The third time the bell jingled, it was him filling the doorway, smiling at me like we’d just seen each other, like I was as familiar as his own reflection, like we did this every day. What can I say? My heart soared. It literally soared, its wings beating on the inside of my chest. I stood up and let him hug me, let his strange familiarity engulf me. By the time I took my seat across from him, I knew I was in trouble and foolish to keep telling myself I wasn’t, an addict in denial.
He ordered coffee for me, and a few minutes later the waitress placed it on the table, the steam rising and heating my face. I wrapped my fingers around the mug but didn’t bring it to my lips. “So,” he said. “Tell me everything. Everything I missed about you.”
“Why don’t you tell me everything you missed about me?” I teased him. I was pretending to be confident when I was anything but. Fake it till you make it: That had been my motto for as long as I could remember. It had served me well.
He smiled and cocked his head as if he couldn’t figure out whether I meant it or not. There were little laugh lines around his eyes, and his hairline had moved slightly farther back, but other than that, I couldn’t find a single thing that had changed about him. I wondered if he saw the changes in me—the pooch of my belly where I’d had the girls, the angry 11s between my eyebrows that had come from too much worrying, the fact that my eyes weren’t the same vibrant blue they once were—more a washed-out denim color now.
“When we saw each other at the pool, I wondered if you’d remember me,” he said. “I mean, I thought you would, but there was this part of me that was afraid you’d moved on so completely that you didn’t.” He looked at me. “That I didn’t rank high enough to be worth remembering. A girl like you, I figured, has a lifetime of memorable loves. Who was I to think I’d be anything special?” He scratched at a mark on the table but gave up when he realized it was a stain. “So that’s what I remember about you. I remember how truly remarkable you were.” He looked up. “And how stupid I was to let you go.”
I looked back at him, unblinking. His words pinged around my body, finally settling in my heart, expanding there, filling me up with something that had been missing for a very long time. “You sure know how to say the right things,” I said. “You always did.”
“It’s not just words,” he argued.
“It’s all just words,” I countered.
He reached out and peeled my fingers from the mug I was clinging to, lacing them in his own. “When I lost you—” he began.
“You didn’t lose me. You let me go,” I said.
He looked down. “I know. I did. And I’ve regretted that decision for a long time.” He laughed. “I can’t believe I’m getting a chance to tell you that after all these years. It’s like I’m dreaming. The best dream ever.”
“Whenever we’d go to a restaurant or a place like this,” I said, gesturing to the shop, “I’d always have to sit facing the door, so I could see who was coming in. Mark teased me, said I was afraid of terrorists and stuff. And to be honest I never knew why I did it. But sitting here with you, I know that I was always watching the door, waiting for you to walk through. I guess somewhere deep inside I always hoped that we’d get to this moment. That one day the door would jingle and I’d look up and there you’d be, walking in with that smile on your face. And then my life could start again.”
He squeezed my hand. “And now it has.”
I nodded. “Now it has.” The door jingled, but I didn’t look up. I just kept staring into his eyes.
Days later, when I went to get the mail, I found a CD with my name on it waiting for me. My heart pounded as I opened the envelope and slid the shiny silver disk into my hand, a rainbow arc playing on the surface as I took in the handwriting I recognized from letters traded years ago. “Because I See You” it read. I held it for a moment, scanning the street to see if anyone was watching. And yet, as I walked inside, I was already wondering where I’d hide the CD. If Mark ever saw it, he’d know something was up.
I had to listen to it. The girls were outside playing with Ariel’s boys and—later—I had promised to go over and teach Ariel how to bake her own bread. But first, I would listen to what he had made for me. I imagined him downloading songs late at night, burning them onto the CD, his wife upstairs asleep in her bed unaware. He was thinking of me, searching for songs that reminded him of me.
The music filled the den as I sat down on the couch, Barry Manilow’s voice singing what to many would just be another cheesy love song. No one but him knew what that song meant. I marveled that he had remembered all these years later, that the memory hadn’t been punched through with the holes of time. I thought back to that morning when we had spoken on the phone, how our conversations were growing longer, more frequent. How lately when something happened instead of thinking, I can’t wait to tell Mark or I can’t wait to tell Laura, it was his face that flashed across my mind, his number I automatically dialed.
“I want to see you,” he’d said that morning. “How can we see each other for, like, more than an hour?”
“We could meet somewhere tomorrow night. I’ll tell Mark I’m having a girls’ night out with Ariel. He’ll believe that.”
“What about Ariel?” he’d asked. “How can you be sure she won’t drop by your house or he won’t see her in her backyard?”
“I’ll make sure she’s occupied. Don’t worry. I’ll figure something out.”
He exhaled loudly.
“What?” I asked. “Are you worried?”
“No, just impatient. I don’t want to wait. I think about you all the time. I can’t believe I got through all these years without you. Now that you’re in my life, I—”
There was silence on the phone as I waited for him to finish the sentence. I could hear both of us breathing. “You what?” I prompted.
“I don’t think I can ever go back to the way things were.”
“I know.” Upstairs the girls were jumping up and down, singing and giggling. It sounded like they were coming through the floor. “I know.”
“I keep thinking,” he went on, “that this was supposed to happen. I mean, out of all the neighborhoods in all the cities we could’ve ended up, we ended up being neighbors. What are the odds for something like that? It’s got to be a sign, right?”
“A sign of what?” I asked. I needed to hear his answer.
“That we’re supposed to be together,” he said. There was silence as we both processed what he’d just said. I didn’t know what to say in response. That I thought the same but that it scared me to death? That the one thing I’d always fantasized about happening was happening to me? That I had never stopped loving him, only pushed the pause button?
“Are you there?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m here. I’m just … confused. There’s so much that would have to happen. You have Betsy and the kids, I have Mark and my kids. We have homes and bills and legal obligations. Not to mention morals.”
“And yet here we are getting this amazing second chance. Do you see that we also have an obligation to us?”
“I see that. I do.” I thought of the verses in the Bible that talk about divorce and adultery. I thought about Erica and how the women in the neighborhood talked about her, how they shunned her. I had even encouraged them to shun her for reasons I didn’t want to think about. Did I want to be an Erica? Was I willing to sacrifice my position—my reputation—for another chance with Tom? My heart sang back its answer: Yes, yes, yes.
Chapter 11
Ariel
Justine and I sat down and had a cup of tea while the bread rose, and I couldn’t help but wonder what Erica would’ve said if she’d happened upon our cozy little scene. And yet, I was having a lovely time. We had mixed up the dough together with a lot of little helpers. The girls’ camp was over, so Justine brought them over for her lesson in bread making,
just another of her many talents. Cameron insisted on doing everything we did, so we ended up with two large bowls of bread rising on the counter. The kids sat clustered around my island, staring at the dishcloth-covered bowls. “Dylan,” I said, scolding him with a grin on my face, “don’t take the cover off. Why don’t you go outside and play and then we’ll have lunch?”
“It’s too hot,” the kids all whined in unison. The five of them were fast becoming friends. The gate between our houses was hardly ever shut anymore, but Justine had learned to keep her fence bolted so Lucky was at least contained in our yards. I ushered the kids outside, promising them it was only for a few minutes.
Justine walked over to the bread and pulled back the dishcloth. “I think it’s ready,” she said, heaving the mass out of the bowl and onto the floured countertop. I watched her arm muscles ripple as she kneaded determinedly. “You know,” she said as she worked and I watched, “you should come out with us for a girls’ night out sometime soon.”
A girls’ night out sounded like just what I needed. “Sure,” I responded, not even bothering to mask my eagerness.
“I think we’re going out tomorrow night,” she said, staring down at the bread dough.
“Okay,” I said. A reminder of David earlier this morning standing beside the bed in the first light of morning, leaning over to kiss me good-bye, suitcase in hand, flashed through my mind. “Oh. Never mind. I can’t.”
She looked up at me. “Why not?”
“David’s out of town,” I said.
“Oh, too bad,” she said. She looked genuinely disappointed. I couldn’t imagine she was more than I was.
Donovan walked in from the deck. “Hey, Mom, where do we keep the umbrellas?”
“Umbrellas do not make good parachutes, Donovan. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a million times, you are not to jump off the roof.” He sighed deeply and returned to the deck to report that he had been unsuccessful in his mission.
I caught the look on Justine’s face. It was a look that said she had never experienced such a request from Cameron or Caroline. I smiled at her. “See why I need a girls’ night out?” I quipped.
“I guess you could never describe your life as dull,” she said, studying the boys from the window like a scientist might study a rare breed of animal.
“When Donovan was about a year old, I took him to the park one beautiful day. I was pushing him in the swing when a little boy who was probably about four got on the swing next to us. His mom was pushing him, and with every truck that drove by, he would ask her what kind of truck it was. ‘That’s an earthmover,’ she would say. Or, ‘That’s a cherry picker.’ All these pieces of machinery I had never heard of or cared about. I stood there and pushed Donovan as long as he could stand it, just listening to this woman talk to her son in what was, to me, a foreign language.”
I paused and smiled at Justine. “I went home that night and cried to David that God had made a mistake, that I couldn’t be the mother of a boy because I didn’t know any of the names of big rigs. The next day David brought home a book for Donovan with all these pictures of heavy equipment with the names under them. He handed it to me and said, ‘You’ll figure it out. God didn’t make a mistake.’ And I did figure it out.” I looked out at my boys. “Now I could give that mom a run for her money. Show me any piece of construction equipment, and I can tell you the name and what it does.” I giggled. “But I couldn’t tell you where that book is anymore. We wore it out.”
“David sounds like a great guy,” she said. “A great dad.”
“He is,” I said. “I miss him being around more. It’s hard.”
Justine shaped the bread into loaves and placed them in the greased baking pans. I watched with the same form of respect I once held for that mother in the park. Could it be that easy? Could I learn how to be her the same way I had learned to be that mom?
After Justine and the girls left to go home and whip up what was sure to be a gourmet three-course dinner for Mark, I decided to tackle the laundry while the boys vegged in front of a movie. I was untangling balled-up socks and separating whites and colors when my hand fell on the capris I had worn to the mothers’ group meeting. I felt the crinkly feel of paper under my fingertips as my hand grazed the back pocket. Suddenly I remembered Heather, the babysitter. I pulled the card from the pants, thankful I hadn’t washed it. Score one for not being on top of the laundry. Grabbing the phone in the kitchen, I hastily dialed the number.
“Hello?” a female voice said.
“Hi? May I speak to Heather?” I said.
“This is Heather.” She giggled. “This is my cell phone so I am pretty much the only person who answers.”
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t ready for a child of mine to be armed with a cell phone. “This is Ariel Baxter, the one with the three boys? And, well, I was wondering if you could sit tomorrow night? My husband’s out of town and a friend of mine—well, actually she’s my neighbor. I mean, I haven’t known her long enough to call her a friend yet. I mean, friend is a strong word. Oh. You might know her. Justine Miller? She led the mothers’ group? Where I met you?” I sounded like a raving lunatic.
“Yes, ma’am,” she replied. She sounded more adult than I did.
“Oh, great. Well, we live behind her. You know the house with the gate that connects to their yard?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she replied. “I can walk to your house, actually.”
This just kept getting better. “So you can do it? I mean, tomorrow night? You can sit?”
I heard her flipping through pages, checking her calendar. “Umm. Sure. What time?”
Justine hadn’t told me a time because I had told her no so fast. “Let’s say six?”
“Yeah, I can do it then for sure.”
“Great! Thanks, Heather. You’re a lifesaver. My husband travels a lot and it gets lonely here with just the boys for company. I could really use a girls’ night out.”
“Sure, no problem,” Heather said, humoring me.
“Okay, well, I will see you tomorrow night.” I made myself stop babbling to a teenager who neither knew nor cared about my need for adult interaction and hung up the phone, victorious. I kissed the business card and held it aloft. It was the golden ticket to a night of freedom.
I dialed Justine’s number first thing the next morning, bursting with the news that I would be joining her and the girls from the neighborhood. “I got a sitter!” I said as soon as she said hello.
“Ariel?” she asked.
“Yes. I got a sitter,” I repeated, a little embarrassed that I assumed she’d know who I was. “Heather Davidson? The sitter from mothers’ group? I met her last week and forgot all about it, but after you left yesterday, I remembered. So I called her and she could do it. Isn’t that great?”
“Oh,” was all she said.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, willing there not to be anything wrong and the sensation I felt crawling up the back of my neck to be nothing more than prickly heat.
“Well, I hate to say this but we … well … we had a change of plans so we’re not going.”
I felt the air leave my lungs and sat down with a heavy thud at the kitchen table. Pressing the heel of my hand to my forehead I chastised myself for getting so worked up over a stupid girls’ night out with women I barely knew. And yet, isn’t this what I imagined when I dreamed of moving to this neighborhood? Togetherness? Friendships? Community? I was this close. “Oh,” was all I could say.
“Hey, we’ll do it again, though,” she said. “And I will give you plenty of notice when we do so you can get Heather if David’s out of town. How does that sound?” She sounded as though she was talking to a child. A silly, petulant child.
“Okay. Yeah, sure. That sounds great.” I willed myself to sound perky, like her.
Donovan came in the ki
tchen and opened the refrigerator. “I’m hungry,” he whined, his voice nails on a chalkboard, the soundtrack to a long day stretching in front of me.
I waved my arm at him to close the refrigerator door and pointed toward the den where he came from. “Go,” I mouthed. He rolled his eyes and left with a deep sigh.
“Well … maybe you should keep Heather?” she said. “Nothing says you have to have a reason to leave. I am sure David wouldn’t care if you hired a sitter for a break when you needed one.”
“I couldn’t justify that,” I argued.
She laughed as though I had much to learn. “Has he had to justify leaving you for days on end with those boys, trapped in the house with no outlets?”
“Umm. No,” I said, suddenly feeling angry with David. Why did I need to justify spending some money for a break I deserved? Justine was right. “I guess I could just go to a bookstore,” I offered, halfway hoping she would say she wanted to go with me.
“Exactly,” she said. “Invest some time in yourself. Get a pedicure. Eat a salad. Go for a walk. See a movie. You don’t need me or any girls’ night to do that.”
I pictured myself all alone in a movie theater, something I had never done. I wanted to tell her that I did actually need her to do that. “Oh, of course,” I said, trying to sound more positive about her suggestion than I felt. “That’s a great idea. I’ll do it.” I did not think that I would, but I wanted her to believe I was the kind of confident woman who could do such things.
“Good for you,” she said in a singsong voice. I heard one of her girls’ crying go from faint to loud. “Listen, Cameron cut herself with scissors so I better go tend to her. You have fun tonight.” The line went dead before I could say good-bye.
I set the phone down in the base and stood still, staring over at Justine’s house through the kitchen window. I looked back down at the phone and willed it to ring, to be her saying she had worked it out after all. I didn’t want to go out by myself. I didn’t want to be the loser having dinner alone with just a book for company. But apparently, that’s what I was.
She Makes It Look Easy Page 11