CHAPTER 24
“So are we just going to ambush her?” Byron sat at the conference table in the spot normally held by Lukas, who was out, supposedly at a lunch meeting, though we suspected he was yet again shopping for the perfect outfit for his upcoming audience with Petra Polly.
Rhiannon sighed. “This doesn’t make any sense. You all realize that, right? We’re going to embarrass ourselves.”
Lukas’s plan was very simple. Lukas, Byron, Rhiannon, and I would get in line at different points. When it was our turn to approach Petra, we’d give her an elevator pitch. Hopefully, by the time the last of us reached her, she’d be so charmed she’d be willing to stop by Gossamer Space for a full presentation. Jackie and Glynnis were to stay in the office and get things ready, a job both grumbled at, and both suspected was the lesser position.
“I don’t see why I can’t go,” Glynnis whined to me. “Why do you get to go?”
“Maybe he wants one old person there. The voice of authority.”
She shot me a dubious look. “You’re not that old. You know the real reason.”
The stress of possibly losing her job had made Glynnis a touch cynical. Cynicism was a natural by-product of being in a corporate atmosphere, but Glynnis wore it awkwardly, like an ill-fitting shirt.
“Will you talk to Lukas about letting me go to the bookshop?” she pleaded. “Maybe if you say something . . .”
She didn’t finish her sentence. Passive-aggressiveness was one of my pet peeves. “What would happen if I said something? When has Lukas listened to me? The only thing you can control is the job you have to do.” That gave me pause. Was that advice I wasn’t heeding myself? I wanted to control Trey and Lukas and even Mr. Eckhardt. Perhaps I had to let go of those feelings and focus only on what my brain and two hands could do.
“You know there’s more to it,” she said. “I’m learning that, so I suspect you’ve known it for a long time. Office politics. The balance of power.”
“Aren’t you being a little dramatic?”
Tears sprang to her eyes, and I immediately felt like a villain. We were all stressed and worried, but was there something else going on I didn’t know about? Was this about Byron and Rhiannon?
“Are you okay?” I asked gently. “Is something else bothering you?”
She glanced at Byron, who was punching something on his keyboard. “No,” she said dully. “I just don’t understand why there needs to be a competition. We all add something to this company, don’t we?”
“We do.”
“Even Seth did. He shouldn’t have been fired.” She fiddled with her phone. “I don’t like change, especially when it happens because of stupid reasons, because then the outcome is just as stupid.”
“That’s something I can understand.” Jesse’s death was stupid. “I don’t think many people ask for change on a regular basis,” I said. “But it happens. You have to learn to react to it. To take action.” The garden flashed through my head. Mykia. Sean. Was I finally breaking a pattern?
“I take action all the time,” Glynnis said, sadness in her voice. “It doesn’t matter if no one is paying attention. People pay attention to you, Paige. I could come up with the greatest ad in a hundred years, and no one would pay attention to me in the slightest. I wasn’t lucky enough to get . . . what is it? Charisma.”
“That’s not true,” I soothed. But . . . maybe she was right. I followed Byron’s lead, punching on my own keyboard, because this conversation was getting uncomfortable.
I’d always felt success was won by hard work—I lived my life by it. But what role did luck play? I didn’t like to think luck had much to do with it, because that would mean life was mostly random. To think of the major happenings in my life as flukes belittled them. To say Jesse was merely unlucky didn’t sit right with me. Why would the death of a healthy, larger-than-life forty-two-year-old father and husband result from a small, random occurrence? How would I get meaning from it if I bought into the notion that shit just happened, and I had to buck up and accept it? Maybe life just unfolded like those ash snakes on the Fourth of July—messy and moving in unpredictable directions, sometimes longer and sometimes snuffing out before things really got started. If that were so, where would I find meaning in something that was so fundamentally unfair?
By living as if what I did while I was on the planet did have meaning, even if I secretly feared it was all one big nothing.
Maybe Glynnis was born unlucky. Maybe not. And in the end, how much did it matter? Life would still unfold unpredictably.
“You know what, Glynnis? Lucky or unlucky, you do what you can,” I said, wishing I could erase her sad expression. “I wish I could tell you something more profound, but that’s all I’ve got. Just do what you can.”
It was just a meal. Dinner. Two people sitting down, ordering, laughing, trying to eat without making chewing noises or burping. Easy, right?
Nooooo. Not right. Not right at all.
Sean’s text said fifteen minutes to arrival.
I was not ready.
Clothes. Makeup. Hair. Three things I normally did on autopilot were as foreign to me as driving on the wrong side of the road. My hand slipped, sending my eyeliner off into Catwoman-like wings. My clothes had somehow wrinkled, even in dry cleaning bags. My underwear could be worn proudly by a nun . . . my underwear? Why was I even thinking about that? No one but me was going to see my underwear tonight.
No one.
Thinking about intimacy unleashed too many conflicting feelings, so at odds my brain could’ve been having a tug-of-war with my heart. Except for some brief, fumbling hookups in high school, I’d only been with Jesse. We were partners in the bedroom, truly in sync, and thinking about sharing more than a kiss with Sean vaporized any courage I’d mustered.
Ten minutes. I would shove that thought to the back of the line. I swabbed lip gloss on with a heavy hand and then dabbed most of it off with a tissue, determined not to look like a Real Housewife. I fluffed my hair and patted it back down. I yanked off the gray blouse that suddenly seemed too dingy and replaced it with a black silk tank. But my pants were black, too. I looked like a ninja.
Five minutes.
I found a soft pink linen skirt and managed to squeeze into it, and added some black strappy sandals. Three minutes. Jewelry! I rummaged through my jewelry tray, determined to find something that didn’t remind me of Jesse. I’d taken off my wedding ring almost immediately after the funeral—the shock of pain I felt whenever I glanced at my hand was too much to bear—but everything else I owned was somehow tied to a memory. With thirty seconds to spare, I found Mr. Eckhardt’s wife’s earrings and put them on.
The doorbell chimed. Sean was right on time.
Jesse got his driver’s license before me. Neither of us had any hopes to own a car, so we were well into college before we ever headed to the DMV. An elderly neighbor told Jesse he could occasionally use her ’78 Buick if he mowed her small, postage-stamp-sized front yard. It was she who drove us to the DMV that morning, a good ten miles under the speed limit the entire time, and complaining incessantly about the inconvenience. When we dropped her off afterward, she sent Jesse to fill the tank at a local gas station.
We’d never gotten gas before. Nerves rattling, we looked at each other with big eyes. Did we pay first? How did the pump work? Was the window-washer thing gross or not gross?
We managed to fill the tank without spraying gasoline everywhere. We cleaned the windows, and they sparkled. Smiling and satisfied, we drove home, pulling up to our block at a crawl, wanting to be seen. Then Jesse stopped the car just in front of a tight spot and parallel parked with surprising finesse.
When he shut the engine off, neither of us moved. We’d been friends, such good friends. I fiddled with my seat belt, wondering why the silence suddenly felt so heavy when it was usually such a comfortable respite between the two of us, a shared ability to just be.
“Congratulations,” I said, my voice unsteady. “You’re a good driver.”
“I don’t have insurance,” he said, but he sounded distracted. “I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to drive us around. It’s too risky.”
“I don’t care about that. You have your license if you need it. That’s enough.”
He removed the key from the ignition and placed it between us on the leather seats. “I wish this was our car, and we could go anywhere we wanted.”
“We don’t need a car for that,” I said. “We do okay on the bus and the ‘L.’”
“But it’s not ours,” he insisted. “I just want something to be mine.”
“I could be yours,” I blurted, instantly mortified that I’d shoved a truth I’d sheltered for so long into the cold, open air.
“Could you?” he asked softly, so softly. He picked up the car keys and placed them in my palm, closing my fingers over them. “Someday, I’m going to give you everything you want.”
One honest comment made another come easier. “I just want you.”
He lifted my chin, and I caught his gaze with mine. I knew those eyes as well as I knew my own, but for the first time I saw something different in them, a longing I’d since realized was desire.
Jesse kissed me. Our first real kiss. I held tightly on to his broad shoulder with one hand and the keys with the other, their sharp ridges burrowing into my hand.
Sean was a confident driver, cruising steadily through the streets of Willow Falls, heading to the center of our village.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise,” he said.
“I’ve lived in this town for almost twenty years. I doubt anything could be a surprise.” It hit me, the ambiguous thing I’d been fearing. He could take me somewhere familiar. He could take me somewhere packed with memories. He could take me somewhere Jesse, at some point, had been.
“Stop,” I said.
“What?”
“Pull over. Please!”
I knew it was simple panic, but my chest tightened from fear, the muscles bunching to protect my heart. I couldn’t catch my breath.
Sean swerved into a parking spot. “What is it?”
“I’m—” I focused on breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
“You’re what? You can tell me, if you want to.” His voice was gentle.
“It’s just that . . . I’m afraid.”
Sean nodded, settling back in his seat. “Yeah. That’s probably normal, though, right?”
“I guess.”
“Let me ask you. Are you afraid of me, or of something else?”
“I’m not afraid of you at all. I just thought about all of the places we could go in downtown Willow Falls, and nearly every one of them has memories attached.”
“Good memories?”
“Yes.”
Sean thought for a moment. I just sat there, breathing.
He finally said, “If we’re going to date, we can go to other suburbs if we need to, no problem. We could drive an hour away if you need to, but I’m not quite sure that’s the solution to this problem.”
“I think that sounds like a good solution.”
“Part of me thinks I don’t have a right to tell you how to grieve, but the other part of me is gonna tell you anyway.”
“Go ahead and say it.”
“Tonight, I think you should pick a restaurant that has good memories. It doesn’t have to be one that was very special to you two, but one that has memories you can deal with. Pick out one of those good memories, and tell me about it. I didn’t know Jesse. Maybe it’s about time I did.”
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t. Would it hurt too much? Would it hurt too little? I didn’t know which one was worse. I would have no problem telling stories about how wonderful Jesse was, even to this man.
“I’m not looking to replace him,” I said. “He was irreplaceable. I hope that doesn’t make you feel weird.”
“Not at all. People can’t be replaced. Anyone with half a brain knows that.” He took my hand, lacing his fingers with mine. “Especially someone who caught your heart. He had to have been pretty special.”
“He was.”
My awareness returned, and I realized we were parked on the main strip, right outside one of our favorite Italian restaurants. We’d celebrated Jesse’s promotion there, and Trey’s eighth-grade graduation. Big Frank spent his last minutes there, spooning ravioli on everyone’s plate and chomping on his cigar.
“Let’s eat here.”
Sean got out of the car and dashed around to open my door. I took his arm, and we walked into Marinetti’s Chop House. “This one time,” I began, “Jesse mistakenly ordered the squid-ink pasta . . .”
When Sean pulled up to my house, it was dark save for the front porch light. I was used to a dark house—the past two years had me coming home to one more often than not—but in the stillness of late summer, it looked particularly lonely, like an old photograph.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” Sean said.
I paused. Dinner had gone well, but there were stages here, stages I’d long forgotten. And there were choices. Did I go with propriety, or did I chuck the rules into my new compost bin?
Into the bin they went. “Do you want to come in for a cup of coffee?”
He smiled to himself, a satisfied grin that told me he’d hoped I’d ask but didn’t expect it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that.”
He got out of the car in a hurry so he could dash over to my side to open the passenger door. He’s nice, I thought. And thoughtful. This is okay.
We walked to my front door, and I thought about how many times I’d done that while married, taking for granted that I would always have Jesse with me or waiting on the other side of the door, a presence I realized I had taken for granted.
I glanced at the man next to me. He was shorter than my husband, sunrise-colored hair instead of Jesse’s dark, rich brown, broad instead of thin, rougher around the edges . . . different. But different was good. Different was necessary. I felt drawn to this man. He was not my husband, and that was fine. He was Sean, and I liked Sean. The rules could disintegrate under a pile of old eggshells.
“Do you think you’ll kiss me tonight?” I asked, my voice loud enough for a nosy neighbor to hear.
He laughed. “Would you like that?”
“Yes.”
“I was hoping you might kiss me.”
“You like a woman who takes charge?” I was flirting. Oh, God, I was flirting.
“I like a woman who knows her own mind.”
Sean stopped at the bottom of my porch. He didn’t reach for me, just smiled. A dare.
I took a breath. Stepped forward.
He still didn’t move.
“Are you going to give me a little something here?” I asked, nerves getting the better of me. “Meet me halfway?”
He grinned. “Nope.”
“Fine.” I stood directly in front of him. I curled one hand over his shoulder to steady myself.
“That’s a good start,” he said.
I leaned forward. I could see his beard had already made a return appearance, the scruff a burnt-orange color. Sean’s lips were full and lush for a man. I licked mine and then slowly pressed them to his. He let me, but he didn’t take charge. He let me lead myself to a place of comfort. His mouth, soft and accessible, didn’t demand, it just accepted.
He was giving me a chance to get myself together. And I needed it. I pulled back, surprised my breath had left me. I could feel the goose bumps rise on my skin, though it must have been ninety degrees.
“Was that okay?” he asked, his features etched with concern.
“Yeah, it was—” A bright orange sticker affixed to the front door grabbed my attention. I had a feeling I knew what it was. “Son of a bitch!”
“What?”
It was stuck at the top like a Post-it note. I tore it down, reading quickly in the glow of the porch light. “It’s a cease and desist command. From the village.”
He ran a hand over his face. “They don’t mess around, but they usually have a pretty sound reason for taking action.”
“It says that using my private residential property as a profit-seeking business is against the bylaws. I have to shut down the garden. How would they know that I intend to sell anything?”
Sean stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I might have said something about your salsa to Mr. Eckhardt.”
“You didn’t.”
“I kind of did.”
I took the letter in both hands and slowly ripped it in two. “I’m allowed to have a garden. They’re going to have to dig it all up if they want me to stop.” I tore it again and again, until it was reduced to bright orange confetti.
“I don’t know if that’s wise,” Sean said.
“Wisdom hasn’t done all that much for me,” I said before tossing the shredded papers onto Mr. Eckhardt’s pristine lawn.
And then I pulled Sean to me, and kissed him with the force of a woman on a mission.