The Cocktail Collection

by Alice Clayton

  “Sure, it’s my dad’s company.” I grinned.

  Clark sat there for a moment, digesting. “Can I ask something?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you sell it? I mean, sounds like things were going great for you back there. Why come here?”

  I thought for a moment. “I think because I hadn’t had an adventure in a long time, and I was ready for one. And this was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time,” I said, dipping up a fingerful of jelly and licking it off. “Do you believe in fate, Clark?”

  “Fate?” he asked abstractedly, watching my mouth closely.

  “Yeah, fate. Do you think that there’s a preordained path you’re supposed to be on?”

  “Never given it much thought, really. I’m pretty methodical. Not prone to whims,” he said.

  “No. I never would have guessed.”

  “You’re teasing me, Vivian.” He chuckled.

  “Maybe just a little.” We sat for a moment together, quiet and still in the candlelight. “So,” I finally said, “I guess I should get the dishes started.”

  “I’ll help you,” he said, getting up to clear.

  “Don’t be silly. You cooked; I’ll do the dishes.” I took his plate before he could grab it and brought them both over to the sink.

  “You wash, I’ll dry?” he asked, tying his apron back on.

  “That’s a deal.” I turned on the water. As we cleaned up, we chatted some more.

  “So did you always know you wanted to go into computers?” he asked, drying the plate I’d just handed him.

  “No, in fact I hadn’t planned on going into it at all. Most of my family’s in computers so I wanted to try something new, you know? Out of the box?”

  “You? Out of the box? I never would have guessed,” he said, swiping a soapy fingertip down the ink on my arm.

  “Don’t poke fun, Clark. That’s my design there,” I warned, flicking a bubble at him from the sink.

  “You’re a tattoo artist too?”

  “No, but I minored in art in college, and spent some time really trying to make a go of it before the computer bug bit me. This tattoo is one I designed myself.” I twisted so he could see it better, the candlelight not being very strong.

  He examined the ink, turning my arm to see how it wrapped around. “You drew this?”

  “Mm-hmm.” I drew in a breath at the feel of his hands on my skin. Backstreet Boy or not, he had good hands.

  “You’re very talented.”

  “Once, maybe. I haven’t used that part of my brain in a long time, though.”

  “Why not?”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek, not ready to answer that question. I never went back to it because I just fell into something new. I’d always assumed there’d be time for it, that I could go back to my painting later. That I could balance the practical with the artistic. But family and work became all encompassing.

  It wasn’t a bad life, just a life without a lot of . . . passion. Adventure. Purpose. Intrigue. Wonder . . . And paint. “Here,” I said, handing him a slippery dish. He took it, drying it off without asking anything else.

  We stood in the darkened kitchen, quietly cleaning up. It was nice, the not talking. When I finished washing up I leaned back against the counter, swallowing the last of the wine in my glass. He hummed a bit while he was working, a tune I almost recognized but not quite. His voice was even and pleasant, even humming. He caught me watching him but didn’t stop his tune, just grinned a little.

  I was struck by how easy this was, how comfortable it was. There was no onion to peel here; Clark was an open book. Easy to read, easy to predict, he’d tell me anything I asked him. No holding back, no games, no bullshit.

  But also maybe no chase? No working for it, no running after, no stomach pangs, no hit of adrenaline when the little things go my way. Like when Hank threw me that apple, I got a thrill from that, right?

  You also got a thrill when Clark was draped across you, breathing on your thighs . . .

  Well, I’m only human. And a human who is living in her own romance novel, remember? The house, the ocean, the cowboy? There’s your passion. Adventure. Purpose. Intrigue. Wonder.

  “Paint?”

  “What’s that?” I asked, brought out of my daydream.

  “I was saying that if you wanted, I could help you paint the kitchen. When you’re ready, of course.”

  The librarian finished drying the dish, still humming his merry tune.

  And I thought long and hard about paint. I was still thinking about it after he went home.

  chapter ten

  The next two weeks passed by quickly. I spent my days either cleaning, organizing, or driving countless bags of clothing, kitchen supplies, and ever-loving tube socks to a local shelter that was happy to take them off my hands. I found stack after stack of old plates, cups, and saucers; nothing too fancy but not cheap either. I pored over them, selecting a few pieces I wanted here and there but mostly packing them carefully into boxes and bringing those down to the shelter as well.

  I threw away and recycled so much so that I now knew the names of the sanitation guys on my route. Threadbare rugs, moth-eaten coats and scarves were pitched; and bag after bag of magazines went into the recycling bin. Boxes of old receipts, calendars dating from the seventies, cassettes, CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs—pitched, recycled, or donated. The eight-tracks I donated to an antiques shop; I knew someone would pay money for those.

  Encyclopedias, yellowed with age and warped from water damage under the leaky roof, and sadly with outdated information, were recycled as well. As Clark pointed out, not everything was worth saving.

  Checkbooks, TV Guides, ads for local stores that had gone out of business years ago—there was no rhyme or reason to what was saved. And there was no easy way to go through this; you couldn’t just go through bulldozer style and throw everything out. I realized that when a box that I mistakenly thought contained only old coupons had one of the original titles to the land the house was sitting on! And in a box of crappy costume jewelry? An antique brooch with a ruby the size of a marble. A marble!

  “A very small marble, maybe, if you squint,” Clark had said when I showed it to him.

  “Oh where’s your sense of storytelling?” I’d said right back to him.

  I was recounting the story to Jessica one morning when she stopped by to see how things were going. She’d helped out a few times with sorting and packing, taking a carload herself down to the shelter a couple of days a week after her shift at the restaurant.

  One afternoon I made her come up with me to the attic. After the initial foray into the basement, I wasn’t too proud to admit I wanted some company; I’d seen way too many horror movies to venture into an attic alone. I promised her dibs on any creepy dolls we found up there.

  The attic stairs were at the end of the hallway on the second floor, almost hidden behind the linen closet. Behind a door that you opened with a key, which had made it seem like a wonderland when I was a young girl.

  Jessica and I opened the door with a loud creak. The stairs were as steep as I remembered, and creaky, just like attic stairs should be. Turning on a small landing, once you made it around that corner you could see how large it was. The house was truly grand, and it had an attic to match.

  Spanning the length of the house, it had the widest plank floors I’d ever seen anywhere, and I’m from Pennsylvania, home of the wide plank. But this was the great wild north of California, and the timber that was milled back then was staggeringly huge. As we crept, quiet as little mice up the last few steps, I saw what I remembered more vividly than almost anything else from my childhood.

  I saw miles and miles of unobstructed deep blue ocean. Window after window set into the back of the house, eight panes wide and equally as tall. An attic had no earthly reason to have this many wi
ndows, it was a waste of heat and space. But it didn’t matter. Because the man who designed this home knew how important and how utterly unique a view of this magnitude would be. And thank goodness the subsequent generations felt the same way, as it was never walled over.

  “Would you look at that,” Jessica breathed behind me.

  “It’s stunning isn’t it?” I said quietly. Who knows how long it had been since someone had been up here? The dust motes dancing in the air current we’d stirred up indicated that Aunt Maude hadn’t used this space recently. And it was untouched by the pack rat stacks of crap that had taken over the rest of the house. It was still the attic from my childhood.

  Dress mannequins were lined against one wall, like girls at a party waiting to be asked to dance. Some were wearing party dresses that had never been finished, and even after years of the sunlight fading them, the attic was filled with splashes of sugary pink, buttercup yellow, azure blue, kelly green, and ruby red. Sequins, bows, prints, and swirls waited to twirl.

  On the other wall? Trunks, stacked four and five high. Travel stickers shellacked the sides with places I’d never heard of as a child, but sounded so exotic. Athens. Siam. Mexico City. Cleveland. Some of the trunks were empty, but others contained treasures. Old hats and gloves for playing dress-up, old-fashioned clunky cameras for pretending to take pictures while playing dress-up. Maps. Letters. Yearbooks full of people who had lived and cried and had babies and died, all before I was even born.

  Old furniture, mirrors clouded with age but still reflecting everything that came within sight. Old landscape paintings, some of the sea, some of the mountains, but all massive and framed with ornately carved wood. I once found an anchor behind a full set of bowling pins, and had once launched an assault on the kingdom of Viviana with an army of tiny tin soldiers.

  And it was all still there. Better yet, it didn’t look small, as so many things from childhood do. It was still larger than life, and all in front of those gorgeous picture windows. Jessica and I oohed and aahed as we looked through it all, squealing in delight when we found some new shiny thing or perfectly darling bit.

  “This is seriously the coolest house ever, Viv.” Jessica sighed, sinking into an old wing chair by the windows.

  “I know! I feel like I should be modest, but I so fucking know what you mean. This is the coolest house ever,” I agreed, sitting on a tufted ottoman in front of a window, gazing out over the large expanse of blue.

  “I knew there was a reason I always wanted to come and see the inside of this place,” she continued, grabbing an old suntan reflector and making like a film star by the pool in the hills of Beverly. “What do you think you’re going to do with all this space up here? You can’t just use it for storage, it’s too cool!” She angled the reflector to grab some additional rays.

  I had an idea—an idea that had been working on me since I was twelve. I’d stood in front of the windows, the natural light pouring in as I’d pretended to paint one of the big landscapes. Holding an imaginary brush, I’d pretended to feather in different colors, maybe make a different choice in the shading of that tree, or the shape of that hill. I saw my own painting laid over the actual, and in my mind’s eye I was in my own art studio.

  I wasn’t quite ready to share that thought out loud, though.

  If I was really going to consider working in this space, I’d have to get some heating and cooling up here. And install screens in the windows so they could be opened. “It’s getting a little stuffy up here; let’s head back down and get something to drink.”

  “Are you sure? I feel like I didn’t help you at all, we just played,” she said, adjusting the top hat she was wearing.

  “I kind of want to keep it like this for a while. So much of this house isn’t at all like I remembered it,” I said, running my fingertips across one of the paintings. “It’s nice to have something be exactly the same.”

  She went down the stairs ahead of me and I paused at the top, looking back over the attic. There was another reason I was reluctant to disturb everything up here. I kind of wanted Clark to see it, as is.

  I flicked off the light and followed Jessica downstairs.

  We kept at the cleaning every day. Even Jessica’s boyfriend, John, had been drafted when we realized how heavy the Legless Knight was. He and Clark lifted him, reunited his torso with his better half, and took him down to the antiques store that had taken some of the other things.

  “Don’t you think he should stay in the house?” Clark had asked, patting the knight on the head.

  “No, he’s too weird. And speaking of weird, the dolls are next on my hit list.”

  I laughed as he tried to spook me with stories of how, if I got rid of them, they’d plot their revenge.

  What did not need a ton of work—cue surprise face here—was the Bel Air. Clark found the car keys in a mayonnaise jar in the pantry with all kinds of odds and ends. Spying a Buffalo nickel at the bottom of the jar, he upended the entire thing all over the kitchen table. And as he combed through the stuff, I saw a key chain with two very bright and shiny keys. Biting back a squeal in case they turned out to be the wrong ones, I snatched them up, ran out to the garage, and slid behind the wheel before Clark even knew I was gone. I’d planned only to slip the keys into the ignition to see if they fit, but when they did, I couldn’t resist.

  With a cough and a chortle, the engine purred to life. Clark ran outside, visions of a Bel Air–shaped hole in the garage no doubt in his head, and stood in front of the hood with a bemused expression on his face. I revved her up once, which made him sidle to the side a bit.

  “It sounds pretty good!” I yelled over the engine, and he walked to the window.

  “Let’s not tempt fate, shall we? I’ll have one of the guys from Brady’s Auto come over while you’re gone and make sure it’s drivable. How ’bout that?”

  Eager as I was to tootle about town in it, I realized that it wouldn’t do me any good to get stranded on the side of the road. So I turned it off and reluctantly handed over the keys to Clark.

  “Just so we’re clear, you don’t get to drive it first. Even if the guy says everything is great, you wait for me. Got it?” I said, poking him in the chest. He nodded, pocketing the keys. He’d better have listened to me . . .

  Clark was around most days now. Cleaning and culling was uncovering some other necessary repairs to the house, which of course he needed to be consulted on. I didn’t mind. I’d gotten used to him being here. Now that the bandage was gone and the bruises had faded, I didn’t mind looking at him so much.

  And when you got past the briefcase and the tie, the elbow patches and the dusty eyeglasses, he was a pretty funny guy. He made me laugh; he made me think. He also made me furious. But he was quickly becoming a good friend.

  And I’d been right about letting him see the attic as is. He loved it. He went bananas over the old yearbooks, especially since most of them were from the local high school. As he pored over old letters and receipts from stores long since shuttered, I studied the light as it shone in. Where the shadows were, where the light was the strongest. I began to mentally carve out a space that was becoming my studio.

  “Can I help you with that?” Clark asked as I struggled to pull a trunk away from the wall.

  “No no, I’ve got it,” I insisted, pulling hard enough to make my eyes cross a bit. “What in the world is in here?” I mumbled, giving one more good tug and sending it, and me, sliding across the floor. I sat down hard, biting my tongue in the process. “Sonofa— Ow!”

  “Impossible woman,” he muttered, but was at my side a moment later. “You need to let people help you.”

  “What do you think I’m doing, with all this free labor cleaning out my house?” I said, wincing as I felt around the inside of my mouth. The piercing in my tongue clicked against the back of my teeth like it always did, and the sound made Clark look closer.
r />   “You didn’t lose your piercing, did you?” he asked, crouching down next to me and offering me his handkerchief. God bless him, he carried a hankie.

  “No, it’d take a lot for this sucker to come out,” I said, accepting what he offered and pressing it to the tip of my tongue where I’d bitten it.

  “Did it hurt?” he asked.

  “Well yeah, didn’t you hear me yell?”

  “I meant the piercing. When you got it.”

  “Why, you thinking about piercing something, Clark?” I asked with amusement.

  “Good lord, no.”

  I laughed out loud. He sat down next to me on the floor of the attic and looked carefully at me. “I just wondered how it felt.”

  “It hurt, sure, but a good kind of hurt. And I was expecting it, unlike a moment ago. No biggie, I’m a tough girl. Five brothers, remember?”

  He stared at me a moment, his eyes darting back down to my mouth. I poked the barbell out a little so he could see it, waggling my tongue at him. He breathed in hard. “Tough girl,” he echoed.

  We sat in a patch of sunshine, staring at each other. Eventually I put his handkerchief back into my mouth, and his eyes blazed. And when finally a cloud passed overhead and interrupted the sunshine, we both sat back a bit, each looking away. Clark finally moved, standing and offering me his hand. He pulled me up harder than I expected and I overbalanced, knocking us into each other. We both laughed.

  “Well, let’s see what’s so darn heavy in this trunk!” he exclaimed, and set about worrying the lock open. I sucked on his hankie while I watched him work.

  There was dust in his hair, and I reached out without thinking and ran my fingers through it. His hands faltered. “Dust,” I murmured, stepping back and shaking my head.

  “Mm-hmm,” he replied, and sprang the lock. Taking a step back, he opened the trunk and we peered inside. “Well would you look at that,” he said, admiring. I looked, and had no idea what I was seeing. Bronze, curved, looked like a . . . cornucopia?

  “Is that a horn of plenty? Like people put on the table at Thanksgiving?”