Maybe, to salvage what remains of their friendship, she has to shut her out of her life. Not permanently, but for a while, to save Rachel from being further hurt. When her life is back on track, she’ll try to recover this friendship. So she does something that scares the hell out of her. And what she realizes is that she’s done this before in her life. Getting scared, making instant decisions, doing a double take at herself.
“Listen,” she says, before she can change her mind. “Please don’t come back. You’re not a part of this.”
Sara Beth feels like some sort of an arrow slung from the great heaving bow of her life. She has to move Rachel out of the way until she straightens things out. Hopefully, over a huge pot of coffee some day she can’t even fathom yet, she’ll be able to explain this all. Because incredibly, she feels more like a new person, the right person, the more she follows her heart. So Tom can’t know about this carriage house just yet, the risk being he might stop her somehow. And this friendship can not be a bitter consequence.
Sara Beth’s heart almost breaks with Rachel’s quick breath then. That one breath holds a possibility of saying I’m sorry, somehow. Let’s fix this once and for all.
“Sara.”
“No. Rachel.” This is the hardest thing she will ever in her livelong life say to her best friend, to save their friendship in the long run. She glances up, praying first for a special some day, the kind you hope for, the kind when all the stars are aligned in your favor and magically grant a wish, hers being to find this friendship again. Because their whole life is mapped out in the constellations, in the sky, they always thought that, especially those summers at the beach. If you looked up long enough, you recognized something in the celestial life, something of yourself. Someday she hopes she can find this part of her life again, this Rachel part.
“Get out.”
Rachel moves to speak, then stops and turns, getting in her car and driving away.
And Sara Beth stands there, and what she’s hearing, echoing, are those words, Get out, as they come storming back into her life. She never dreamt she’d say them again, and doing so spins her back twenty years.
Maybe that was the mistake that landed her here today, one simple error in judgment that turned her away from her self. That ultimately cost her mother’s life. One little decision two decades ago, and her life did an about-face. She chose safety.
It was between Claude or Tom. She’d chosen wrong when she’d stood in her kitchen and told Claude to “Get out.”
Would it help to find that old constellation again? The one with Claude in it?
She goes back in the carriage house, drawn in by the leather journal.
Where are you Mom? I really need you right now. Because I’m not sure if I’m doing this right. Any of it. How can I be, if it feels like the carriage house just cost me Rachel? This would’ve been so much easier with you here. Okay listen, I don’t know if it’s possible, but can you at least send me a sign, somehow? Please?
Chapter Fourteen
Some people say that white is not a color, it’s simply the absence of color. Sara Beth disagrees. She loves white because it is the color of beginnings. A clean palette. And the next week, she’s ready to Feng Shui it into her living room because what better room to shift the energy in her living.
The idea to focus on the energy of her home came at the same time she won the bid on the Sotheby’s antique. After lifting the carefully packed white hued snake leg candlestand from its box, she decided to keep it in her home until she had her own antique shop. It felt right, and so she finally had a little of this: A white antique, a new beginning, circa 1765.
You always loved red, Mom. Burgundy window treatments, throws, a velvet chair. Bold and daring and passionate. So I’m going to Feng Shui it into my “Living” Room.
And a can of deep red paint came into her life to cover one living room wall.
“Mom?” Kat asks, walking into the newly painted room.
“Hey there, Kat. Do you like it?” Sara Beth steps back to admire the wall.
“I guess. But red?”
“Yes. I’m doing a little Feng Shui. You know, changing the energy in our home. I like the red. Fire! Passion! Don’t you feel it?”
Kat drops into the wingback chair and studies the wall. “It needs something.”
“And I have just the thing!” Sara Beth sets the white candlestand at the north corner of the wall. “An accent piece. White, for clarity and balance. We’ll put a vase of flowers on it.”
“Do they have to be a certain color too?”
“I guess they would now. Want to help me? We’ll buy silk flowers and make a big spray.”
“What colors can we buy?”
“Well, it’s the north wall, so a color that works in the north. According to the Feng Shui chart, that would be Earth colors, yellows and beiges. Maybe sprigs of forsythia? That would be really pretty, and the earth colors nourish our relationships.”
“How about a color for money? Like green?” Tom asks as he walks into the room holding a piece of mail. “Something to nourish the bank account.”
“What do you mean?”
“To cover this five thousand plus charge to Sotheby’s, dated during your Manhattan escapade. And you can explain what you’re doing in my house, and this red wall while you’re at it.”
“It’s Feng Shui,” Kat says, curled in the upholstered chair, mesmerized by the new color.
“Feng what?” Tom asks.
“I’m just changing things around, Tom,” Sara Bath says. “It’s no big deal.”
“Five thousand is a big deal. And so is your being here redecorating. You’re supposed to call first and clear it with me.”
“I did call. No one was home. And come on, Tom.” She moves closer to him and whispers, “This separation isn’t forever.” When he stares at her, she continues, “Or is it?”
“Dad,” Kat says, and Sara Beth turns. She hears the anxiety in her voice, the worry about her parents splitting up. Kat the peacemaker. “Want to come with us to buy flowers?”
“Flowers for what?”
“For that table. The white one.”
Tom looks at the white painted snake foot candlestand, then at Sara Beth. “Sotheby’s?”
Rachel didn’t know how else to reach out to Sara Beth and thought planting the flower barrels on The Green would be her olive branch. Get out or not, she got the job done regardless with a few other friends, beneath the warm June sun. Life always has a funny way of filling up Rachel’s days.
But now those two words still ring. Get out. Last week’s flower planting without her friend feels like a farewell. Today she’s alone instead of patching up a broken friendship. Absence becomes a piece of her heart, a real concrete absence in place of her friend and daughter on this Wednesday morning with the sun streaming and the flowers in bloom. But fresh from the shower, when she steps into her sunroom and tunes in Stevie Nicks on the stereo, doesn’t life go and give her what she needs when the doorbell rings? Life calling. For Rachel DeMartino.
“Holy cow,” she says with a smile as she opens the front door. It’s early, just after nine o’clock.
“Hi,” Michael says on the other side of the screen, a cellophane-wrapped grocery store bouquet in his hand. She hasn’t seen him since their New York weekend and his presence now is huge. She crosses her arms in front of her. “Hey stranger,” she says through the ear-to-ear grin that life just delivered.
“Hey. Do you want to go to the beach?” Michael asks. “Maybe? With me?”
He wears a Yankees cap backwards, aviator sunglasses, plain dark t-shirt and khaki cargo shorts. Okay, she can’t help it and eyes the length of his body. He has on Docksiders, with no socks.
“Is this a date?” she asks through squinted eyes, so glad she changed out of her robe and into capris and a tank top with a light cardigan.
“Could be. If you’d invite me in.”
“Did you drive all the way from New York?” She swings ope
n the screen door and sees his pickup truck parked on the street.
“I did,” he says. He pulls off his cap and hands her the flowers. “For you.”
“Come on in.” She is still smiling and has a funny feeling that she’ll be smiling all day. Half way to the kitchen, she turns, reaches up to his face and kisses him. “I can’t believe you drove all the way here. It is so good to see you.”
“You too,” he says, taking off his sunglasses.
“How did you find my house? And, wait a minute, how did you know I’d be free today?”
“I MapQuested you.” Michael stands near the kitchen counter while she fills a vase with water. “And I knew you wouldn’t be busy. Well, prayed was more like it.”
Over the sink, slats of sunlight stream in the kitchen window through its white half-shutters. She looks over her shoulder to see if the nerves and prayers that got him to Connecticut show. Not really, except that he fidgets with his cap. She sets the flowers in the vase and motions for him to take a seat. The table is small and square, a country table with a white tile top and golden pine trim. French doors open to the sunporch behind him.
“You knew I wouldn’t be busy?” She places the vase on the table and sits across from him. “Am I that predictable?”
“No. It’s just that today is the day of the eleventh commandment.”
“I can’t wait to hear this.”
“Wasn’t it on your teaching certificate? All teachers shall spend the first Wednesday of summer vacation at the beach, at the water’s edge.”
School let out Monday. “I am on summer vacation, aren’t I?” She wriggles her bare toes beneath the table. “You really want to go to the beach?”
“That’s why I’m here. Do you want to come with me? I mean, I just assumed, maybe.”
“Let me get changed and pack a bag.” She stands and starts out of the kitchen. “But can I make you a coffee first?” she asks, turning suddenly back and catching him dabbing a napkin on his forehead. “Or would you like some juice?”
Michael shakes his head no.
“We’ll stop on the way and get something?”
“Sounds good, Rachel.” He sits back in the chair looking a little relieved.
“Awesome.” She stares curiously at him again. “Is this for real? You drove all the way from New York to do this? Aren’t you tired?”
“Time’s wasting.”
“Let me drive to the beach then?”
“Fair enough.”
She hurries from the kitchen still smiling, thinking Yippee! Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, it’s a perfect word.
Michael stands and stretches his legs, stiff from two hours in the truck. His shoulders are tense too and he rolls out a kink. Each darn love song on the radio made him wonder if he was making a mistake, if Rachel would be glad to see him, if his feelings were exaggerated by her absence. Until he finally switched to an all-news station. Now a month of time stands between them. He rolls his shoulders and picks a ripe peach from the fruit bowl on the counter.
Music comes from the sunporch and he bites into the peach and wanders out there. Tall windows let in sunlight warming upholstered furniture and hardwood floors. Hand-painted wooden herons stand in the far corner beside spiky cattails spilling from a large clay floor vase. Soft music rises from a shelf system on a built-in bookcase where pale pink conch shells nestle among books.
The room is so intriguing, he backs right into an antique easel, its dark oak frame holding a large blank paper in place. He catches it before it falls over, but not before a case of drawing charcoals slide from the lower tray. When he sets them back in the case, the back wall has him do a double take.
Sketches mounted in silvery-gray wooden frames fill the space. Most are pencil on paper, some charcoal, and a few are pastel. He studies them, biting into the peach as he goes.
A couple of sketches portray a man at two different times in his life, a man who must be Carl. He’s a little older than Rachel and he sees respect in her pencil lines. There’s a sketch of a young girl with long, fine hair, and he touches the glass of the frame lightly. From the tender gaze caught in the artist’s charcoal strokes, this can only be Rachel’s daughter.
The next portrait is Sara Beth. But not the woman he saw in New York. This shows Rachel’s personal description of her, the gentleness, in the rendering and in the artist’s touch.
There are other sketches, too, filled with incredible background detail and colors. There are stone jetties and sunset scenes drawn with such a fine touch, the medium seems to be pastel, though it is pencil. He sees hot afternoons when beach umbrellas line the shoreline like a row of swirling lollipops, and dark windy days drawn in a thousand shades of gray. Seagulls perch on weathered pilings. Rachel’s pencils find the softness in marsh grasses and swans and neglected wooden rowboats, contrasting with the straight lines of her summer home’s imposing two stories, its large old windows opened to the sea, and salty breezes, and seagull cries.
This is her heaven.
Rachel breezes into the room carrying a large canvas tote.
“You’re very talented,” Michael says, turning to study the artist. She changed into black Bermuda shorts, a white tank top, flat leather sandals. Her hair is French braided in an artist side he didn’t see in New York.
“Oh, my sketches. They’re a hobby of mine.” She glances at her work.
“You could make money with your talent. Or teach art instead of fifth grade.”
“It wouldn’t be the same then,” she says, straightening a frame. “Having to do it, you know?”
“Couldn’t you get used to it? Making a living doing what you love?”
“I am,” she says. “With my job, I’ve got two empty months in front of me to spend as much time as I’d like,” she pauses as she studies her pictures, “here.” She points to the row of colorful beach umbrellas. “I don’t go as much as I used to, but I’ve got this room at home when I’m not there.”
“It’s a great space.” The large windows open onto a green lawn where a stone birdbath is tucked into a rock garden and a birdhouse hangs from the low branches of an old maple tree. Rows of baby tomato plants fill a vegetable garden off to the side, away from the cool shade of the trees.
“After I sold my share of the cottage, I used the money to build this room. My beach room.”
He turns back to the wall of sketches. Their frames are a blend of grays and browns, driftwood from the beach.
Rachel picks up her tote. “I’ve got sand chairs and an umbrella in the garage. It’ll be hot in the sun. Ready?”
On the way out of the sunroom, she reaches for one of her sketch pads and tucks it into her canvas striped tote the way a photographer might grab a camera, or a writer a notebook.
“You have everything you need? Keys, sunblock?” he asks her in the garage.
“I do.”
“And you locked up the front door?”
She looks at him for a second, pausing before nodding and picking up the umbrella.
“Show me around a little,” Michael says once they’re in her hybrid.
“Do you mind walking?” she asks as she drives through Addison.
“No. Walking’s fine.”
She parks in a spot on Main Street in front of a Smith’s Hardware. The summer day is light on traffic and getting warmer as the sun moves high in the sky. He lets it slow him, this easy day outside of the city, walking past the potted flowers at the nursery, looking into the windows of a five and dime.
At the coffee shop, as they wait at the counter for their order, she points out an important landmark. “That’s our table.”
He considers the empty table beside a large window facing The Green. “Yours and Sara Beth’s?”
“If possession is nine tenths of the law, we should own that table.”
They take their coffees outside and walk across the street. Rachel explains the eclectic barrels of flowers dotting The Green. “Anyone can adopt a barrel and plant their ch
oice of flowers. It can get pretty artsy.” She points out her barrels of zinnias among the snapdragons and black-eyed Susans and roses even, mixed with ornamental vines and spikes.
“Sarah and I’ve adopted barrels every year except this one. Some other friends helped me out this time.” They walk among the flowers. “She loves this Green. It’s as pretty as it is because of her volunteering.”
Colorful birdhouses hang from trees. The American flag flies from a tall white pole. Even the litter baskets are placed within wood slatted containers. There are no visual sore spots. They stop at a stone wishing fountain.
“Does this have the same potency as the stars?”
The spewing water reaches for the sky and falls in an arch of infinite silver droplets, like tiny falling stars. “I like to think so.”
He slips a penny into her hand. “You first.”
Rachel clasps the penny to her heart and closes her eyes, then tosses it into the stream of stars. “What about you?” she asks when he continues walking.
“I’m saving mine for later.”
“Later? What do you mean? At the beach?”
“Never question wishes.”
Chapter Fifteen
He made her a flower chain necklace, his fingers weaving daisies and wildflowers and long green grasses together outside the horse stable at Chateau du Masnegre. It was a beautiful July day in Valojoulx, France, and her memory of it bears the soft, liquid qualities of a canvas painting: The brown stable with the brick red roof sitting nestled into a hilltop, the slant of sunlight falling on the sloping lawn, varying the shades of green, the wooden fence surrounding the corral, with peels of white paint curling from the wood.
Sara Beth sat in the cool grass and watched Claude’s hands weaving, very much aware of the sounds around them. Has anyone ever defined the sounds of love, she wondered. Birds sang from deep in the green trees, whose leaves rustled in the breeze. An occasional nicker came from the horses in the barn, and the sound of hoofsteps rose and fell as a lone horse cantered past. The sky, watercolored blue, was the big transparent bubble around that world.
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