“What about the floors?” I asked, wondering if I would get an answer with full sentences, or if she was going to continue to be clipped with me all day.
“The floors were replaced at the same time as the windows. The owners did a complete overhaul of the apartment when they decided that they were going to sell,” she replied, not looking up from her clipboard.
“So they want to sell, as opposed to renting?”
Sara nodded, finally glancing up at me. “The whole building was broken out to units, and most have separate owners. The couple that owns this one decided to sell after relocating to London.”
I really hadn’t thought about buying an apartment outright instead of renting one. I’d never been given the option, actually. I couldn’t afford to buy a house on my own, but most of the apartments in the area were rentals. This building, though, had been different right from the start. It was actually a converted warehouse in the business district of historic Pensacola, a four-story brick building that still had the novelty of the original company signs painted on the façade. It was worn, of course, but it gave the place a certain element of interest. It reminded me of something you would find in New York.
Plus, there was the added bonus of its proximity to the store.
Sara’s BlackBerry chirped insistently, interrupting my thoughts.
“Excuse me,” she said, ducking out of the room and walking quickly toward the front door. Apparently, she really wanted some privacy for whatever call she was taking.
“So what do you think?” Ray asked, sidling up next to me as I stared distractedly out the door after Sara.
“Hmm? Oh. It’s great. Really great, actually. The bigger question would be if it really is in my budget, though. What do you think…dear?” I asked with a smirk.
“Well, firstly, I think that Sara has a bug up her ass.” The grin on his face was so wide I wondered if it made his face hurt. “Secondly, I agree that it’s a fantastic apartment. And a good investment, if you can swing it. Barring any deviation in the numbers that I gave Sara before she started working her magic list, it should be something that’s in your price range. But realtors can be like car salesmen, so I’d be hesitant to say for sure until we get to talk to her about that.”
I nodded. “That’s what I figured.”
“I think the other question would be whether this is someplace you’re truly interested in. You seem like you like it, but I’m not seeing over-the-moon happy. What’s going on?” Ray searched my face.
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just tired. It’s been a long week, and I’ve got a lot on my mind. And I’m running out of time, right?” I couldn’t help but grimace as I spoke.
I felt stressed more than excited over this whole thing, but I didn’t really want to go into that with Ray. I wasn’t sure he would understand. He was best friends with Neil, and I didn’t have any idea what he would think if he knew that I really didn’t want to leave the house behind. He might read too much into it, get the wrong impression.
“Well then, I guess we’ll tell Sara that we need some information on the numbers for this place, huh?” He looked past me out the doorway into the living area. “Whenever she comes back, that is. I wonder where she went?”
“All I know is, she didn’t seem to want to answer her phone in front of us.” I shrugged. “Maybe it was a personal call.”
“Maybe it was her social grace, calling to give its regards,” Ray snickered.
“Oooh, low blow,” I said, my lips curling into a guilty smile.
“Not undeserved, I assure you.” Ray scratched his head. “Now. I think we should go find her highness and see what we can see. And then we should finish up this exercise so that we can enjoy our dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, dinner. There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” Ray looked grim.
“Okay. Well, I guess then we should have dinner.” I wondered if maybe I would have a chance to ask him the questions that had been on my mind. Or, more importantly, if he would answer them.
“Let’s go,” he said quietly, putting his hand gently under my elbow to guide me out. I smiled up at him and took one last look around the place as we walked out, wondering if this was going to be the place that I would eventually call my home.
I was staring at my fingertips as though they held the answers to all the unsolved questions of the universe, barely seeing the chips in the polish on my nails or the snags in my cuticles. In fact, I wasn’t really aware of anything or anyone around me. My brain was too focused on what Ray had just said.
“All these months, Ray, and you never told me.” I shook my head sadly, feeling tears burning my eyes. “Why? Why didn’t you tell me? You knew everything that happened with Paul, and you never said one word to me about this.”
Ray shot up from his spot on the bench and walked a few steps toward the fountain. We were at Plaza Ferdinand, just down the street from Seville Square. It was one of my favorite spots in Pensacola during the summer, and on this unseasonably warm day in late fall, it was a pleasant change to the confines of a restaurant. I sat cross-legged on our bench, watching Ray as he paced a small section of the grass in front of me, not unlike a caged lion. Just as suddenly as his pacing started, he stopped, inching his way back to the bench to sit down again. He reached down to pick up the bag of trash we’d collected from our Subway wrappers, the remnants of our picnic dinner in the park, squeezing it between his hands to squish out all the air.
“I didn’t tell you because it’s not something I like to talk about. I don’t just tell people,” he said, looking past me to some middle distance, remembering the part of his past that had included a wife. Remembering the day he had come home to find her, lying still and cold on their bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.
“So why are you telling me this now? And does Kate know?”
He nodded. “I told her when we first got serious, but I asked her not to tell you.”
I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t suppress the bite of anger that I felt at their secrecy.
“She was keeping this from me, too? Wow.” There was no disguising the frost in my voice. “So again, why tell me now?”
He shook his head, still avoiding my eyes.
“I realized it was time,” he said at last. “I wanted to tell you—and maybe myself—that you can still have another chance. I have it now, with Kate, and you can have it, too. But you have to be open, and you have to believe. No matter what, you have to believe.”
The words hung in the air, important somehow, yet I wasn’t sure why.
I felt the anger seep out of me like air from a punctured tire, replaced by a desire to comfort him, the way he had me so many times. I reached out and took his hands in mine, crouching forward so that I was in his line of vision and could look directly into his eyes. I saw it there, the vestiges of pain commingled with happiness and hope. That pain would always be part of him, just as my loss of Paul would always be part of me.
Neither of us could change the past, but there was still a future. And we were both responsible for what we did with that.
Chapter 23
To: Neil Epstein
From: Zoë Trent
Subject: Down to the Wire
Dear Neil,
I can’t believe how close we’re getting to everything…Thanksgiving, Christmas, not to mention your homecoming. What’s that like, coming home after all those months away, having to try to get back to normal life? It must be disorienting to come back to changes that you didn’t expect, to see new buildings in new places and find that your social landscape has shifted.
Thanksgiving is only two days away. Isn’t that amazing? I remember how I felt last year at this time; Paul had only been gone a month, and the holidays did nothing but serve as a painful reminder that he was no longer there. I went through the days in a fog, physically present through family gatherings and festive parties; but emotionally vacant. It
seemed to be the only way I could survive a season that places so much emphasis on togetherness and relationships. What I failed to realize was that I was shutting out the people and relationships that I still had.
I’m looking forward to this time, this year. There have been so many changes in my life over the past months, and I’m excited about celebrating that. So much richness has been added that I would have never been able to see if I was still there, in that place of blind pain. I have so many things to be thankful for this year, and one of those things is you and the opportunity you gave me.
Thank you for that, Neil. I hope that one day, I’ll be able to thank you in person.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, do they have any kind of celebration arranged for all of you over there, or is the day going to slip by largely unnoticed?
Take care and stay safe, Neil.
Zoë
“You’re kidding right?” I felt like my eyes might bulge out of my head, but given the situation, it seemed a perfectly natural response.
“Oh, how I wish I was,” Ray replied, rubbing the back of his neck and hanging his head.
“Help me, Ray! What do we do?”
I was trying to keep my voice down so that I wouldn’t alert the other people in the house that there was a problem, but I was starting to panic. Really panic. Like full-on melt-down mode.
“What’s this we, white woman?” Ray asked.
“Someone doesn’t want to eat today, I see,” I shot back.
We were standing side-by-side in Neil’s kitchen, staring down at a turkey that was still very, very raw. The oven door was open, the wire rack pulled out far enough to give us a full view of the roasting pan and its frigid contents.
What I couldn’t understand was why, after being in the oven most of the day, the turkey was still so pale.
So very, very pale.
“Ray,” I said finally, not looking up from the turkey.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Does this oven feel cold to you?”
He reached down and tentatively touched a corner of the rack, then grabbed the whole edge.
“Aaagh!” he screamed in pain.
“Let go! Let go!” I shrieked, jumping up and down.
Ray started laughing, shaking his head and still holding onto the oven rack.
“Calm down, Zoë,” he chuckled. “It’s not on. I think there might be something wrong with it.” He paused, giving me an amused look. “You did turn it on, right?”
I punched his arm, scowling mightily at him. “Yes, Ray. I turned it on hours ago, when we put the turkey in.” I glanced at the dials on the oven to make sure I wasn’t losing it, relieved to see that they were set to the proper temperature. “Look,” I said, pointing at them.
“Okay,” Ray sighed. “So the good news is that you’re a capable cook, and the bad news would be that the oven is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
“Ray, it can’t be dead! Not now! My parents and Kate and her parents are all in the living room expecting to be sitting down to a nice turkey dinner in an hour. One hour.” I buried my face in my hands, hoping that somehow when I removed them, the turkey would be cooked and the oven would be fixed. “What the hell am I supposed to feed all these people?” I wailed through my hands.
“I don’t know,” Ray replied, sounding much too cheerful for my taste. “Why don’t we ask your mama?”
“She’s behind me, isn’t she?” I moaned, peeking through my fingers as I turned slowly around. My mother stood just inside the doorway of the kitchen, chewing her lips in an attempt not to laugh at the scene in front of her. “Hi, Mama,” I said weakly.
“Zoë, what’s going on?” she asked, looking past me at the open oven. “That turkey looks mighty pale, sweetie. Is everything going alright?” She looked from me to Ray, waiting for one of us to answer.
I shook my head and felt my eyes well up.
“No,” I whimpered. “The oven’s broken. The oven’s broken, the turkey’s raw, and dinner’s ruined.” I was full-blown crying by now, frustration and humiliation fueling the fat tears that streamed down my cheeks.
Today was not supposed to turn out this way.
Today was supposed to be a testament to all the changes that had gone on in the past year, a celebration of how far my life had come, a reflection of how much I had to be thankful for.
Today was supposed to be perfect.
My mother smiled sympathetically at me and crossed the worn linoleum floor to gather me in her arms. It felt so nice to be held by my mother that I cried even harder. The thought that I probably now resembled a member of Kiss did nothing to slow the tears, but I tried to keep my pitiful whimpering down so that no one else would hear me. I didn’t really want to have to face everyone just yet.
“Baby, don’t worry,” my mother soothed, rocking me and rubbing my back. “We’ll fix this,” she whispered, pulling back to look me in the eyes. She was smiling, her blue eyes sparkling like a little girl with a secret. I was reminded as I looked at her through my swollen eyes of just how beautiful she was.
Beautiful and capable and courageous, all the things I was afraid I would never be. I’d wanted so much to make her proud, and I felt like I’d failed.
I’d ruined Thanksgiving.
I buried my tear-soaked face in her shoulder and started crying harder, wishing I could wave a magic wand and start the day over.
“Zoë, sweetie, stop crying,” she shushed gently. “Stop crying and listen to me. The oven’s broken, but we can still do this. We just need to calm down and make a plan, okay?”
I nodded into her shoulder.
“Okay. Ray, how frozen is that turkey?” she asked.
“Let me check,” he replied. I heard him moving around behind me, presumably poking the turkey to get an accurate assessment of the situation. “It’s almost completely thawed out, but it’s nowhere near edible. Unless you want this to be your last Thanksgiving,” he chortled.
“Is there a grill somewhere around here?” Mama asked.
I pulled my face put of her shoulder, wiping the tears and mascara out of my eyes so that I could see what was going on. My mother didn’t seem at all panicked; in fact, she looked completely composed and in control. She’d always been able to stay level-headed in even the most stressful situations, and it was one of the things I admired most about her.
She looked at me, still wrapped in her arms but no longer crying.
“Are you going to be okay? Do you want to go splash some water on your face?”
I nodded. “But I want to help, too. Just tell me what I should do,” I said, sniffling.
“Well, first go splash some cold water on your face, and then we’ll get this turkey set to go on the grill. I’m going to work on scooping the stuffing out so that we can throw that away,” she said, moving to the sink to wash her hands.
Ray took the roasting pan from the cold oven and set it on the counter, silently watching my mother take control of the situation.
I didn’t want to risk someone seeing me in the hall on the way to the bathroom, so I used the kitchen sink to scrub my face. When I’d toweled off, I felt a little more ready to start getting dinner back on track, but I knew I was going to have to recruit help. I looked at my mother, up to her elbows in turkey and stuffing.
“Should I go get more help, Mama?” I asked quietly. As willing as I knew Ray was to assist in any way, I’d seen his kitchen skills in action. “Do you want me to get Kate or her mom?”
She looked up from her task and smiled at me, seemingly in her element.
“I think you and I can handle this, Zoë. We just need to get things packed up so that they’ll all cook out on the grill, and then we can let it take care of itself. It’ll be easy,” she said, trying to reassure me.
It sounded a little too simple to me, but I was willing to defer to my mother’s expertise. She’d been doing this much longer than I had, and I’d been witness to her ability to work miracles
when none seemed possible.
I decided it was better to smile at the humor of the situation than to continue thinking of it as a lost cause.
“What?” she asked, noting my small smile.
I shook my head. “You. You’re amazing, Mama. Am I ever going to be as amazing as you are?” I asked, meaning every word.
“I’m not amazing, honey. But I am your mother, and that makes me feel amazing,” she said, her eyes dancing as they welled with tears.
“Hey, now, you two,” Ray interjected, sounding a little bit hoarse. “There’s things to be done in this here kitchen. And last time I checked, there’s no crying in cooking.” He put an arm around each of us and gave a quick squeeze, then wandered toward the door that went from the kitchen to the backyard. “I’m going to go rustle up that grill so you two women can get on with your womanly duties.” He disappeared out the door, leaving it slightly ajar behind him.
Mama shot me a sheepish look. “We scared him off,” she whispered.
“Nah,” I said, grinning widely. “He just doesn’t want you to see him cry,” I whispered back, still smiling.
“Gotcha,” she replied. “Well, Zoë. What say you and I get this birdie pulled apart so it’ll fit in a smaller pan, and then we can wrap up the veggies in tin foil and throw them on the fire. We’ll just have stuff roasting in pans on the grill, and it’ll turn out so good no one will think to ask.”
I wrapped her in a big hug, burying my face in her shoulder again. “Thanks, Mama,” I whispered. “Thanks for everything.”
“I love you, Zoë. Always remember that,” she said.
To: Neil Epstein
From: Zoë Trent
Subject: And the turkey makes way for Santa
Coming Home to You Page 18