The back door slammed and Hannah sat up hurriedly, smoothing her T-shirt. Sure enough, it was Noah, carrying his beauty like a heavy weight, head down. What must that be like, Ruby wondered, to be the man in a room for whom all the women straightened? She wanted to put him at ease. “Noah! We are thinking we should be barefoot goddesses for the Blue Moon Festival. We will need some gods.”
“Come again?”
She gave him her best dimple, raising an eyebrow and a shoulder. “What god would you be if you could be any?”
“Not god material, I’m afraid. Lavender, we have some issues with the ice machine. Can I talk to you about it?”
“Again the ice machine?”
“It’s giving out.”
“Hmm.” Lavender put down the pencil and took her reading glasses off. “Let me think about it.”
“All right.”
She gestured to the last empty chair in the room. “Sit a minute, why don’t you?”
“Nah, I’ve got—”
She pointed at the chair, tapped her finger in the air. Sit.
He settled gingerly on the very edge. Scratched his temple.
“What god would you be, Noah, my dear?”
He scowled. “I don’t know. I don’t know any gods.”
“Hannah,” Ruby said. “Look up some gods that suit him.” She turned back, smiling. “I’m going to be Ariadne.”
“How about Hades?” Hannah/Persephone piped up. “He’s the god of the underworld.”
Lavender grinned. “Well, that fits, doesn’t it?”
“Sure, whatever. I’ll be Hades. But I’m not dressing up and I’m not going barefoot.”
Ruby laughed, the sound emerging from somewhere deep in her chest. People had always commented on her husky, robust laugh. “No toga, no sandals?”
He looked at her a beat too long, his eyes full of sleepy suggestions. “A sheet, maybe.”
“We vote for that,” Ruby replied evenly. “Just you in a sheet.”
Slowly, he rubbed his hands together. “What are you wearing?”
“I don’t know. We have to find tutus now, don’t we, girls?”
“What’s a tutu?”
“It’s what dancers wear onstage,” Hannah volunteered. “My mom was the first black prima ballerina in Cincinnati.”
“No kidding.” Noah gave Valerie a genuine smile, and Ruby swore the lights in the room started to short out. “That’s cool. That must have been a lot of hard work.”
She gave an elegant shrug. “Dancing is hard work, period. I was lucky to have a lot of support.”
“And she’s going to be a queen of something,” Hannah said.
“How about you, hon?” he asked.
“Oh,” she ducked her head, toed the edge of a rug. “Not quite sure.”
Ruby raised a brow toward Valerie, and Valerie sucked her top lip into her mouth. “Can we actually get tutus somewhere, do you think?” Ruby asked. “Like, rent them? We only have one day.”
Lavender said, “I’m not wearing a tutu. I’m too old.”
“Oh, yes,” Ruby said, “you so are. You’re the birthday girl.”
“What about Ginny? What would she like, do you think?”
“The cake queen? Who would that be?” Ruby pointed to Hannah. “Goddess seeker, find us a cake goddess.”
“Looking.” She punched in a phrase, frowned, tried another. “I’m getting a bunch of blogs and cake shops.”
“Hmm.”
“Artemis,” Lavender said. “Ginny is Artemis.”
Inexplicably, Ruby wanted to cry. “Oh, that’s beautiful.”
“Who is Artemis?” Valerie asked. “I can’t remember all this stuff. It’s been a long time since college.”
“I’ll look it up,” Hannah said.
In her pocket, Ruby’s phone started to play a song. Jason Mraz’s “I Won’t Give Up.”
She slapped her hand over it. “Crap. Crap. Crap! It’s Liam. What do I do?”
“Answer it,” Lavender said firmly. “It’s got to be done.”
With a shard of ice sticking through her heart, Ruby stood and answered the phone, heading for the back porch. “Hello?”
“Hey, Ruby,” he said, as if he were a westerner, not a New Yorker. The sound of his baritone voice, dark and honeyed, flowed down her neck. She hunched her shoulders, using an arm to cover her ribs.
“Hey, Liam. I guess you got my email.”
“Yeah.” Silence rocketed down the line. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I don’t know. I just thought you should hear the news.”
“I thought you couldn’t get pregnant, because of all the chemo and shit.”
“Radiation. It’s chemo and radiation.” She peered through the screens around the porch at the rain obscuring everything with a blurry gray. “I thought it was impossible, too, but I guess it wasn’t.”
“So we had sex for six years and you got pregnant the very last time?” Only now did she catch the hostility in his voice. “Is that right?”
She took a breath. This was the side of him she hated, the cold-bastard side, the inquisitor who could turn off all emotion and make her feel like a foolish, stupid child.
Not this time. “Yep,” she said.
“It sounds like bullshit to me. Like you’re just trying to fuck up my wedding to Minna. Your timing is—”
“Stop.” Ruby took a breath. “I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything from you. I wouldn’t have told you at all, but my friends thought you deserved to know. So—have a nice life, Liam. I don’t need you.”
“Ruby! Don’t hang up!”
She waited, her throat as tight as if she had drunk poison. Hearing his breath through the line made the fine hairs on her neck rise, as if in readiness for his lips. She had a vision, a sudden, shocking, disturbing vision, of his naked penis, red and crooked, as he came toward her on the bed, once upon a time. How she had grown to love it, like his voice, like his hands with their rough calluses!
Where had he gone, her lover? “Liam, it’s like … a miracle.”
“It’s like a lie, Ruby. You can’t really expect me to believe you.”
The words splatted against her face, cold and whole. “Have you ever known me to lie? Ever?”
“No. But you break up pretty bad.”
“Gosh, I can’t imagine why, after we were the couple of the century for six years.”
“It’s over.”
“I know that!” she yelled. “I got it.” A sharp pain burst over her eyebrows, and she put her hand over it. “Speak your mind, Liam. I don’t have all day while you think of a posture—but you know as well as I do that I would not lie about something like this.”
The line hummed. “I know.”
“Look, I’m going to hang up. Talk to me later or don’t. It’s up to you.”
A half beat of silence. “Minna doesn’t want me to talk to you. She’ll be pissed as hell that I called you today.”
“So we don’t have to talk at all. I just wanted to do the right thing.”
“I want to. I want to send you money.”
“You know I don’t need any money, Liam.” It had been such a sore point between them, his alternating jealousy and delight in her father’s extreme fortune. “Don’t worry about any of it. I’m fine.”
“It is a miracle, though, isn’t it?” His tone was hushed. “The baby? Like what if I never have another one? What if you don’t?”
This was how he swayed her—not the swagger or the charm. His genuine bewilderment at life sometimes, his desire to find the numinous in things. “I can’t tell Minna. It will destroy her.”
The dagger-shaped icicle in her heart twisted. “Right.”
“I’m really sorry, Ruby. I did love you, you know.”
“Don’t,” she said, and hung up.
Chapter 21
After the phone call with Liam, Ruby paced the porch for fifteen minutes, trying to pull herself together, to calm her racing heart and
shaking hands, to erase the lingering spill of his voice. In her belly, the baby swooped, but Ruby didn’t feel even slightly nauseous.
Huh. She’d thrown up only once today. Maybe it was getting better.
She needed to cook. Popping her head into the other room, she said, “I’m going to my trailer for a while.”
“Everything all right?” Lavender said, looking up.
“Not really. I just need to cook. I’ll be back later.”
“Take an umbrella from the foyer.”
Noah had settled on the floor on one side of the coffee table. Hannah sat on the other. A backgammon board was open between them. “Your move,” he rumbled to Hannah. She picked up the dice and rolled. Valerie watched the game over her reading glasses, needles clicking along.
“Don’t stay gone forever,” she said. “We have some planning to do.”
Ruby nodded and ducked into the rain. It pattered softly on the umbrella, enveloping her in a soft quiet that eased the back of her neck very slightly. Out in the rain, with no one watching, she could let the tears fall down her cheeks, embarrassing, stupid tears that showed her weakness.
What was this craziness with Liam, anyway? She sliced through the long grass of the meadow, getting the hems of her jeans soaking wet. It wasn’t as if she’d never had a boyfriend before him. She’d had plenty. She’d slept with some of them, too.
Why was she hanging on? It didn’t make any sense. It was making her miserable. She had to find a way to get over it.
As she approached the Airstream kitchen, she heard a little mewp. From the shelter under the trailer, a pair of gold eyes peered out of the darkness. They looked as if they were floating, then her black face disappeared in the shadows. Ruby blinked, once. Mewp.
“Oh, poor baby!” She reached down and scooped the kitten up. Ninja Girl wiggled up to Ruby’s shoulder, her fur wet and cold against her neck. Ruby stroked her, turning her face to kiss the kitten’s soft side. “See,” she said, adding aggrievement to the yeasty brew of her emotions. “This is why humans sometimes need to intervene. Why aren’t you in the barn?”
As soon as the trailer door was open, Ninja Girl jumped inside and delicately ran over to the licked-clean saucer on the floor by the table. “Mewp!” she said, blinking over her shoulder at Ruby.
Ruby allowed a chuckle to break up some of the craziness in her chest. “You’re a hungry thing! Luckily,” she said, opening one of the cupboards, “I stocked up on the yucky stuff you like. How about salmon with greens?” She held up the can. Ninja Girl twirled around her ankles.
This was why old ladies had too many cats, Ruby thought. She scooped the food onto the dish, and the kitten delicately ate one tiny bite at a time, chewing each three hundred times, like a proper lady. When Ruby ran her fingers over the cat’s spine, she arched upward, purring between bites. Her fur was as soft as a powder puff Ruby had as a little girl. Someone once brought scented talcs to the hospital ward, and the girls all smelled like sweet musk and baby powder for months after.
The feeling of Ninja Girl’s fur, the sound of her little purr, eased the wild craziness of Ruby’s mood. She settled on the floor with her laptop and checked her email, thinking maybe Liam would have followed up, but there was nothing, of course.
She wished she had a mother or a sister to talk to, someone to whom she could confess her incredible foolishness and finally hear an answer. She wanted advice, a map to follow, a drug to take, something that would sever her connection to a man who did not love her anymore.
As she mulled it over, Ruby suddenly realized it was classically calm Ginny to whom she could unburden herself. She opened an email and wrote:
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: JUST TO YOU
I’m falling apart and trying not to let anyone see it, but I know you have a daughter my age, and maybe you’ll have advice. I can’t talk to my dad, because he worries SO MUCH, and Lavender is great but she’s never really been all mixed up in relationships, you know?
She poured out everything that was weighing on her, asked for advice, and sent the email. Then she leaned back against the cupboards. Ninja Girl licked her paw, black tail curled around her other feet, the white socks peeking out from beneath it.
After a few minutes Ruby got to her feet, feeling the dampness of her clothes. She could change in a little while. The edges of her tongue fluttered with flavors—onions and garlic, rich broth, peas and carrots. She would make a shepherd’s pie for their dinner, for everybody. On the counter, she lined up her ingredients: olive oil and potatoes, a good boxed vegetable broth since time was too short to make her own. She lacked a bottle of red wine—of course, she didn’t buy it now, because she was pregnant—and she knew from long experience that it made a big difference in the depth of the dish. She called Lavender’s cell phone. “Hey, do you have a bottle of red wine?”
“Of course. I bought some yesterday. But you’re not drowning your sorrows, are you?”
“No! No way. I’m making dinner for everybody, and I need some wine for it.”
“Ah. I’ll send a bottle over, then. What time is supper?”
Ruby glanced at the Felix the Cat clock on the wall, which reminded her that Felix was a tuxedo cat. She grinned at Ninja Girl. “Around six. I’ll bring it over when it’s finished.”
“What can we add?”
“Bread and salad—fruit or vegetable, it doesn’t matter.”
“Done.”
When she hung up, Ruby pulled up a cooking playlist and set it to play on the speakers. Humming along with Pink, she smashed garlic cloves and peeled them, slid the wrapper from an onion and set it aside. The carrots and celery were slightly limp, so she put them in a bowl with ice water to crisp up.
A knock at the door sent the kitten skittering for a hiding place. She scrambled in one direction, tried to get under the stove, streaked behind the table.
“It’s me, Ruby,” Noah called. “It’s raining out here, you know?”
She yanked open the door. “Sorry! Come in. I was making the world safe for a certain Ninja Girl.”
His head and shoulders were soaked, and he leapt up the steps and into the trailer with a bottle of wine in hand. Water dripped down his nose, and Ruby laughed again. “I am sorry.” She gave him a dish towel and he handed over the wine.
“Oooh, good one,” Ruby said, reading the label. “Thanks for bringing it over.”
Noah rubbed his face and shoulders. Then, in a move that took her completely by surprise, he leaned in and shook his curls, sending water all over her.
Ruby shrieked and held up her hands. “Ick! Stop, stop!”
He grinned, the curls falling around his face in black ringlets. His teeth were not quite perfect but they were very white, and his tanned skin glistened with the rainwater. “You gonna drink that whole bottle yourself?”
“I’m not drinking any of it,” she said. “I’m pregnant!”
“How about pouring me a glass, then, and I’ll be your sous chef.” He lifted his chin at the unchopped veggies.
Ruby smelled him over the onions—cloves and sweat and a note like the breeze over the ocean. It made her think that his skin would taste like the ocean, like the tang and salt left after a wave swept over your body. “There’s not a lot of room in here.”
“You mean you want to be alone to brood.”
She shrugged, touched the swell of her belly. “More like think things over.”
“What things, sweetheart?” He took the bottle out of her hand, opened a drawer and then another until he found the corkscrew. “How bad you feel?” Expertly, he sliced the foil, slipped the cork from the bottle, waved it under his nose, and gave a small nod. It surprised her somehow. She would have said he was a beer man, or maybe whiskey. Most soldiers weren’t big on wine. “Is that thinking making you feel better?”
She sucked her top lip into her mouth, let it go. “Not exactly.”
He opened a cupbo
ard, finding glasses on the first try, and poured a substantial amount into a highball glass, then gave her the bottle. “Let me help you.”
His eyes were almost copper colored, like a river in late summer, and when he looked at her, she almost thought she could see the rippling currents. “There really isn’t room for two,” she repeated.
“It’s fine.” He tasted the wine, a very small sip. “Mmm. That’s good.”
Ruby gave him a knife. “Chop the onions.” She took out another cutting board and stood beside him. “Where did you learn about wine?”
“I worked vineyards a lot as a teenager. Napa, Sonoma. You learn a lot.”
She nodded. “Did you know Valerie was a wine blogger before her husband died?”
“Huh. Quite a Renaissance woman—maybe I should talk to her. I keep thinking it would be a kick to try some vines here. With the bees and the lavender—could be interesting.” His hands were deft and strong, with long fingers and good technique. “She quit?”
“Yeah. She says she’s not sure she wants to write about it anymore. It makes her think of her old life.”
“I can see that.” He scraped the diced onion into a bowl and plucked a celery stalk out of the water. “How much celery?”
“Couple ribs. Thinly sliced.” Ruby poured the onion into the olive oil and stirred it. The heat was not high. She added the garlic, stirred again, sprinkled in a little bit of sea salt, then took a carrot from the bowl and began to trim it. “When I think about her life and everything she’s lost, it makes me feel like a stupid little girl for all my whining.”
“It’s not a contest.” Painstakingly, he sliced the celery, making sure each piece was the same size as the next. “And you haven’t had an easy time, either.”
“I know. She’s just so together, really, so brave. Even at the funeral, she was dignified.” Ruby made a face. “Not my forte, I guess.”
“You’re not a drama queen, though. You’re a very cheerful person.”
“Am I?” She looked up at him, suddenly vulnerable. “I want to be. It seems like a waste to be grouchy if you have a single new day on this earth, but since I broke up with Liam—or, rather, since he broke up with me—I’ve had a lot of days of wallowing.”
The All You Can Dream Buffet Page 16