Winters Solace

by Magnolia Robbins

  The two of us get lost in conversation until Rocky brings us our spread of food. The smell is as delicious as I remember the last time I’d come here. My visits had trickled off since Katlynn had left town, but I still came on occasion.

  “God, it looks amazing,” Katlynn says as Rocky drops off our milkshakes. I watch her as she carefully unrolls her napkin and places it gently in her lap and then separates her fork, knife, and spoon on either side of her plate.

  “Enjoy, girls,” he smiles, tapping his hand on the table. The two of us stare in delight at the massive amount of food. Just as I’m about to dig into my burger, I watch Katlynn take a large fry and dip it into her shake.

  “Oh God, you still do that!” I look away as she engulfs it in one bite.

  “Don’t knock it till you try it,” she replies, dipping another fry and holding it out to me. I take it from her, and our fingers touch for just a moment. It sends a wave of electricity through me, even though it barely lasts. I taste the disgusting looking concoction and am surprised when it doesn’t turn out to be as terrible as I had anticipated.

  Katlynn looks pleased with herself when she notices my reaction. “See, not as bad as you thought?”

  “Not as bad as I thought,” I reply, smiling at her.

  Rocky brings us out each a slice of apple pie ala mode with a cup of coffee for dessert. “On the house,” he smiles, patting me on the back. We thank him, and as he walks away, Katlynn turns to me.

  “So, are you seeing anyone?” The question comes out of nowhere. I cough up a bit of the coffee I was drinking.

  “Sorry, that was probably rude of me to ask. I just noticed you weren’t wearing a ring, so I got curious.”

  My mind darts all over the place for a moment with that response. It takes me a minute to recover but I manage to answer. “Not for a while.” She looks at me curiously, and I find myself opening up more than I’d expected myself to.

  It had been five years since my mom had gotten diagnosed. I still remember the day perfectly when they’d told us she had heart complications. Complications she’d live with for the rest of her life. She was like a ticking time bomb. As a result, she had to step down from her job as manager of the Wellesley bank after forty years. She’d offered the job to me but the last thing I wanted was to be stuck in a corporate job my whole life.

  Cynthia and I had started dating shortly after Katlynn left for San Francisco. She was my world for nearly six years. When I told her I wanted to go to nursing school, at first she had been supportive. She understood my reasoning, given my mother’s diagnosis and my need for change. Once I’d started work, things changed. The stress got too great for her. She’d drifted and we couldn’t make it work anymore. I hadn’t been the same since.

  Katlynn stares at me for a long while thinking before she speaks. “Well I guess she really missed out then,” she replies, giving me a smile. I can’t help but smile at her back, her words sent a flutter through me.

  “What about you?” I nod towards the engagement ring on her finger.

  “Oh,” Katlynn says, fidgeting with it. She pulls it off and slides it into her pocket. “I’ve needed to take that off for ages.” I look at her curiously for a moment before she tells me about Tim and the affair. I sit in shock, unable to imagine a world where someone would cheat on a girl as sweet and wonderful as Katlynn Walker.

  The two of us sit quietly for a while, our messy lives intertwining. Finally, Katlynn raises her coffee cup to me. “To better days.” I can’t help but smile at her when she does. “To better days.”

  Somehow we manage to run our conversation until closing. It feels like no time at all. Katlynn stretches as she gets up from her seat. As we pay our bills, Rocky reminds us not to be strangers, and he is reassured that the two of us will definitely be back soon.

  “Are you sure I can’t offer you girls a ride home? It’s no trouble.”

  “I think we’ll be fine,” I tell him as I wrap my coat around me. I watch Katlynn slip into hers and can’t help but be entranced by the very elegant way it flows around her body. She makes it look like art. I have to shake myself free of her in fear I might be staring too long.

  “Are you ready?” Katlynn asks me. When I nod, I watch as she wraps her arm around mine. “Lead the way.” The way she had done it felt so natural and innocent. Yet it filled me with such an intense desire that I could hardly stand it. I take a deep breath and head out the door onto the sidewalk.

  Our conversations are endless. One leads to another, and another. Just when I think we can’t talk anymore, we reach Parker Street and the white picket fence that divides our houses. The two of us stand in front, facing one another. As Katlynn’s arm leaves mine, I long for it again.

  “I had a really great time,” she says to me, a giant smile spread across her face. She looks beautiful underneath the light of the streetlamps.

  “Me too,” I reply. The way she looks at me fills me up to the point I’m nearly overflowing. We stand there, staring at each other for the longest time before either of us speak.

  “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow?” Katlynn asks, leaning her body into the fence towards me. She draws so close I could almost feel her breath on my skin.

  “That would be nice,” I smile at her. The two of us stand there again briefly before she leans in the rest of the way and wraps her arms around my neck. My body feels as if it is melting into the ground when she touches me. I hug her back tightly for a moment.

  When she breaks from me and turns to walk away, my instincts kick in before my brain does. Suddenly all those years of silence and uncertainty fly out the window.

  “Katlynn..” I reach out for her wrist. When she turns back towards me, I push my body into hers and let our lips collide.

  Chapter 3

  Katlynn

  SHE TASTES DELICIOUS. Like leftover remnants of pie and ice cream and coffee. And for a moment I stand there and savor it. As if it was something I’d been waiting for my whole entire life. When she pulls away from me, I put my fingers to my lips, the sensation still lingering over them.

  Iris stares at me for a long moment before I lean into her again. I feel her hands wrap around my face and I sink into them as she pulls me to her mouth. We sit there, just tasting each other for a little while until she finally moves away.

  Fear washes over me at a rapid pace.

  I manage to speak. “I’ll see you later then?” Iris looks as panicked as I feel.

  “Goodnight,” Iris says to me, and I watch her out of the corner of my eye take off in a flash towards her house. When I’m alone, I breathe out softly, running my fingers over my lips again. It had been magical; unlike anything I’d ever felt before. And at the same time, it petrified me.

  That night I could hardly sleep. I rolled around in bed for the longest time, my mind replaying the day’s events over and over again. Finally, I sat up and fetched my phone from the nightstand. It read two thirty in the morning. Sarah would likely kill me, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Is everything okay?” She says half asleep when she answers.

  Even though I had woke her, Sarah listened to everything I had to say without interruption or judgment. She had always been good at that. I must have repeated myself over and over again a thousand times before I finally calmed down. When I finally came to a halt, I waited patiently for her to respond.

  “Wow,” she laughs into the phone, her voice clearer now that she’d woken up a bit. “That’s a hell of a lot of information for two in the morning, sister.”

  “Sorry,” I apologize, running my hand through my hair. It occurs to me that this is probably one of the first times I’d come to Sarah for advice in years. Usually, I had talked to Andrea. Now that it was no longer an option, I had relied on Sarah more and more. I’m sure she was still not used to what to say or how to comfort me.

  “Did you like it?” It was the strangest question she could have asked.

  “I think so, I mean. I don’t know. Maybe?�
� I sigh into the phone, sitting back down against the bed. “Everything with Tim is just so fresh. I mean, we just broke up a few months ago..”

  “Screw Tim, Katlynn,” Sarah says, and I’m surprised by her bluntness. “The guy didn’t deserve you from the start. He was a jerk who cheated on you.”

  “It’s Iris though,” I argue with her.

  “That’s exactly my point. It’s Iris. That girl was smitten with you the entire time you were together in college.”

  “Really?”

  “If you didn’t catch on to that, you’re helpless.” My sister laughs.

  “I really didn’t,” I reply, lying back into the bed. “What am I doing Sarah?”

  “I don’t know,” she admits. “But I suggest you start trying to figure it out.”

  The next morning I wake early, in spite of my lack of sleep. Somehow I manage to force my way down to the kitchen and pour a pot of coffee. While I argue with myself in my head about my lack of self-control when it came to work, I pull out my laptop and sift through emails and respond to some. I see an email from the engineering department talking about the latest rollout of a software package, and my heart stirs in my chest. It had been so long since I’d programmed. So long since I’d done something that I actually enjoyed doing.

  Suddenly I hear a loud sound from out front. I wander towards the doorway to peek outside. Iris is adorned in her scrubs and a coat shoveling my driveway of a few inches of snow that had accumulated during the night. She has a pair of headphones on, dancing around on the sidewalk as she worked. It was the most adorable thing I’d ever seen.

  As soon as I hang up the phone from checking my messages, I wrap myself in my coat and stuff my pajama laden legs into a pair of boots by the door. When I head outside, Iris lifts her head, and the two of us meet eyes. She removes her headphones and looks immediately embarrassed.

  “Did I wake you up?” She calls to me from the far end of the driveway.

  I shake my head. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I always do this,” she smiles. “Your sister leaves after me, and I already have to do mine anyway. She always takes my garbage out for me when I forget, so I figure it’s about even.”

  “Let me help you at least.” I wander over to the garage and dig around for a minute or two for the shovel. It’s buried under some other winter weather supplies. Once I manage to get it out, I drag it to the driveway behind me. “Geez, this thing is heavy.”

  I start a little ways up from where Iris is working and throw little scoops into a pile. It doesn’t take long before I am panting. When I look up, Iris is leaning on her shovel, smiling and shaking her head at me.

  “You’re doing it all wrong,” she notes.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m fine,” I reply, continuing to shovel. As I gather another pile, I feel my feet start to slide underneath me. Before I can stop it, my body flies backward onto the ground. Luckily there is a pile of snow behind me to catch my fall.

  I lay there for a moment, staring up at the sky until Iris’ face hovers above me. “Are you alright?” She offers me a gloved hand, and I take it graciously.

  “Never better,” I groan as manage to make it to my feet. “I’m getting too old to be falling like that.”

  “You’re not old,” Iris says, handing me back my shovel. “Just a little clumsy is all.”

  I give her a playful shove when she says this, and she laughs. Touching her again sends feelings through me I was not expecting. My head shakes the ideas away just as Iris begins to shovel again. She demonstrates how she slides a huge pile of snow to the far end of the driveway and then pushes it into a pile.

  “See? Easy.” She smiles at me, and I shake my head in disgust.

  “I remember why I moved to San Francisco now,” I say as I push the snow across the driveway.

  When we finish, Iris and I stand there for a moment at the end of the driveway looking at one another. Those feelings I had been having, last night, today; they were attacking me at every corner. It is so overwhelming I feel as if I might explode. My mind wanders to thoughts of her lips touching mine again. How soft and gentle they felt against me. How delicious she’d tasted.

  “Have a good day, Katlynn,” Iris smiles at me softly, and my heart flutters in my chest.

  “Have a good day,” I breathe, giving her a wave. She takes off down her driveway towards her car, and I watch her the entire way. As she pulls out, we wave at each other again, and I stand there until she disappears from sight, my heart exploding in my chest.

  Chapter 4

  Iris

  “DID I TELL YOU THE story about the time my late-wife took me for my first sled ride?” Robert Shaw lay stretched out on his bed adorned in his plaid pajamas and black slippers. He looked up at me as I wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his arm.

  “When you got so scared that you jumped off halfway down the hill and the sled broke your neighbor’s fence?” I started the machine and made notes of other vitals on his chart.

  Robert laughs as he looks back out the window at the lightly falling snow. “I’ll never forget that.”

  I had many favorite patients, but Robert happened to be one of the ones I cherished most dearly. He had been coming to the hospital off and on for about as long as I’d been employed there. He and my mother shared a similar diagnosis. We’d grown rather close over the years, and it was always bittersweet with his visits.

  “You have a glow about you today,” he mentions as I finish up his chart notes on the computer. When I look back at him, he is smiling at me curiously.

  “I may have run into an old friend yesterday,” I admit, smiling back. “A girl I knew in college. She’s back home for Christmas.”

  “What’s her name?” Robert asks me as I push the computer back to the other side of the room.

  “Katlynn Walker,” I turn back towards him then, holding the written notes I had taken for his file against my chest.

  “Donna and Mark Walker’s daughter?” I nod. Wellesley was a pretty small town, so it didn’t surprise me too much that he knew who they were. “I used to work with Mark at the power plant.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you liked her.” Robert has a twinkle in his eye when he says this, and I feel myself blushing. “Good for you. It’s about time you moved on after whats-her-name.”

  “Cynthia,” I reminded him as I walked back over to his bedside. “And she’s only in town for two weeks. I’m just enjoying seeing her again after ten years.”

  “You never know, Iris.” Robert still smiles at me as he pats my arm. I give his hand a squeeze before I start to leave the room.

  I give him a smile. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

  All day my mind wanders to Katlynn. I can’t help myself. Wondering what it would be to touch her again. How it would feel to kiss her again and feel her soft lips trail down my skin.

  “Well you look hot and bothered,” Megan notes, when she meets me at the nurse’s station at the end of our shift. We sit together, logging out time into the computers. “What happened with Katlynn last night?”

  “We had a good time,” I smile at her, giving away more than I probably should have.

  “Uh oh, something happened didn’t it?” Megan looks excitedly at me. “Did you tell her that you were madly in love with her in college? Did she tell you she was in love with you too?”

  “Not quite,” I laugh. I take pause before I continue. “But I may have kissed her.”

  Megan’s eyes grow wide. “Really? Did she kiss you back?” When I nod, she claps her hands excitedly and smiles wide at me. “Iris, that’s amazing!”

  “I don’t know how she felt about it,” I reply. “We both were kind of panicked that it happened. It might be a bad idea.”

  “Iris, you’ve been in love with this girl for over a decade.”

  “I know,” I reply, turning my attention back towards the computer for a moment.

  “Oh!
You know what you should do!” Megan says finally, nudging me again. “You should invite her to come over to David, and I’s for Christmas! You both should come! It would be fun.”

  I smile at the gesture. It had been a long time since I’d had a traditional Christmas. “You know I’m not big on the holiday stuff,” I reply. “I think I’m just going to order a pizza.”

  Megan laughs. “Well, if you change your mind, the offer stands. There’ll even be a fancy dinner and everything. I’m sure it will be much better than delivery pizza.”

  “Who said it was delivery?”

  “Says the person who can’t make a TV dinner without burning it. It’s delivery.”

  I roll my eyes at her as I finish on the computer and stand up to fetch my coat.

  “Tell your mom I said hi,” Megan says as I grab my things from my locker.

  AS I TURN INTO THE Park Ridge center on my way home, there is an ambulance waiting in the front of the parking lot. Every time I saw one, my mind assumed the worst. In a panic, I park my car and race through the doors. As I make my way down the hall, I find the gurney. My mother’s neighbor Ruth lays across it breathing softly into an oxygen mask. My hand falls on top of hers, and she looks up at me.

  The EMTs appear in the doorway of her room. I recognize Tony, one of the ones that made regular visits to the ER. He was one of David’s best friends. “What happened?” I ask him as he unlocks the gurney and starts to move it down the hall.

  “We think it’s just a panic attack, but we’re going to take her over to get looked at just to be safe,” he smiles at me. “How have you been doing? You look like a million bucks.”

  Tony. One’s a flirt, always a flirt. “I’ve been good,” I smile back at him and pat him on the back as he starts to walk away. “Take care of her.” He nods at me, and I turn away, heading next door to my mother’s room. I give a knock before I enter. Rachel, one of the nurses, greets me at the door holding a few vials of blood and a basket of phlebotomy equipment.