Return to Paradise

by Laina Villeneuve

  A rush of butterflies swept through my belly. I had anticipated being able to turn around and swing back through town and had no idea how I’d do that now, back on a curving hill that did not invite a U-turn. My hands tighter on the steering wheel, I reached the crest of the hill and found another stretch of town on the other side.

  The sight of more businesses ahead didn’t allay my anxiety. I vowed to stop at the next mechanic I spotted. I coasted down the hill and into the straightaway with two-way traffic. On the left, I recognized the open bay doors of a shop and turned, smiling at the small sign that read “Rainbow Auto.” The mechanic was busy with a customer, so I dropped the gearshift to neutral, pulled the hand brake and released the clutch to wait for them to finish.

  Waiting in the warmth of my cab, I tucked my hands under my thighs. Though the chill from my hike had faded on the drive into town, the tips of my fingers still tingled. The garage looked more house than business. I pressed my head to the cold driver’s side window, staring at the second story perched above the second bay door. The curtains suggested that it was a living space.

  A wall of split firewood stacked neatly between posts blocked my view, but somehow I knew that in the summer with the porch cleared of wood, there would be pretty cut glass in the upper half of the front door. I shut my eyes and the image of my young parents standing in that spot flashed in my memory.

  I’d seen this house before in a small square photograph.

  My father’s left arm draped around my mother’s shoulder, and an infant me stretched out along his right forearm. He held me as casually as some would hold a football, my face cradled in his hand and my limbs hanging down loosely.

  I’d unknowingly come back to the place that I would have grown up in had Charlie stayed with my mom. My body felt icy cold.

  I compressed the clutch and started to put the car in reverse, but the mechanic’s eyes had found me, and I felt stuck having idled there as long as I had. The customer handed her keys to him, a big guy with a lumberjack beard and ball cap. It struck me that they were the same height, but while he had a heavy bulk to him, broad shoulders under his jean jacket, she was lithe in a well-cut business suit. Styled almost-blond hair framed her face—wispy bangs and sculpted eyebrows—this was a woman who took care with her appearance. She spoke with her hands and easy large smile on her face. Her posture suggested homecoming queen, the girl everyone liked and everyone wanted to be seen with. Having always got her way through school, it made perfect sense that she would continue to use her skills in the adult world.

  She continued to stand in the shop when the lumberjack got into her SUV, and I waited for him to pull it onto the blocks, surprised when white lights signaled that he was backing up. He maneuvered around me in the small driveway and disappeared into the traffic behind me. I sat uncomprehending as the homecoming queen approached my truck.

  Chapter Four

  Lacey

  What the fuck, I thought eyeing the woman in her black truck, not wanting to deal with anything in my business getup. Figures that someone would show up in the five-minute window I had opened up to get Guy’s Suburban back to him. She continued to sit there even after he left, forcing me to leave the relative warmth of the shop.

  “Can I help you?” I asked her. I squinted into the cab, and she stared at me without speaking. Great, a space cadet. She opened her mouth like she was going to speak but looked back at the house. She seemed lost. “Shop’s not technically open, but if it’s something simple…” I prompted, cold and ready to get inside and into some warm clothes.

  “You live here?”

  I turned to look at the house. What the hell did that have to do with anything? “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “Look, I wasn’t planning on working today. I’m obviously not dressed for it. Did you need directions?” My feet were starting to freeze in my pumps, corporate drag for the monthly small business meeting at the Chamber of Commerce.

  This got her brown eyes to focus on me instead of the house. Maybe she was high and drawn to my sign. I heard my friend Hope’s warnings about putting Rainbow in my business name.

  “I…” She stared at the open bay door as if she were trying to remember why she was parked in front. “I got a flat on my way up the canyon. I’m on the spare right now and wanted to make sure it’ll get me back home.”

  “Which tire are we talking?”

  “This one.” She pointed down at the front driver’s side.

  I quickly read the information on the tire. “You’ve got a standard tire there, so you’re fine driving on it until you can fix the flat. If you’re worried, you can pull up on into the garage. I can check the pressure for you.” I stepped back and let her put the truck in gear and pull in ahead of me, noting a small rainbow sticker on the back window. Well, that changed everything. I decided she must be in awe of how bold I dared to be with my signage in a small town.

  She had already shut off the engine and was stepping out of the truck to remove the cap from the tire valve, making me feel a little bad about the pothead assumption. I assessed her in a wholly unprofessional manner, admiring the hair so short it stuck up a bit at her crown and would have been boyish on a less feminine face. She moved freely in clothes that had seen real work, the worn barn jacket and heavy jeans tucked into snow boots, and now seeming much more capable than at first glance.

  I pulled the air hose over and checked her pressure to the manufacturer’s specs on the door, adding a pound before I held my out my hand. Long, slender fingers as feminine as her facial features surrendered the valve cap. I noted with disappointment that she didn’t register the brush of my fingertips across hers. “This tire’s good to go for a trip down the mountain, though it’d be good to get the one from the set patched up and back on for balance and wear, if it’s salvageable and you’ve got the time.”

  Stabilizing herself with a hand on her cab, the woman studied my shop as if she hadn’t heard me. When her gaze did return to me, she said, “You’re not open.”

  “C’mon,” I said, smiling big. “I wouldn’t turn away family.”

  She furrowed her brow, so I pointed to the rainbow on her truck. She looked to her sticker and back to me with a blank expression. Okay, I thought, going back to my original take on her. She might be cute. Too bad she’s a brick shy of a load.

  “I…” There was the lost look again. “I think I know this place, but not as a garage. It was a house.” She patted her pockets as if she could locate the answer in one.

  I frowned. I grew up in Quincy, yet I had never seen this woman before. My parents had bought the place when my mom found out she was pregnant with her fifth kid, and we’d been there nearly twenty years. How did she know I’d converted it into a garage? Did she know that we were standing in what had been my bedroom? The humor of poking around in someone’s engine or having my hands on the intimate workings of the transmission never grew old for me. I never shared with my local clients that I worked on cars in my former bedroom, but I was tempted to tell her. If she was like most of my friends, though, she wouldn’t find it funny. Best to get back to business and move her on her way. “Did you want me to look at the tire to see if it could be patched?”

  “Oh, it’s long gone,” she stated.

  I peered in the back of her truck and saw how shredded it was all around the rim. “Oh, yeah. You’re pretty much screwed there.” Though she hadn’t asked for advice, I checked out her rear tires and saw that there was plenty of wear left on them. “Your rear looks fine,” I said before I realized what I was saying. For a moment, I hoped she’d take it flirtatiously. It could have led us into a conversation about what she was doing in town and how long she’d be around. Unfortunately, she didn’t react to the double entendre. I could easily see her cluelessness getting her snowed on a full set of tires she didn’t need. “You could easily get away buying just two new tires. You’ll want the new ones up front for the best steering.”

  “Can’t I pair a ne
w one with the spare and carry the old front passenger as my spare?”

  Crossing my arms over my chest, I puzzled over her first logical utterance. I liked a person confident enough to speak her mind. “If that tire is in good shape, you could do that. How long have you been driving on the spare?”

  “Thirty, forty miles?” she estimated.

  “You said you were heading home today?”

  “Yes.”

  I put my hands in my pockets, trying to ward off the chill seeping through my too-thin business jacket. To get my blood moving, I walked to the other side of the truck to eyeball the tread and then came back around to check the coding on the side of her spare. “I wouldn’t recommend driving any distance the way you’re matched up here.” As I got into the details of tires, her attention drifted again, maybe to hold up the cost of tires to the balance in her bank account. More likely, she’d gotten lost in her impossible idea that she knew my house. Whatever it was, I had to snap her out of it. She was dressed for the weather; I was not.

  “How long did you say you’d lived here?” she asked in a faraway voice.

  “I grew up here,” I answered curtly. Enough with the chitchat. At this rate, I’d never get my feet warmed up. I glanced at my watch as discreetly as I could and found I was now running late for my lunch date. “If you wanted that referral,” I prompted.

  That finally put her into motion. “Sure. That would be helpful.”

  I grabbed one of my business cards and wrote down the number of a friend who mostly did tires. With the briefest of eye contact, she took the card and slid into her cab. To my relief she immediately turned over the ignition.

  “Whatever you do about that tire,” I said in parting, “don’t get screwed into a full set. You don’t need it.”

  She gave me a thumbs-up as she pulled out of the bay stall, and I felt a pang of sadness. It wasn’t every day a cute lesbian in my age range visited what had been my bedroom. I silently wished her well on her journey, hoping she was safe and found herself where she needed to be.

  Chapter Five

  Lacey

  “Lacey! Over here, girl!” my lunch date Delevasha hollered, like I hadn’t spotted her sitting smack in the middle of the nearly empty restaurant. She pointed to the empty seat with a tray waiting in front of it.

  I wrapped an arm around her shoulder as I slipped into my seat, grateful to settle into the warmth of the burger joint. “Coach Michaels,” I said, toasting her with a fry.

  “You’re late, and you’re still in costume. What gives?” she mumbled around the french fry she’d folded into her mouth. She paused her chewing to give her signature greeting, an expression of concerned sympathy that had grated on me the brief period we’d tried to date. Whether she stood at the door with a birthday bouquet and bottle of wine or met me at the local vet to hold my hand as I had my dog put down, her expression was always the same.

  When we were dating, I obsessed about what aura I carried to make her so concerned about my well-being. Her heavy sigh and the way the inside tip of her eyebrows curved up so they pointed toward the ceiling made me paranoid that I was barely holding my life together. Now that we’d been buddies for years, I realized that it had nothing to do with me. She’d similarly sigh her thanks to the busboy who brought our catsup.

  “I got held up.”

  “I told you not to keep cash in your shop.”

  “As if Annie Oakley comes through Quincy on a regular basis.” I took a bite of my burger, glad Della had ordered for me even if it was so she could have her onion rings and swipe some of my fries as well. “You think Annie Oakley was a lesbian?”

  Della took a long draw of soda. “What in the world makes you think that? Just because she was a better sharpshooter than most men doesn’t mean she favored women. She was married.”

  “I got held up by a lesbian is all.”

  Della’s hands smacked the table and she raised herself up as if by looking around the restaurant, she could locate her. “Here in town? Where is she?”

  “She had tire trouble. I couldn’t help. She said she was driving down the canyon tonight.”

  “So you let her go?” She held out an onion ring which I declined.

  “What was I supposed to do? Invent some reason she had to leave her truck with me?”

  “Yes! Wiggle some hose or plug or something so the thing wouldn’t start. Then tell her that all the rooms in town are booked but your friend Della happens to have room for her.”

  “We’re not that desperate.”

  “Speak for yourself, sister. It’s been a year since I got laid.”

  “Not a year,” I argued. “What about Natasha? You said last Christmas…oh.”

  “Yeah, like I said, a year, and it was a pity lay for an old lady, the worst kind.”

  “You’re not old,” I reminded her. I placed my hand on hers for a moment. I loved her skin, the dark richness of it like soil in fall. Mine was the stark contrast of winter snow unless I had burned to a painful red. My thoughts drifted to the stranger’s fingers brushing against mine. I placed my hands back in my lap.

  “Let’s write that down and see how you feel when you’re in your thirties. These are my best years, and I might as well be locked away in some tower living here.”

  “But imagine the glory when you turn your basketball team into champions.”

  She let her head fall dramatically on her forearms crisscrossed on the tabletop. “We’re not in last place this year.”

  “You think it’s because Patty graduated?” I asked, glad we’d directed the conversation away from the last time either of us had been laid. Since we had broken up, I tried to date a woman I’d met in Chico, but I’d ended it when it became clear that she was getting everything she wanted out of the long-distance relationship, but I wasn’t. I needed someone who wanted to be with me, day in and day out.

  “I’ve never seen a girl so untalented and driven at the same time. I lost count of the times she fell on her face.”

  “I’ve never seen someone trip on the court lines.”

  Della laughed so hard she choked and waved her hands in front of her face to stop me from saying another word. “You cannot say things like that about my students. Everyone gets a shot, everyone.”

  “Everyone gets a shot, even if she never makes it in the basket.”

  “No more.” The swat she landed on my shoulder had a hint of seriousness. “This isn’t exactly a recruiter’s dream here, McAlpine.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

  I was the grandchild recruited to keep an eye on her grandmother once she started to need more help with her errands. You’re looking to start your own shop, so do it in Quincy, my parents argued. You can have the old house and pop over to Gran’s once a week. Twice a week. After work each day. You don’t have any kids, two of my siblings argued. We’ve got our own families to care for and no energy to spare. I knew about sacrifice too. Grousing about the population that stagnated at fewer than two thousand was one of our favorite topics. That said, there was no way in hell my gran was ever leaving, and her sympathetic ear and rooster-shaped cookie jar always well stocked went a far way to keep me sane.

  “Tenure this year, right?” I asked, switching to a safe topic.

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t sound so excited. There were only, what, two hundred other people who wanted your job?”

  “I’d be a lot more excited if I didn’t have to take you as my date to the reception since you let my chance to take a real date drive out of your shop today. I’m never meeting anyone.”

  “Blazer met Hope,” I offered helpfully. “She’s your mentor. Why don’t you talk to her about it?”

  “She scares me,” Della said succinctly.

  “Scares you?” I said, not wanting to hear yet again the game she played, always measuring herself against others.

  Della started ticking off the tasks Dani Blazer handled on the campus. “It’s not only how much her students love
her. It’s the rodeo club. It’s being a Senate officer. And now she’s working on getting the campus to do the Safe Zone training. And she’s got a little one at home. What doesn’t she do?”

  I pulled a napkin from the dispenser, looking for a way to reroute a discussion we’d had plenty of times. Della’s passivity frustrated me. She could be as involved on campus as Dani but preferred to sit back and blow hot air instead of changing anything. I appreciated the way Dani had whipped both the campus and the town into the twenty-first century.

  She was a firecracker when she arrived, first making the whole place fall in love with her and then demanding that they continue to treat her with respect when she came out. There were plenty of people in town who suggested that it was her fault that there were any gay people in Quincy at all which was absurd. She was simply the first one who acted like it didn’t matter, holding Hope’s hand while they walked down Main Street even though it brought pointed stares.

  Everything mattered to Della. She believed their colleagues were more comfortable with Dani’s being Mexican to her being black. She agonized over the rodeo team’s success and the basketball team’s losses. I tried to point out how many years Dani had invested in the school and tried to get Della to spend her energy better, but her self-doubt exhausted me. I set down the napkin and took hold of Della’s hands across the table. “She doesn’t sit on the sidelines. She’s in the game with all she has. You could be too. It’s your choice.”

  “It’s my choice on the basketball court, sure, but outside of that it’s in someone else’s hands.” She tipped her chin and flashed her eyes upward. Her face clouded, and with a deep frown on her lips and eyebrows, she pulled her hands from mine. “You don’t get to talk about sitting on the sidelines when you let a cute lesbian walk away.”

  “I never said she was cute.” I felt my face flush when I thought again about the stranger’s slender fingers.