, but his father’s loud and consistent disapproval over his divorce had deterred him pretty quickly.

“I hope you left some room for dessert,” Savannah said as she carried their dishes the short distance to the kitchen. “Lilly and I stopped off at the bakery on the way home.”

Bruce followed her to the kitchen, his hands full with as many items as he could carry. Jock had never once helped wife one or wife two in the kitchen, but Bruce had always considered it to be part of marriage. It had always been those little things, like Savannah cooking while he did the dishes, that had made him want to be a married man. And for a while there, he had managed to have a perfect marriage, to the perfect woman for him. For a while there, he had managed to marry his best friend.

“All I have to do is pop them in the oven.” Savannah held up a plate of raspberry chocolate turnovers, freshly made from his favorite bakery.

Bruce filled the sink with water and soap and set the dishes in the hot, sudsy water to soak. He wiped his hands off on a dish towel, his mouth watering for the tangy, sweet dessert, but his stomach needed a little extra room before the next course.

He smiled his thank-you. “You know what I love.”

Bruce saw a pretty flush of color on his wife’s cheeks before she turned away to put the plate on the counter. “Should I heat the oven now? Or wait?”

It had been such a long time since he wanted to pull Savannah into his arms and kiss her. But, oh, how he wanted to kiss her right at that moment. The kindness of her gesture, the sweet blush on her cheeks that spoke of her ability to have a reaction to being in close quarters with him. He felt her attraction for him, just as strong as when they were first married. And in turn, his body, his mind, his heart, were all reacting.

“You up for a walk?” he asked her, not at all sure that she would accept. Nothing was certain with Savannah. With a nod to the plate of pastries, he added, “I need to make some room for at least three of those.”

Walking after dinner had been one of their marriage staples; they both loved to walk in the evening with the dogs, hoping to catch a colorful sunset. Even the rain hadn’t deterred their evening routine; they had just grabbed raincoats and gone.

Bruce held the door open for his wife, and then grabbed his hat off the rack as he stepped out onto the porch. As usual, the dogs happily mobbed Savannah, who greeted them as if she hadn’t seen them in days, not just an hour.

“Which way?” she asked at the bottom of the steps.

“Cook’s choice.”

They headed toward the west, toward the setting sun and toward one of the many pastures where some of the herd of black Angus were lying down after a day of grazing. They would have held hands—they always had—but this time, she didn’t reach for his hand, and he couldn’t bring himself to reach for hers.

Silently, they walked together, side by side, until they reached the pasture fence. With a sigh, Savannah leaned on the fence to admire the view. Perhaps he was biased—most likely he was—but Sugar Creek Ranch was heaven on Earth. A landscape seemingly touched by God’s hand, it featured flat pastureland abutted by an expanse of gently rolling hills leading up to the base of royal Montana mountains far off in the distance. Tall grass on the hills swayed, almost imperceptibly, in a calm breeze floating across the hills, and the soft echo of the water flowing over rocks in the wide stream that crossed the ranch like a snake uncurling itself. It was the kind of landscape that would inspire painters like Winslow Homer or Georgia O’Keeffe to unroll their blank canvases and take out their brushes.

“I never get tired of this,” Savannah mused. “It never gets old.”

“For me, either.”

There was much that he resented about his father—Jock was harsh, cold at times and unable to admit wrongdoing or express regret—but he’d gotten it right when he’d bought this land. And though maybe Bruce hadn’t gotten everything right in his own life, either, he knew, as he admired his wife’s profile in the early-evening light, that he had gotten it right when he married Savannah.

“I need to go back, I think.”

“You okay?”

She nodded, her arms now crossed in front of her body as she turned away from the view. “I suddenly feel so tired. It’s been a long day.”

“You overdid it.” Bruce fell in beside her. “Cooking me dinner.”

A shake of her head. “No. That was fun. It’s not that. It’s that I seem to be going from one appointment to the next to the next now. I can go years without so much as a cold, and yet now, it seems, that’s all I’m doing.”

Bruce whistled for the dogs playing in the pasture to follow them back to the house.

“Your limp is less noticeable,” he told her. “Already.”

The bruises on her face had faded to a light yellow and a faint green, a sign of healing, but her speech was still affected, a little slurred and slushy, and as far as he knew, Savannah hadn’t had any memories, not even flashes, of the last several years. All of her childhood memories, the memories of her young adulthood, and even the early years of their marriage were still, thankfully, intact. But Savannah still did not have recent memories about the darkest period of their marriage.

“Don’t get me wrong—I’m grateful for the help.” She ascended the stairs, holding on to the railing, much more slowly than she had descended. “I just wish I didn’t need the help.”

* * *

The first time she mustered the nerve to drive herself into town after she was cleared to drive by her neurologist, Savannah decided to meet her friends from work at one of their favorite spots on Main Street.

“How are you?” her friend Maria, a speech-language pathologist at the elementary school where Savannah had worked before the accident, asked after the waitress took their orders.

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