Whole Latte Life

by Joanne DeMaio

  “Sure. I’ll walk you out.” She wipes her hands on a dishtowel.

  Without saying goodbye, Sara Beth pushes quickly out the door to the front yard.

  “Hey,” Rachel says. “Slow down, and why the tears?”

  “I can’t believe how much I miss that.” She nods toward the house. “That easiness you have with them. Cooking food together, your great kitchen, the talking. The sweet flowers I don’t know anything about.”

  Rachel sits on the garden bench. “Those aren’t tears from missing a kitchen social. It’s not just me, is it?”

  “Not just.”

  Sara Beth sits beside her.

  “Do you want me to cancel the walk?”

  “That’s all right. I can’t do it now.”

  “Do what?”

  “Fix this. Me. Us.” She stands to leave. “We need more than that smoothie inside. We need a huge pot of coffee on a long voyage on that boat, with no interruptions. Like my kids, who are home alone for way too long now, like my long overdue grocery shopping that Tom’s supposed to do, like the business that I need to find a vacant store for and is stuck in some weird dream. And lasagnas and walking friends.” She runs a hand through her short hair. “Like my marriage on my mind. You get the picture.”

  “But we’ll start. Come on.”

  She wanted to come back to Addison after that Manhattan weekend and set her life on its intended course. But she owes Rachel more. She owes her all the baggage she dumped deep into the Hudson River that night on the Staten Island Ferry. She owes her an explanation for abandoning her.

  The folded newspaper is in her hand. “I had thought maybe…Well, your friends are waiting.” She shakes her head and squeezes Rachel’s hand before hurrying out to the car.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Rachel sits at the antique easel, sensing the wall of sketches behind her, a life displayed. She sketched Ashley shortly after Carl’s death. They needed each other intensely then, and it shows in the drawing’s affecting expression. She sketched her beach cottage the first summer there, when she couldn’t get enough of that heaven.

  Today her camera focused on kids twirling sparklers, babies looking out from porta-playpens, men tossing horseshoes and women talking and setting out food on The Green. Someone stuck little American flags in the flower barrels. Her camera captured what The Addison Weekly wanted on Independence Day. People want to see themselves happy.

  Now her pencil moves back and forth and it gets to the point where she no longer needs the Manhattan photograph to copy. It’s better sketching from feeling, trusting her heart to guide her hand.

  But it isn’t working. The varying skyline is set against the light of dusk. She reaches forward and touches the Empire State Building, needing to break through this block. If she stalls on a portrait, she visits with the subject. If it is a beach scene, she needs an afternoon by the water.

  It’s obvious what needs to be done. She packs the sketch and charcoals into a zippered portfolio. Tomorrow afternoon she’s supposed to meet Michael at the cottage. But a shiny cottage key tempts her. Anytime, he said. She needs to be closer to her subject. If she leaves now, it’s early enough to catch the last Cross Sound Ferry. She’ll sit on the deck and raise her face into the sea breeze as Long Island nears.

  Summer living is easy. It takes no time to pack a suitcase: Bermudas, t-shirts, capris, yes, her True Religions and a cardigan for the evenings, espadrilles and sandals. Last she tosses in the new Yankees cap she bought for Michael, a surprise day gift.

  The truck’s tires crunch on the stone driveway. It takes a second for Michael’s eyes to make out her black car in the shadows. He doesn’t get out of the pickup right away. Everything about the night has to gather together first. The darkness conceals the old cottage roof shingles and peeling paint. But it has strong lines, a bungalow with a peaked roof, a wide front porch with old lattice windows, all of it sitting on a stone foundation. The front porch light shines softly on the shelf of conch shells and gulls. It isn’t a bad little place; it only needs a sprucing up.

  He unlocks the front door and sets the bag of groceries, another flashlight and a package of window alarms on the kitchen counter. Rachel’s easy touch fills the room with murmurs telling secrets. Here! Look at this. A large glass vase, the color and texture of green sea glass, overflows with pale yellow heather and blades of tall thin marsh grass. Oh, and here, too! Beside it, on the kitchen table, lays the novel she began last week. The windows are opened, the white shutters folded back, the sense of the beach right outside. It’s always there now, that feeling of missing her, and this, her touch in the cottage, helps.

  While unpacking milk and eggs and seeing the lasagna in the freezer, he worries about her on the beach alone. What if someone follows her back? Or if she forgets to lock up? He takes two deep breaths, slowly exhaling. Exercise helps, too, his therapist told him. Serious exercise. Maybe he needs to start jogging. Or just come clean with the truth. His therapist said the more he talks about it, the better he’ll feel. Heading here straight from work still in uniform, he planned only to stock the refrigerator and open a window so the cottage would be ready for tomorrow. But this place has a way of changing plans. It’s like one of Rachel’s sketches, shading their lives right into its lines, its shadows. He steps outside, the screen door squeaking behind him. The sea air cooled at twilight.

  The walk to the beach takes minutes and he notices her as soon as he steps on the boardwalk, sitting in the far shadows. He notices, too, how she turns to watch. She knows from a distance it’s him. Maybe it’s the uniform discernible in the dim lighting, or the leather boots sounding foreign on the boardwalk, or his silhouette in shadow.

  “Hey you,” he says and sits beside her, slipping his arm around her shoulders as though they always meet on the boardwalk on midsummer nights.

  “Hey,” she answers, and he kisses her lightly before she comfortably leans into his body.

  For a moment, they only listen to the waves off in the dark. “You’re a pleasant surprise,” he tells her, his fingers touching her hair. She wears capris, a camisole and a cropped black cardigan to keep off the sea damp.

  She settles closer. “I couldn’t stay away.”

  “How was the drive? Okay?”

  “Fine. I caught the last ferry.”

  “I’m glad you came,” he says. “Want to walk?” The creaking boats, the waves lapping at the sand, the salt air, it all makes you want to be a part of it. He slips off his boots and they walk along the beach, he in uniform, she beach bum. His arm pulls her close and she moves along with his body, leaving him very much aware of where they touch and of where they don’t.

  “You’re making the summer very easy,” he tells her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Finding you here tonight? On the beach?” He stops near the water and turns to her in the dark. “I’ve got to tell you something.” He moves a strand of hair from her face, running his thumb over her cheek. It’s routine now, the way he checks. Sometimes it’s more a check for him than for any tears, touching her to believe she came all this way to see him. His thumb strokes her face back and forth. “Do you have any idea that I’m falling in love with you?” He bends then and kisses her a summer kiss, the kind that reaches somewhere inside and takes hold. His hands reach around her neck, pulling her even closer. When he feels her smile against his lips, it’s enough for him to say more. “You wanted to take the summer to enjoy the beach. And I am. Right here I need to wake up with you in my arms. When I saw your things in the cottage, I knew.”

  Rachel turns and sits in the sand, pulling her knees up close. He sits beside her and it’s all there, the moon and the stars and the sea, but not the kiss. “Talk to me,” he finally says, touching her face, tipping her chin toward him.

  She brushes his face with her fingers, running them behind his ear, touching his hair. But he can’t tell what the touch is. Is it I’m sorry? Or Not yet? Or Let’s slow down? He’s not sure if it’s a
touch that will torture him with its second thoughts.

  “I think about you all the time,” she says. “I think about your life and things you’ve told me. I guess that’s why I wanted to slow down here, at this cottage at the beach. I love you too.” And the whole time she talks, her hand is there, tracing his face, stroking his hair, and then it slips to his neck when she leans close and kisses him three kisses, each longer than the other.

  “Whoa, whoa,” he says when she starts to pull away after the third. “Where you going?” he asks with a slow grin. And he puts his arm around her shoulders and folds her into one more kiss before taking her hand and helping her to her feet to finish that walk they started along the beach.

  In the cottage, Rachel pours two glasses of wine. In her mind, she’s still in the beach kiss. It’s the kind you don’t forget because it’s a kiss and the sea breeze blowing wisps of hair across it and waves breaking at your feet that you step toward so the sea reaches your ankles and there’s a faraway lighthouse beam flashing like a shooting star in the night sky and it is the stars, twinkling but playing second stage to the low amber moon painting a swath of gold onto the sea, over the water, right to your feet where you stepped deeper into it and so you’re caught in a liquid moonbeam while you kiss. A beach kiss.

  They sit in the dark on the porch swing and Michael picks up her sketch. The light of the moon coming through the lattice windows illuminates the city drawing the way her mind had been trying to do. When he sets it down, he takes her face in his hands and kisses her so that there is only this moment. Really, if they never stopped, it would be enough, this life behind closed eyes, this stirring in her heart. But he pulls back and his thumb grazes her cheek in the dusky light of the porch. It’s sweet, how he checks. That’s part of love, too. Checking, he’d told her.

  “Come here,” he says, standing and leading her to the bedroom.

  Dappled moonlight falls across the bed. That’s what she notices: The way clouds and leafy treetops dapple the night’s light. She notices it until his fingers slip beneath her camisole’s lace strap and the sensation, his fingertips on her skin, brings her eyes to him. A little bit of that moonlight falls on his dark hair, almost like it followed them home from their beach walk, and she is glad for that. At how you can think of simple things and see wonder in them. He lies beside her, tracing his hand down her neck, along her collarbone, down to her hip.

  Giving her time. His way has grown so familiar, his way of slowing the most perfect moments. This is what he does now. His hand travels down the curve of her hip as she slowly unbuttons and slips off his shirt. But when she reaches for his shoulder, he tenses.

  “Rachel,” he says, pulling back.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He cups her hand in his, starts to say something, then stops. He sits up in the shadows and kisses her hand.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks. Love never comes unannounced, does it? As sweet and beautiful as it is, it’s really these collisions of hearts and intentions and feelings, and something else is coming with it now too. His change comes so suddenly, the way he recoils when she reaches for his shoulder. Something is there, something is in his way.

  Michael opens her hand, touches each fingertip and places her palm flat on the front of his left shoulder. “This. I want you to know about it first.”

  “You’re hurt.” In the shadows, her hand moves over his skin, feeling the scar tissue, the ragged hollow of missing flesh, healed over and since repaired. “What happened?” she asks with a concern that can’t fathom this man facing the horrific cause of this wound.

  “I’d been shot.”

  “Shot?”

  “I’m okay. It happened a long time ago. But you’ll feel it, you’ll see it.”

  “Tell me what happened.” Her hand touches his skin again, checking. She knows where the heart is, it’s so much of your life, in so many ways.

  “Not tonight, no. I’ll only tell you that I was lucky.”

  “Lucky,” she whispers. To have some monster gun unloaded into your chest. It must have done this to him, though. That injury, that affront, has him find the good. Lucky.

  He takes her hand and touches her fingers to his mouth. “Just know it’s there.”

  With his shoulder damaged, does he still hear the gunshot ring? Explode? She closes her eyes with the image of a bomb going off in his life. What else could it have sounded like? When his fingers touch her hair, her eyes open at the feeling.

  “I know everything you’re thinking about that bullet,” he says, then kisses her lightly. His arms cradle her shoulders, his hands frame her face. “Because believe me, I’ve thought it all too. But you know what I think now?”

  She touches his face, his eyes, and kisses his chin, his jaw, his mouth, before telling him no.

  “What I think,” he says, “is that it was a gift.” And he quickly puts a finger over her mouth, not letting her deny his words. “Shhh.” He shakes his head, no. “I’m not going to explain now because what I’m going to do, Rachel, is love you.”

  She smiles in the dark, hoping, praying, he can feel every bit of it as he kisses her lips a hundred light kisses.

  Moonlight fills in the shadows and she thinks it’s the same moonlight they kissed beneath on the beach. The night’s all about light and dark, how it shapes them and becomes them, how life, every day, is varying shades of both, some so black, some as light as the sun. The moonlight is a pale haze silhouetting his face. What he can’t see is how she lifts her hand behind him, open, and sweeps it through the misty light, closing her fist on it before bringing her hand back to his wounded shoulder, letting the moonbeam fill in his shadows.

  Michael talks softly in the dark, and she touches his lips with only her moonbeam fingertips until he strokes her hair, then moves over her and trails his mouth down the soft of her throat. Every touch has new meaning now.

  But his way of slowing time is never more sweet than it is this night. He takes her arms, one at a time, holding them up beside the pillow and kissing her lips lightly, almost barely. When her eyes close, it is his touch on her face that has her open them, meeting his gaze. “Hello sweetheart,” he says quietly, as though she’d gone somewhere in her pleasure and he just caught up, tracing his fingers along her jaw. Summer comes through the window in the glow of the moon, in the sea air touching their skin with July warmth, and it becomes a part of it all, a part of loving him, the way he leads her to hold every moment, every sensation that began with a kiss in the moonlight.

  Afterward she lies in his arms. “Are you okay?” Michael asks, his hand trailing up her arm. Now that he started, he can’t seem to stop touching her. And she knows just how to answer him, little by little, stretching out a moment.

  One slow, slow word at a time, she whispers “I love you,” each word separated by a lengthening kiss. Her lips feel his smile form in the dark and it is genuine enough, beautiful enough to be the sweetest moment of the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  At the carriage house, a George III library table becomes her desk, with an old brass lamp throwing light on her computer, paperwork happily askew. She connects the digital camera to her laptop and downloads photographs. They’re from earlier when a morning sunbeam fell through the carriage house window, catching mist and dust like stardust in its light. And it made her think of the stars and constellations, and the people and feelings and dreams spinning through her days, the constellation of her own enlightening forty-year-old universe. Now one little email will put her life out into cyber space, celestially reaching out.

  What she sees on the computer screen, the same way her mother would if she receives the email with the pasted-in photograph, is this: the shop of her dreams nearly true, laid carefully out—straight chairs there, end tables there, mirrors on the wall, an oak sleigh bed and chest of drawers—but all stuck in a dream, that sunshine a ray of hope lighting upon it all. Typing in a line beneath the picture, just one line, she tells her mother about life
being in a dream stage.

  And the sound that comes a short while later when she walks among her antiques, writing their provenance into a spiral pad, seems straight out of those dreams.

  Her email box chimes with incoming mail.

  She stops still, her pen aloft over the page, her heart pounding. Of course she knows it’s not her mother writing back. But a thought crosses her mind about the twilight zone-ness of it all. There’s something to be said about standing among furniture three hundred years old, in a hundred year old carriage house, being pulled back to the twenty first century through cyber space. She cautiously clicks open her mailbox.

  Subject: Antique Shop

  From: Melissa

  To: SaraBeth

  Date: July 5 at 9:03 AM

  sb, how’s it going? Hey, i came across this in the addison weekly online classifieds. i know you’re looking for a vacant storefront for your shop, but would you guys consider this? it looks pretty, but i’m not sure it would work. something to think about? maybe whoever buys the house would rent you the business addition. u could call the agent and put that out there. i attached the ad. take a look and let me know, okay?

  love, lissa

  Sara Beth opens the attachment, the first words there being Currier & Ives location. “Mmmh. I’ll take it,” she says, scanning the ad. Colonial Home. Impeccably restored with attention to detail. Crown moldings, arched doorways, stone fireplace. Spacious kitchen, dining room, family room. Four bedrooms, two and a half baths. Walk-in pantry. One acre landscaped.”