Blood Red

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  In the end, she skips the lipstick and eyeliner, goes with the ponytail, and turns her back on the mirror. Downstairs, she finds Doofus blissfully snoozing on the rug and has to shake him awake.

  “You’d make a lousy watchdog, you know that?”

  He wags his tail, apparently mistaking it as a compliment.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my keys?” she adds, unsuccessfully searching the cluttered kitchen surfaces, a daily occurrence.

  She lets the dog out into the yard and takes her medication on an empty stomach. To stave off the predictable tide of nausea—­evocative of morning-­sickness-­meets-­wretched-­hangover—­she belatedly gobbles a ­couple of saltines as she continues searching for her keys. After finding them in the pocket of last night’s jacket, she coaxes Doofus back inside too soon even for his taste.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got to run,” she explains, dumping some food into a bowl for him and convinced he’s gazing reproachfully after her when she finally hurtles herself out the door.

  The pavement is slick and shiny as she winds her way south along Highland Road, riding the brake in anticipation of joggers and deer. Tendrils of mist obscure portions of the highway she knows so well.

  Growing up in Mundy’s Landing, she longed for the day she could leave the village behind. But when it finally arrived, she found herself longing to go back home. It took her well over a decade to do that. After a year as a commuter student at Hadley, the only college willing to admit her, probably only because the admissions ­people were local and knew about her recently deceased mother, she transferred to her mother’s alma mater, the University of Buffalo. Like Mom, she majored in education, not because she particularly wanted to become a teacher, but because it made her feel closer to her mother and it made her widowed father happy.

  Weary of western New York winters, she went south to Virginia for her master’s. But while she was back home over Christmas break, she met Asa Jacob Mundy IV, though no one ever called him that. He was just Jake. He was seven years older than Rowan, having graduated high school just ahead of her oldest brother, Mitch.

  Like most graduates of Mundy’s Landing High School during their era, Jake had gone away to college and stayed away. His father had died fairly young and his mother was still living in Mundy’s Landing, but she’s long since settled in Texas with Jake’s older sister, Liza.

  Jake hadn’t strayed so far: he was working for an ad agency in New York City when Rowan met him.

  They were married the June after she got her master’s degree. She’d had her fill of steamy Southern summers and welcomed the chance to move North again. She found a teaching position in the New York suburbs and that’s where they settled. Her father adored Jake—­not just because everyone likes Jake, but because he was a hometown boy, a Mundy.

  Dad lived to walk Rowan down the aisle and hold her firstborn, but died while she was pregnant with her second. He never met the daughter Rowan named for her mother, or his own namesake, Mick; never got to see her come full circle back to Mundy’s Landing.

  Not a day goes by that she doesn’t long for her parents or remember the promises she made to them both and struggled so hard to keep.

  What would they think of her now?

  They wouldn’t be proud of me—­that’s for damned sure.

  Resisting the urge to feel sorry for herself, Rowan swallows over the lump in her throat and merges onto the thruway headed toward New York City, determined to make things right again.

  The drive should take only two hours, but three and a half have passed before she’s finally pulling into a parking garage in the West Fifties. It was pouring by the time she reached the northern suburbs, and steady traffic gave way to notorious holiday gridlock within the city limits.

  She’d expected to have plenty of time to gather her emotions before meeting Rick, but she’s got less than fifteen minutes to make her way to the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant he’d suggested. She covers those blocks beneath a dripping umbrella, pausing on every corner to exchange texts with Jake, who’s back home and filled with the usual questions about where to find things that have gone missing in the laundry room or kitchen. A phone call would be easier, but she knows there’ll be no passing off the rumbles, honks, and shouts of urban street noise for a shopping mall.

  She signs off with a quick “TTYL” when she arrives at the designated meeting spot.

  It appears to be more of a no-­frills coffee shop than the upscale café she was for some reason anticipating. He suggested it, saying it was close to the West Side Highway and the PATH trains to Jersey, where he now lives . . . alone.

  That his marriage to Vanessa didn’t survive probably shouldn’t surprise Rowan, but it does.

  There but for the grace of God, she thinks, pausing in front of the door to silence her phone. Then, taking a deep breath, she steps inside the restaurant.

  She recognizes Rick Walker immediately, sitting alone in a booth with his back to the door. There’s something strikingly familiar about the poised, pensive posture: elbows propped on the table, raised cup clutched in both hands, head bent.

  Either he’s got her right where he wants her, or he’s in for one hell of a nasty surprise.

  “Table for one?” a waitress asks, and she shakes her head and points toward Rick.

  “I’m joining someone.”

  The woman waves her on, but Rowan hesitates, unwilling to approach him. She reminds herself that she’s anonymous here; no one is watching her, judging her. But it isn’t easy to push aside the guilt and trepidation.

  At last, she walks over to the table and steels herself for the confrontation whose script has been running through in her head all night.

  “Rick?” Her voice works. So far, so good.

  He looks up, lights up with a grin that crinkles the corners of his eyes just as she remembers. He sets down the mug—­tea, she sees, noting the string dangling over the edge. He always chose tea over coffee.

  “I’m surprised you don’t,” he said once, soon after they met.

  “Why?”

  “Because you grew up in an Irish household.”

  “So you assume we drank tea?”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Sure we did. And whiskey, too, and we ate corned beef and cabbage every night and wore kilts and danced jigs . . .”

  “And hid pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, right?”

  “Exactly,” she agreed with a laugh.

  Snippets of that lighthearted exchange float into her head as he gets up to embrace her like a long-­lost friend.

  “Rowan. It’s so good to see you. I almost didn’t recognize you without your hair.”

  “I still have hair.” He does, too, but it’s thinning.

  “I meant your long red hair. But you look great. Sit down.”

  She’d been worried until this moment that she’d take one look at him and become infatuated all over again. But that isn’t the case, and it’s not just because he’s a middle-­aged man now. His looks were never the draw in the first place. It was more that Rick understood her—­or rather, she perceived that he understood her—­far better than Jake did at the time.

  Unlike her husband, he knew his way around the kitchen and the supermarket; the playground and the pediatrician’s office; the preschool parking lot and—­perhaps most important—­the circle of moms. Neither of them could relate to the designer stroller–pushing crowd that populated their suburb. Rowan and Rick seemed to be the only two parents on the playground who hadn’t grown up in Westchester, didn’t come from money, and didn’t have doting parents willing to write fat checks and babysit the grandkids. Nor had they swapped demanding corporate careers to spend days at home with their toddlers. They used to laughingly speculate that some of those moms managed their kids the way they used to manage their corporate minions.

  Jake would
never have grasped the humor in imagining a brisk memo delivered to a sandbox with a cc to a crib, bearing the subject line “Potty Training Objectives” or “Naptime Agenda.”

  Rick got it. He got her.

  She used to wonder whether she’d married the wrong man.

  Now I’m positive I didn’t, she thinks as she sinks into the booth, missing Jake already. What a difference fourteen years—­a lifetime—­has made. She’d give anything to be at home where she belongs, instead of here with Rick, exhuming memories.

  The place feels familiar. They sometimes took the kids out for lunch after preschool pickup, to a diner just like this one. Maybe that’s why he chose it.

  Yes, and one of his boys—­or was it Braden?—­was going through a stage when he’d eat nothing but simple white carbs. Bagels, cereal, buttered pasta . . .

  Funny that she doesn’t remember whether it was his son or her own, but she clearly remembers sitting across from Rick in a corner booth crammed with kids and crumbs, talking endlessly about parenting challenges she might have discussed with the other moms if they weren’t so cliquey, or with her own mom if she were still alive.

  When she’d become a mother a decade after losing her own, Rowan was surprised to find herself grieving the loss all over again and feeling lonelier than she had in years. Then Rick came along, and he was interested in her day-­to-­day existence because he shared it. He actually cared about potty training technique and transitioning away from naps and training wheels . . .

  When she discussed those things with Jake, he always seemed to be either disinterested or oppositional. “Why do you bother asking me for my opinion if you don’t want to listen to what I have to say?” he’d ask.

  “I didn’t ask for your opinion. You offered it.”

  “They’re my kids, too.”

  “I know. But it’s fine. I’m the one who’s with them most of the time, so I’ll deal with it.”

  And she would—­often with plenty of helpful input from Rick Walker.

  And yes, she did think he was good-­looking back then. Not conventionally tall, dark, and handsome like Jake. But Rick had warm brown eyes and a quick grin and was hilariously funny, and so sweet and caring with his kids—­and with her kids, and with her. He was always complimenting her on her laugh, her parenting skills, her hair—­especially her hair.

  “I’ve always had a thing for redheads . . .”

  The comment hadn’t seemed particularly inappropriate at the time. She’d been too caught up in her infatuation, wondering what it would be like to kiss him, and then one day . . .

  She knew.

  How exhilarating to realize he’d been longing for the same forbidden connection all those times they were together. How satisfying to indulge blatant desire after all those years of keeping her emotions and behavior in check.

  And how utterly foolish, and selfish, and sinful, and terrifying.

  They size each other up across the table.

  What’s supposed to come next?

  An accusation, she believes. But the words she’d rehearsed refuse to form on her lips, so she busies herself shrugging out of her coat and arranging her paper napkin on her lap. Meanwhile, he starts to talk. And talk. He doesn’t sound anxious, but maybe he is, because he won’t shut up and give her a moment to gather her thoughts and her nerve.

  He’s telling her how happy he is that she wanted to get together, asking her how things are, how everyone has been.

  “Jake? The kids? Are they grown up now? They must be.”

  “My older two are in college. The youngest is still at home with us.”

  “That’s Mickey. You gave him your maiden name, Carmichael, as a first name, and you used to call him Mickey, like they called your dad.”

  “We still do, only now it’s shortened to Mick,” she tells him, unnerved. Does he just happen to remember those details? Or did he find them somewhere online?

  He must remember. Her father’s nickname wouldn’t have been officially documented in any public record or forum.

  “Mick. Rhymes with Rick,” he says.

  She never thought of that. She wants to assure him that it’s pure coincidence, and that it has nothing to do with him, but of course he knows that.

  He must.

  Right?

  “How about your kids?”

  “None of them are named after me.”

  “That’s . . . I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know what you meant,” he says, “ but I was thinking about how when Liam was born I really wanted to name him Rick, not just after myself but after my father, but Vanessa didn’t want to because her firstborn was named after her ex and after he left, she couldn’t stand to hear the name. So she didn’t want to name our son after me, I guess because she figured sooner or later, either I’d leave or she’d hate me or maybe both.”

  She doesn’t know what to say.

  After an awkward moment of silence, he says, “You know what I want to know? Did you ever get your Victorian?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you remember how much we both hated our raised ranches when we were living in Westchester? I was always fantasizing about moving to a farmhouse somewhere, and you wanted a big old Victorian. You used to talk about exactly what it would look like: gingerbread porch, pocket doors, high ceilings . . .”

  He’s describing her house. Does he know? Has he . . . seen it?

  “And you were going to furnish it entirely in period furniture,” he goes on. “You were so crazy about that era. Remember how we’d go to tag sales so that you could look for antiques? That one time, it took us an hour to walk two blocks with all the kids because we had to use one of the strollers to push that big old fringed lampshade you found.”

  Unsettled by the memory—­particularly when she recollects that she’d casually lied to Jake about how much it had cost—­she quickly changes the subject. “Wait, you haven’t told me about your kids. How are they?”

  “Liam and Erin are both in college, like your older two. And Vanessa’s boys have been grown up and out on their own for years now. They’re both still in the city, but ever since she died, it’s been—­”

  “She died? I thought—­I mean, I assumed—­you’d gotten divorced. I’m so sorry. I didn’t—­”

  “It’s okay. We were divorced a while back, and then . . . she died.”

  What is there to say to that, other than “I’m sorry,” again.

  To think she’d considered that Vanessa—­poor dead Vanessa—­might have been responsible for sending the package.

  But . . . Rick? Could he really have sent it?

  The waitress appears, providing a brief respite from the conversation as Rowan orders the coffee she’d sworn off earlier. She needs it desperately now, having expended every ounce of energy she possessed just to propel herself to this place—­not just physically, but emotionally. Now that the initial confrontation is over, the sheer exhaustion of the night before—­the week before—­has caught up with her. She’s finding it difficult to sort through her thoughts, and the conversation has already drifted so far off script that she has no idea how to steer it back.

  She toys with the upside-­down coffee cup on her scalloped paper placemat as Rick orders a toasted sesame bagel.

  “Cream cheese?”

  “No, butter, thanks, Bernice,” he tells the waitress, and Rowan remembers that he always did have a folksy way of addressing waitstaff by the first names printed on their name tags, and that he never did like cream cheese. He always ordered his bagels with butter. Sesame bagels. Real butter, not margarine—­which he specifies to Bernice an instant after the memory flits into Rowan’s mind.

  “Real butter.” Bernice nods, writing it down. “Anything else?”

  “Just ice in a go-­cup with a lid and a straw and a lemon.”

>   A new wave of memories: he’ll keep adding hot water to his tea as they sit here, and when he leaves, he’ll dump what’s left into the cup and take it with him. Voilà—­iced tea. Two beverages for the price of one, he used to say, and she thought it was clever. Now it seems like cheating.

  “What about for you, hon?” The waitress has turned to Rowan, pen poised on her pad.

  “Just the coffee, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

  “You can share my bagel if you change your mind,” Rick tells her after Bernice leaves.

  An image flashes into her brain: Rick leaning across the table feeding her as they laugh together.

  It’s not a memory; it never happened—­and never will happen.

  How dare he offer to share his food?

  Irrational anger flares within her.

  He has no business getting so . . . so cozy with her, especially considering that they haven’t been alone together since the moment fourteen years ago when they were jerked back to their senses courtesy of the blasting smoke alarm.

  “Rick.” She clenches her hands in her lap. “About the package . . .”

  He just looks at her, waiting. Not a hint of recognition in his eyes.

  If he were responsible, there would at least be a telltale flicker, right?

  But if he didn’t send it, and Vanessa is dead, then who else could it have been?

  “You sent it. I know you did.”

  He blinks. “Sent what?”

  “The box.”

  “What box?”

  “Come on, stop playing stupid. I know that you—­”

  “All righty, here we are.” The waitress is back to turn over Rowan’s cup and fill it with steaming black coffee.

  “Cream?”

  “Please.”

  They gaze at each other in uncomfortable silence as the waitress briefly steps away and returns with a small silver cream dispenser.

  “More hot water?” she asks Rick, gesturing at the little teapot in front of him.

  “Please. Although I think I’m in hot water,” he replies, “and I’m not sure exactly why.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll tell you,” Bernice returns with a sly grin, probably assuming this is one of those typical men-­from-­Mars, women-­from-­Venus conversations.