LIZ
“I’M THROWING A PARTY,” Liz said, clipping a stalk of delphinium and adding it to the growing bouquet in her arm. She blurted it out partly to distract Macy from the pagan purples she was amassing and partly because she wanted to spread the word. Macy was forever hounding her about the unique hybrid flowers in the little garden by her front gate, and Liz wasn’t about to share her secrets. The party announcement was an offering, and Macy accepted it enthusiastically. Key Lake would be buzzing with the news by dusk.
“You are?” Macy gushed, clearly forgetting the cobalt flowers with their mulberry hearts. Truly, they were stunning. People were forever commenting on them.
“Tomorrow night.” Liz looped the clippers over her thumb and held the flowers before her in both hands. There were ten stalks or so, an impressive, towering display that would make the perfect centerpiece for the long table. All she needed were a few bridal bouquet hydrangeas to anchor the base. Maybe some bare branches. She wished pussy willows were in season.
“It’s been ages!” Macy clapped her hands together, delighted. “Will you put the flag out?”
“Yes.”
Macy sighed, smiling. “Remember the summer the boys turned ten?”
It was the same year that JJ turned eight and Nora broke her arm falling off the rope swing. A golden year in spite of the first hard cast among the Sanford children and the unusually hot summer. Golden because all the kids were out of diapers and pull-ups, capable of dressing themselves, independent. Liz felt like she could breathe again, and she hadn’t even realized that she’d been holding her breath. But suddenly, Quinn was sticking her own strawberry Pop-Tarts in the toaster every morning and slipping out the back door before Liz had finished her first cup of coffee. Who knew what the other two were up to? Really, who cared?
Since all her kids knew how to swim, and since there wasn’t much trouble they could get up to in provincial Key Lake, their self-sufficiency was a taste of freedom for Liz. She loved it. Her abrupt autonomy softened her edges and seemed to turn back time. After the chaos and confusion of what she began to think of as the “little years,” Liz felt herself relax . . . And the clock unwound. Her twenties had been spent mixing bottles of formula and hushing night terrors. Now, at thirtysomething, she looked at herself in the mirror—really looked—and found a beautiful, capable, strong woman staring back. I almost missed it, she thought. What a terrible shame.
That summer was golden because of champagne.
Twinkling lights and stars to match, the sound of laughter across the water, and her husband’s hand on her waist. Jack had the most spectacular, almost peculiar gray-green eyes and he spent much of that summer training the intensity of his gaze on her. On her sunbaked arms, her long, slim legs. On the coils of yellow hair that clung to her warm neck, and the place where her sundress gapped open just a bit when she bent over him with a bottle of ice-cold beer in her hand. It was fresh and new, a sort of falling in love all over again and for the first time because after the delirious years of making a family, her husband was a stranger. And she to him. It was intoxicating.
Almost enough to make her forgive him. But not forget. Never forget.
“How are your cherry tomatoes?” Liz said, and bit back the memories with a decisive snap. She didn’t have time for melancholy. Settling the flowers in a basket by her feet, she grabbed the handle and started making her way around the side of her grand two-story home. A cluster of hydrangea bushes crouched in the shade.
“Perfect.” Macy hurried to follow.
“The heirlooms?”
“My Hawaiian currants are ripe and so are the black cherries. I have a few yellow pears, but they’re still rather green.”
“I’ll stop by for them tomorrow morning.” Liz didn’t ask; she didn’t have to.
“Want me to post the party on Facebook?”
Liz couldn’t stop her nose from crinkling. She knew that nothing betrayed her age so much as her inherent dislike for all things technological, but she was finding that she didn’t really care. Some things weren’t worth getting her panties in a bunch over. “Sure,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Macy laughed, enjoying Liz’s obvious discomfort. “You’d love it,” she proclaimed for the umpteenth time. “Get yourself a tablet and figure it out. I’ll help you! It’s so fun to see everyone’s pictures. Never mind the ridiculous status updates.”
“Not interested.” Snip. A bloom the size and color of a honeydew fell into Liz’s outstretched palm.
“You should be. Amelia posts all sorts of stuff.”
“Of course she does,” Liz said before she could censor herself. At least she didn’t roll her eyes. She didn’t need Macy wondering about the state of her familial relations. Before Macy could formulate a theory, Liz added, “Amelia is a lovely girl.”
“In every way,” Macy agreed.
Was she being tart? For once, Liz couldn’t tell.
They parted ways shortly after that. Macy headed back across the cul-de-sac to her creamy brown colonial with the wide front porch and the four hand-carved rockers. She would curl up in the sunroom with her tablet and write God only knew what on Facebook and maybe Twitter. Such an appropriate name for shrill little birdies chirping away. Liz was sure that there were others, too. Sites with names she didn’t recognize and that would make Macy feel superior to announce. But Liz was determined not to care. Tomorrow wasn’t about Macy or resurrecting a Key Lake tradition. It was about Quinn. About reclaiming something good and innocent and real. Liz had to focus on that.
A shelf in the basement contained Liz’s flower arranging supplies, and she carefully selected a glazed clay urn in a dreamy, midnight blue. It was heavy, the sort of object she would have marked with a Post-it note and left for Jack to carry up the stairs. But she was her own woman now, self-sufficient in a way that she didn’t know she could be back when her kids began to grow up. She had practically been a child bride, though twenty wasn’t so out of the ordinary when she’d said “I do.” Several years later she started having children of her own. And now. Who was she now? A wife, former. A mother, still. And yet.
If nothing else, she was strong enough to carry the urn.
Liz plastered it to her chest, wet foam blocks, flower wire, and a roll of green tape tucked inside. She shuffled up the stairs one at a time, straining against the weight even as she relished the tight knot of her muscles, her body performing a task that made her feel powerful. Alive. Guilty, because she was here and Jack was not. Guilty, because a part of her was glad that the roles were not reversed.
Maybe she was going through some sort of late midlife crisis.
“Buy a new car,” she huffed at her reflection in the hall mirror. “Have some work done. Take a lover.”
The last one surprised her. A new car was always on the table and Jack had joked on more than one occasion that he’d happily underwrite a boob job. Of course, he didn’t say it like that. Jack wasn’t crass. But Liz knew that his carefully timed comments and fleeting glances at her less-than-perky barely C cups were wistful. She’d be a liar if she said she hadn’t entertained the thought herself. But, a lover?
Liz laughed.
She was more interested in Quinn’s love life than her own.
There was newspaper on the kitchen table, spread out and ready for the heavy urn and the rough bottom that might scratch the hand-scraped hardwood. Liz hefted the container onto an article about one local woman’s exquisite quilts and set to work. She soaked the wet foam in water from her rain barrel and trimmed the stalks of delphinium. Stripping the stems of leaves, she placed them one by one into the foam, enjoying the sharp snitch of sound as each flower found its place. Even before it was finished, the centerpiece was artful, gorgeous. The sort of arrangement that could be featured on the cover of a decorating magazine. Sometimes Liz wondered if she could still do that sort of thing. Mark the world in some way more significant than the thin and fleeting likeness of herself in her children.
They didn’t want any part of her, anyway.
It was a hard knot of feeling in the center of her chest. A tangle of emotion that had been pulled tight with time, stony and dense and silent. As cool and bittersweet as the spice of damp air in her grandmother’s root cellar. Liz blinked away sudden tears, furious at herself, at how ridiculous and sentimental and old she had become. She had done well by her children. There was nothing to be ashamed of.
So why were they ashamed of her?
No matter. She was still their mother and she would fix what she could fix. Whether they liked it or not.
Maybe she should have done this years ago. Taken the bull by the horns, so to speak, and steered it in the right direction. As it was, she had no choice but to interfere now. And if things got messy? Well, it was true what they said about love and war. And whoever coined that particular phrase wasn’t a lover—she was a mother.
When the arrangement was Better Homes and Gardens centerfold worthy, Liz grabbed her purse off the hook in the entryway and let herself out the door. She had been raised well, and she knew how to right a wrong. A good old-fashioned “I’m sorry” went a long way, but a gift certainly didn’t hurt. Liz knew just what to do.
She cut another armload of delphiniums, a bouquet almost as impressive as the one that would soon adorn her banquet table. Wrapping the stems in newspaper that she dampened with the garden hose, she laid them carefully on the floor of her back seat. Then she was off to the liquor store, where she spent a good ten minutes reading wine labels. What was good? Jack Sr. had liked his whiskey expensive and his wine cheap, so Liz had never really learned to pick out a bottle of wine. She finally settled on a French Chenin Blanc with a label that looked like old sheet music. Pretty, even if the wine turned out not to be to Quinn’s liking.
Sometimes Liz felt like she had spent her whole life keeping the peace. Settling disputes between her children, running interference between Jack and his daughters. Well, mostly Nora. And swallowing disappointment like bad medicine because what other choice did she have? To call out her husband—to name the lies they both knew he told—what good would that have done? It would have split up a family. Left her destitute, abandoned, alone. Nobody would have won. Least of all Liz.
She was a good peacekeeper. Shush now, be content, let it go. Peacemaking—now that was a different thing altogether. That was bombs and battles, wars waged for the sake of starting over, from the scorched earth up, on something pure and worthy. Peacemaking meant casualties, and Liz was all too willing to fall on a sword of silence if it meant life could go on the way it always had.
• • •
The sun was slanting high overhead when Liz arrived at the A-frame for the second time that day. It was time to start thinking about supper, to maybe take a pound or two of ground beef out of the freezer to start thawing for burgers on the grill in just a couple hours. Beer thirty, Jack Sr. had called midafternoon in summer, and it struck Liz that maybe she and Quinn could resurrect an old tradition and open a bottle of wine on the dock.
She knocked on the door this time. A quick, happy, four-note rap that sounded to her like, “Honey, I’m home!” Then she stepped back and waited with a smile on her face.
“Mom?” Quinn opened the door slowly, peering through a crack less than six inches wide. “What are you doing here?”
“Apologizing.” Liz thrust the flowers at her daughter so she had no choice but to swing the door wider. “I’m sorry I burst in on you today. Please forgive me. I brought wine.” Who could resist?
Quinn hemmed and hawed, pausing with one hand loose on the door. It was obvious she was torn between wanting to hold a grudge and struggling to resist the lure of the flowers, the wine. The unvarnished “I’m sorry.” How rare were those? She just needed a little push.
Liz took a confident step forward, handing Quinn the bouquet so that she had to accept it or let the gorgeous blossoms fall. As Quinn wrapped her arms around the flowers, the door swung wide and Liz eased herself in. She gave her daughter a soft, knowing smile. It’s okay, she said with her eyes. We can forgive each other. We can be close like this. Out loud she said, “The wine should be chilled, but if we stick it in the freezer for fifteen minutes or so it should be just perfect. What do you say? Shall we have a glass on the dock? It’s such a perfect night.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“We have lots to talk about.” Liz gave a little wiggle of excitement. “I’m having a party! A big Sanford party. Remember how much fun we used to have? It’s tomorrow night and you just have to come. In fact, I was hoping you could help me . . .”
Liz left the comment hang hopefully between them, but before Quinn could answer, there was the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere in the cabin. Then footsteps, fast as running, and suddenly, impossibly, there was a child standing in the hall. She was slight as a shadow and just as unassuming. A ghost, a whisper, a figment of Liz’s imagination.
“I have to use the bathroom,” the girl said. She kept her head down but stole one furtive, repentant glance at Quinn. Her lips were pursed, her eyes wide in apology as if she knew that heeding nature’s call would undoubtedly get her in trouble. Then she hurried off toward the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.
“Mom,” Quinn started, the word sounding thick and uncooperative in her mouth, “that was my friend’s little girl . . .”
But Liz wasn’t listening. She felt chiseled from marble, lips parted in shock. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, but as she stared at the closed bathroom door she managed to whisper, “Who is that little girl, Quinn?”
“She’s—”
Liz interrupted her before she could utter another word. “Don’t you dare lie to me. God knows I can’t stand to hear another lie.”