Such Happiness as This

by Laina Villeneuve

  Robyn pushed away from the sink. “Let me give the tub one more stir and make sure we’re up to temp. You want to grab us some towels from the bathroom cupboard?”

  “Fine, but then you talk.”

  Robyn conceded and stepped out into the cool night. She lifted a paddle from the patio and stirred the steaming water in the old oyster tank she’d picked up years ago and rigged into a hot tub with a submerged woodstove. Preparing a soak helped her clear out the left over hunks of wood she cut off stumps and burl as she shaped blanks she would later turn into platters and bowls.

  After stirring, she checked the thermometer. It tipped just above a hundred degrees. Just right to soak their tired muscles. Robyn stepped inside and found Isabel wrapped in a towel. “The water’s perfect. Ease on in. I’ll be right out.”

  In the bathroom, she stripped off her clothes and covered herself with a towel just in case one of her three renters chose that moment to return home. She slipped into the water next to Isabel, an appreciative hiss escaping her lips as she carefully lowered herself into the deliciously hot water.

  “When are you getting jets in this thing?” Isabel said, her whole body immersed.

  “Shut up. I made this…”

  “Out of an old oyster tank, I know. I know. But I miss the jets.”

  “So get dressed and go pay for them down at the Café Mokka.”

  “But then I would not be naked in Northtown. Have your neighbors caught you yet?”

  “Nope. At least I haven’t heard anyone screaming or anything, so I figure it’s still pretty discreet.”

  “I love the way the cold mist settles on my skin. It is like butterfly kisses. If I lived here, you would fire this up for me every night,” she said with a dramatic wave of her arm.

  “Another reason we never would have worked,” Robyn laughed. She stopped abruptly when she realized what she’d said.

  “What?” Isabel asked.

  “Barb and I don’t work anymore,” she said, deciding it was better to jump in after all the internal festering. She felt the water ripple against her chest as Isabel shot up from her slouch, her mouth agape.

  “What? But you guys are good. You are always good. I thought you said that you got all of the hard stuff out of the way before you got married and that it was smooth sailing after that.”

  “We never got married,” Robyn said, remembering when she had stopped asking Barb to file as domestic partners.

  “After you got, what is it you say? Committed?”

  Robyn laughed, thinking that being caught in a straightjacket was exactly what her relationship had turned out to be. “It was for a while.”

  “But you retired for her, no?”

  “The arguments about whether I was trying to kill myself on the job stopped, but then it turned out that we stopped talking period.”

  “You said that Barbara was always too dramatic about your job. Were you trying to kill yourself?”

  Though Barb had asked her the same thing, Robyn had always steadfastly denied it. Not until Kristine had told her about Penelope lying in a coma had she considered why she had been so willing to take risks at work. She thought about the things that Penelope would miss, all the firsts that set life’s logical goals: graduating, dating, landing the perfect job. Once she’d accomplished her goals, she had expected to feel happy. Proud. Satisfied. Not hopeless. The only joy in her life was her job so she believed that she might as well give it everything she had, even if that included her own life. “Yes,” she admitted. “I thought it would be so much easier to die than face how unhappy I was at home.”

  “Mija. I never knew it was that bad. How long was it like that?”

  Robyn shrugged. “A few years.”

  “A few YEARS? Ay caramba! You never said one thing.” She looked at Robyn with reprimand and concern.

  “You had your own hands full,” Robyn said, thinking about how stressed Isabel was when she’d had two infants to care for.

  “Never that full, mija. You could have told me.”

  “I know. I’ve been holding on to the possibility that we were just in a rough patch.”

  “How bad are we talking? How is the sex? Better with her or by yourself?”

  Her face, though already red from the heat of the tub, flushed at the question. “Isabel!”

  “What? If you are more excited to masturbate than you are to have sex with her, then that is it.”

  “I’m pretty much on my own,” Robyn admitted.

  “For years you have been on your own?”

  Robyn nodded. “The last time we had sex, you know what she said to me? ‘Why don’t we do that more often?’ Can you believe that?”

  “Well,” Isabel said as the silence stretched. “Why don’t you?”

  “I got tired of asking, of initiating, of feeling like I was imposing on her with my demands. Three years ago, I told her that I was going to stop asking but I was always interested. All she had to do was let me know, and I’d be game.”

  Isabel pushed air through pursed lips, clearly annoyed. “That is pretty harsh. You cannot wash your hands just like that.”

  Robyn shrugged. “It just made everything easier. I didn’t get my hopes up, so I didn’t get disappointed, and the years went by. I kept telling myself that we’d reconnect when I retired.”

  Isabel reached for her hand. “I just spent the weekend with you two, and you seem the same as always. You found Barb the year I met Craig.” Isabel paused uncomfortably, looking at their joined hands. “Robyn, this isn’t about…”

  Following Isabel’s train of thought, Robyn was suddenly awkwardly aware of her friend’s nakedness. She shoved at her shoulder, breaking the tension. “I don’t have a secret unrequited love for you if that’s what you’re going to ask. I met Barb. I fell in love with her. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with her watching the gay pride parade go by the house every year from our porch swing.”

  “Is this the problem, that you are always on the swing and not marching in the parade?”

  “Maybe that’s her problem.” Robyn thought again about the poem she found, wondering if she should share that revelation with Isabel. She didn’t want to tarnish her friend’s view of Barb.

  “Does she want you to be more of an activist, shout out your gay pride?”

  Robyn laughed, appreciating her friend’s humor. “No. The parade makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t get why anyone feels the need to get out there and march or make any kind of announcement about it.”

  “Is it really necessary in Arcata? I thought all the ladies in this town were into each other. Lesbian beer, lesbian mayor, lesbian president for your college. Isn’t everyone lesbian?”

  “And Craig let you visit all by yourself.”

  Isabel glared at her friend. “I am just trying to understand. You never say one thing about the two of you not working, and all of a sudden, what? You are going to split? Have the two of you talked about that?”

  They’d talked about it before Robyn had offered to stop asking Barb if she wanted to have sex. Barb had fallen apart, sobbing, arguing with Robyn about how a relationship was so much more than sex. She’d said she didn’t know what she would do without Robyn. “We haven’t talked about it lately.”

  “So why do you think you do not work anymore? What changed?”

  Robyn had to tell her about the poem, she realized. “She’s invested her energy in someone else. I thought that we were developing other friendships to strengthen ourselves, to have more to give to each other, but then I found a poem she received from one of her friends.”

  “And it was not innocent.”

  “That’s the thing. It could have been. From the contents, I got that one evening, instead of saying ‘take off your shoes,’ he said ‘take off your clothes.’ He was exploring the powerful emotional connection two friends can have.”

  “He.”

  “He,” Robyn confirmed.

  “Dios mío. I must read this poem. Where is it?�
� Isabel asked.

  “Are you kidding? I didn’t keep it. I left it on her desk. On top,” Robyn said.

  “So she knows you read it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not evidence that she’s having an affair.”

  “So she doesn’t understand pride parade because she is not gay? She has been with you what, eight years? And she has not figured it out yet? Did you two go to a counselor?”

  “I tried,” Robyn said. “She picked the first therapist, some hippie-dippie ‘push your hand against mine, and I’ll tell you what’s wrong’ lady.”

  “Hand pressure?” Isabel repeated skeptically.

  “She had this theory that as she asked questions, she could tell what was going on with you by the amount of pressure you offered. She was horribly expensive—she didn’t take insurance—and I didn’t feel like she actually had any useful strategies for us to change how we were. I found this other guy who we saw a few times. He got right to the problems with intimacy that we were having and gave us stuff to work on.”

  “Barbara didn’t like him?”

  “She said that he was homophobic and that the homework he gave proved that he was just trying to break us up.”

  “Serio? Did you try anything else?”

  “I went to that guy by myself for a while, but I didn’t feel like I was the one who needed to be there. I don’t want you to think this is all Barb, but it didn’t feel productive going to therapy to hear what I already knew. If she’s not gay, we shouldn’t be together, but she’s the only one who knows whether she is or not.”

  “Mija, you deserve better than this.”

  “I’m forty-three, Isabel. Who dates in their forties?”

  “Plenty of people. You are not dead. You pushed a—how many pounds was that stump, anyway?”

  “Six, eight hundred pounds, maybe.”

  “You pushed an eight-hundred-pound stump across a beach today. This is nowhere close to over the hill.”

  Robyn laughed, appreciating that her friend automatically took the higher number. By the time she got home, she’d be telling her boys that she’d rolled a thousand-pound stump across the beach while Robyn ate bonbons. She laughed harder than called for and felt tears form. That was all it took to open a floodgate that fell freely into the hot tub. She buried her face in her arm. Isabel laid a hand on her shaking shoulders to comfort her.

  “So you split up. You find someone who wants to ravish you so much you have to turn her down once in a while. What keeps you with Barbara?”

  “I don’t even know where to start. I don’t want to give my parents any reason to say ‘I told you so.’ And all of our stuff is mixed together. What do we do about the bank accounts, the credit cards? I get so overwhelmed, I just hole up in my shop and turn bowl after bowl.”

  “You cannot stay together for stuff or for accounts. If it is that bad, I can fly back down and help you sort. I can do that.”

  “You’re good to me.”

  “You are my oldest friend in the world. Forty-three. You really are old, you know?”

  “Only four months older than you.”

  “Still, you will always be older.”

  Robyn rested her forehead on Isabel’s shoulder enjoying the laughter she brought to her life. Then she sobered. “I don’t want to disappoint you,” she whispered.

  “I only want for you to be happy. If you and Barbara do not make each other happy, the disappointment is going to come from you torturing yourself by staying in a dead relationship.”

  “So you’ll break it to everyone?” she asked hopefully.

  “Sure. I think that’s in the duties of the best friend, way down in the fine print that nobody ever reads.”

  “You’ll start with Barb?”

  “You’re on your own with that, mija,” Isabel laughed. “Get me out of this tub and show me your new creations. Let’s see if misery has sharpened your genius.”

  Chapter Six

  Trust

  Talking to Isabel made Robyn acutely aware of how few friends she had. She socialized with Barb but never completely felt like she belonged. In the days after Isabel flew back home, instead of shrinking back into her shell, Robyn timed her afternoon horse feeding to coincide with Kristine’s, enjoying their easy conversation. They had been on a few more trail rides, but mostly Kristine turned Bean out in the exercise ring while she mucked out his stall, brought him back for a quick brush and apologized for not having time to ride. Her life seemed full to the brim with a lot to juggle in a tight schedule.

  A smile jumped to Robyn’s face when she heard Caemon’s voice ringing in the aisle. Since it was a weekday, she hadn’t expected him to be with Kristine.

  “Please I ride with you? Mama say Bean like the forest,” he pleaded.

  “I know you’re a big boy,” Kristine said, “but it’s too dangerous to take Bean on the trail. You can ride him to the turn-out corral, okay?”

  “This is a treat,” Robyn said, squatting so she was eye level with Caemon. “I don’t usually get to see you.”

  “Mommy needs a nap today,” Caemon supplied happily.

  “Someone isn’t sleeping well all of a sudden,” Kristine said, tipping her head in Caemon’s direction. Her tired eyes supplied evidence that both moms were suffering from lack of sleep.

  “You look like you could use a nap too,” Robyn said.

  Kristine laughed. “Back when I was riding trails in Mammoth, before Gloria and I met, I could nap in the saddle. Sometimes it’s tough to not miss those days.”

  “Up,” Caemon said, extending his arms. He burrowed his head into Kristine’s chest, eyes sparkling and lips hinting a smile.

  “Looks like someone knows how to make up for it, though.”

  Kristine buried her face in her boy’s hair, drinking him in. When she tipped her head to rest her cheek against his crown, her posture relaxed, and Robyn envied the synergy between them, the absolute and unquestionable love. She and Barb had breathed in each other like that once, but love between partners wasn’t the same. The tensions between them had drained her emotionally, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had been able to turn to her to draw any comfort.

  “Last time we talked, you said you were a fan of tractors,” Robyn said to Caemon. “I go to estate sales all the time, and you wouldn’t believe what I saw yesterday.”

  “What?” he said, the question punctuated as his body shot straight up, jarring Kristine.

  “A John Deere tractor.”

  “An excavator?” he shouted.

  Robyn scratched her head. “I don’t know. Do excavators have a wagon on the back?”

  Caemon looked at his mom. She shook her head. He crinkled his brow as if he was searching his database of tractors. “No. Excavator has a bucket.”

  “Maybe you could tell me what kind it is,” Robyn said, slipping out of the stall. Kristine tipped her chin in question, so she whispered, “I hope it’s okay I picked something up for him.”

  She opened the door to her tack shed, blocking their view of the child’s tractor that pedaled like a tricycle. Caemon and Kristine wore identical expressions of wide-eyed wonder that lit up in unison when she pushed the tractor out into the aisle. Caemon squirmed down from Kristine’s arms. “Please I ride?” he asked his mom.

  “You’ll have to ask Robyn.”

  “You bet. I got it for you, so you can help me muck out my stall.”

  His gaze shot between the two adults.

  “Go ahead,” Kristine said, guiding Caemon to the small tractor’s seat. He fit perfectly and with a small nudge was able to start pedaling, slowly making his way down the center of the aisle.

  “I hope it’s okay,” Robyn said. “I was going to check with you today, but then you had him, and I couldn’t resist.”

  “It’s amazing. Look at him. He’s in heaven right now. You have to let me pay for it.”

  Robyn shook her head. She couldn’t explain the impulse to buy the tractor after the brief exchange she’d had w
ith the boy, but seeing him leap off it to turn it around and pedal back to them with a grin that took over his face made her feel more alive than she’d felt in a long time. “I was serious about him helping me muck. I figure we can put some manure in that wagon, and we can see if we can make it out to the pile. I bet it would take long enough for a ride if you trust me.”

  “Robyn…”

  “I know you barely know me, but…”

  “No. It’s not that. It’s just…” Robyn was surprised to see tears forming in Kristine’s eyes. “You don’t know how much I need it.”

  “You want to see if you have permission?”

  “I think you sealed that with the tractor,” she said, squeezing Robyn’s shoulder before she jogged over to Caemon to talk to him.

  Robyn put her hand over the spot Kristine had touched, remembering how good it had felt when Isabel had put her arms around her. How had she missed noticing how long it had been since she’d had contact with another person? Kristine turned with a smile as big as Caemon’s, and they both gave a thumbs-up. The two looked like peas in a pod. “You don’t mind a little work?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “I working man.”

  “Okay,” Robyn said, winking at Kristine who slipped into Bean’s stall to saddle him up. Robyn guided Caemon back to Taj’s stall. She had him sit on the tractor while she put the mare in cross-ties, so they could work with the barn door open, scooping up piles of manure to put in his wagon. He started talking about different John Deere tractors and was completely immersed in his work when Kristine waved to Robyn, mouthing thank you as she slipped away.

  The half hour Kristine took to ride slipped by in a blink for Robyn. They only made one trip to the manure pile with the tractor because Caemon’s legs looked like jelly on the way back, but he was happy to play on the tractor while Robyn filled the wheelbarrow. When it was full, he insisted that his mom always let him ride on top of the muck in the wheelbarrow after she put a tarp on. Since he was able to supply the tarp from their tack room, Robyn obliged, and they continued working happily together.