Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons

stirred the popping bubbles in the eucalyptus bath
     salts with my foot and consciously thought about her. I would, I thought, begin with her in a place I knew she was happy and
     see where that woman led me.
    “I’m starting with her honeymoon,” I told my husband when he ambled in and sat down on the edge of the tub, as he often did.
     “Then, at least, I assume she was happy.”
    “Sure of that, are you?” he said, popping bubbles with his long fingers.
    “Well… why wouldn’t she be? She’d just had that humongous wedding and she was alone with him for the first time, up in that
     mountain cabin….”
    “You must remember as vividly as I do how she talked about her honeymoon,” my husband said, grinning as the last mass of bubbles
     disappeared.
    I looked at him.
    “You know, ‘That dinky little cabin up there on that god-awful bare mountain, and cold as hell, and I threw up all over my
     wedding dress and it never came clean and I wanted Lily to wear it, and then it iced and we couldn’t get out for days, and
     I read old Mary Roberts Rinehart novels till I thought I’d scream, and of course with nothing else to do we got Lily, I bet
     by the second night….’ ”
    “She was just talking… you know how she does, when she tells a story about herself or Dad….”
    He continued to look at me, a deep blue-eyed stare.
    No. My mother had not had a happy honeymoon. So I lay back in my vanishing bubbles and gave her one.
    * * *
    It did continue to ice and snow lightly on Burnt Mountain. In the dark early mornings, before the gray winter light came creeping
     into the bedroom, they could see the dancing stipple of snow light on the old ceiling and hear it ticking softly against the
     old glass panes and they would turn in to each other under the deep-piled quilts and the old goose-feather mattress would
     take them deep and they would make love again, sleepily, deeply, their skin hot against each other’s. And they would cry out
     in joy and contentment, and go back to sleep, and when they awoke again, it was mid-morning and they would race, yelping,
     into the icy little bathroom and pull on soft sweats and socks and sweaters, and build up the living room fire that never
     really went out, and put on coffee to perk and then they would lie, intertwined, on the old couch under the thick old Chief
     Joseph blanket that belonged to it, and look up through the skylight at the opaque sky and watch the snow fall. Softly. Softly.
    And my mother was happy. She had not really expected to be. Oh, she knew that her feelings for Finch Wentworth were strong
     and that she loved to look at him, and feel the hard pressure of his arms around her, but she had thought that their first
     coupling would be in a different bed, a sweet-smelling one with satin coverlets, perhaps at the Cloister at Sea Island, where
     so many young Atlantans honeymooned, perhaps even in the big tower room on Habersham Road that she had decided long ago would
     one day be their bedroom. Perhaps even there.
    She had not expected Burnt Mountain, and she had notexpected that the long body next to and around and inside her could give her so much abiding sensation and ecstasy. She had
     not expected to willingly, even eagerly, spend so much time in bed and on sofas and even kitchen tables with him. It was the
     first great gift of her marriage, his to her. Those first few landlocked days she was steeped in him, tasted of him, swollen
     with him, aching for him. She, who had hoped to get the matter of where they would live, among other things, settled while
     they were on the mountain, thought of nothing but the next time he would take her into bed.
    Days passed thus.
    On the morning of New Year’s Eve she woke up and looked over at him in bed. Before he could reach for her, she said, “Darling,
     I want to go home. I want to spend New Year’s Eve at home. We always have scalloped oysters and eggnog and set off fireworks
     on New Year’s Eve. I want