She’d taken only the clothes she’d had with
her at the beach house, and only because she couldn’t very well
wander around naked. There’d been enough clothes in those bags, and
they were ‘normal’ enough to be practical, so that she thought
she’d be okay with clothes for a while.
A few things had caught her off guard—her
phone, for example. Auberon had always simply handed her a new
phone when he thought the time was right for her to have one, so
when it stopped working, she’d been surprised. Luca had helped her
get a new one in her own name, just as he’d helped her set up a
bank account and get a debit card. She felt ridiculous, not
understanding so many simple things, but the world had moved on
without her, and it was as though she were coming into this life as
a foreigner. Again.
The bell over the café door jingled, and
Carmen walked in, dressed in black cargo shorts and a snug, blue
t-shirt, her hair in a ponytail and her feet in light brown work
boots. She was coming from work.
Sabina had grown to like her very much; she
felt like she might be a true friend. She wasn’t effusive or even
especially friendly, but she was open and honest and had a wry
sense of humor that Sabina appreciated. While she felt herself to
be too naïve and inexperienced, especially for her age, Carmen had
a cynical edge. She wasn’t jaded, exactly, but she wasn’t surprised
when things went awry. Maybe that was why Sabina liked her so:
though they were the same age, Carmen felt like an older
sister.
“Hey.” Carmen sat down. “Sorry I’m late. You
order?”
“No. I waited for you.” With a nod, Carmen
stood back up. Sabina did as well, and they went to the counter and
ordered their lunch.
When Sabina had her salad and seafood soup
and Carmen had her chicken sandwich and chips, they sat again and
chatted while they ate. Carmen wasn’t one to talk without purpose,
so mostly she grilled Sabina about how things were going, and
Sabina asked her about her work.
During a lull in the conversation, Sabina
took a breath and asked the question she’d been setting to the side
of her head throughout lunch. “And Carlo is well? And Trey?”
Carmen stopped in mid-mouthful and gave
Sabina a look, eyebrows lifted. Then she resumed chewing. After she
swallowed, she said, “You know the rule. If you want to know how he
is, I’ll give you his number and you can call him.”
It had been nearly a month, and for all her
excitement and trepidation about starting her new life, all her
happy fussing over her wee apartment, all her wandering around
through the quirky shops downtown, or her evening walks on the
beach as the tide slid in, Sabina missed Carlo fiercely. Trey, too.
She’d had a little taste of what it might have been like to be a
mother, and she’d come to love that bubbly little boy. She loved
his father, too. She knew it was true, though she also knew it was
reckless to want so badly to give her heart away after the life
she’d just escaped.
At night, she played their few kisses, their
sweet touches over and over in her head. She learned to masturbate
thinking about him. Or relearned, actually. She had almost never
touched herself like that while she was married, not even when she
was alone. She’d thought Auberon had killed that urge in her,
tainting anything sexual with the cast of pain. But thinking of
Carlo and the way he’d touched her had brought need back. Not even
the last thing Auberon had done to her, instructing another man, a
stranger, to do terrible things, and then allowing that stranger do
his own terrible things, could cool the ardor with which she
thought about Carlo.
She spent time with his family—mostly Carmen
and Luca. As today, Carmen always refused to talk about either
Carlo or Trey with her at all. Luca would give her a general
update. But they both were of the same mind, that if she was so
curious she should contact him herself.
But was she ready? Was she strong? She knew
she needed to be on her feet first—independent. But what if he had
come to his senses, back in Providence, living his real life, and
no longer wanted to be with her? She wasn’t yet strong enough to
prepare herself for that possibility—that likelihood—and so she
wasn’t yet strong enough to talk to him directly. She need to be
settled in a life of her own.
Carmen snapped her fingers. “Hey. You with
me?”
She shook her thoughts away and smiled at
her friend. Unwilling to expose the truth of her thoughts, she
offered something that had some truth in it. “Yes. Apologies. I was
thinking about seeking a job. I saw a sign in the window of the
yarn shop—I’ll go there, maybe, and ask.”
Carmen’s eyebrows went up in interest. “Have
you ever worked, Sabina?”
“Yes. I worked at Le Palais Providence
before I was married.”
“Wow. Swanky. Okay. The owner of that shop
is a friend of mine. Andi is…she’s interesting. She’s a textile
artist—a weaver. I’ve got a couple of pieces of hers in my
house—the big one over the sofa is hers. Good people, but kind of
odd. New-agey. You know what that means?”
Sabina shook her head.
Carmen chuckled. “Sometimes it’s like you
were locked away in a fairy-tale castle or something.”
“I was, Carmen. A Grimm fairy tale.”
Her friend’s face went dark. “God, Sabina,
I’m sorry. That was shitty of me to say.” When Sabina shrugged it
away, Carmen cleared her throat and went on. “New age is, like,
crystals and moon cycles, stuff like that. Sort of both mystical
and natural, I guess. Her name when we were in school was Andrea.
Somewhere along the line it became Andromeda. But she still answers
to Andi, which is why I haven’t slugged her yet.” Carmen’s grin as
she said that softened the edge of her words. “If you can stand the
pan flute music or whatever, it might be an okay job.”
“She sounds delightful, honestly.” Sabina
meant that sincerely. She had an image of this Andi as something
like a fairy godmother, flitting about sprinkling stardust wherever
she went.
“She’s a hoot, I’ll give her that. And she’s
a decent person. I don’t say that about many people, so…”
“I’ll stop in right after our lunch. May I
tell her that I know you?”
Carmen wadded up the waxed-paper wrapping
from her sandwich and tossed it into the little red plastic basket
in which it had been served. “I tell you what. I still have a
little bit of time before I have to get back to the job site. Let’s
walk over there, and I’ll introduce you.”
~oOo~
Andromeda Walsh—Andi—was everything that
Carmen had said and more. She was tall—when Luca dropped by one
afternoon to check on Sabina, she’d noticed that they were about
the same height—and large, with broad shoulders and a prodigious
bosom. She had straight, light brown hair, parted in the center,
that ran to her waist in a silken sheet, and she had dusky blue
eyes that Sabina would have sworn truly sparkled when she laughed.
And she laughed a lot. She favored long, elaborate cotton tops with
richly colored embroidery over faded jeans. And she seemed always
to be barefoot.
She’d hired Sabina on the spot when Carmen
had brought her in. From that moment, Sabina was happy in that
humble job. By the end of the first week, she knew that she’d made
another real friend. She loved Andi, and she loved the yarn shop,
called Sea Weaver. Her life felt full and lush in a way she
couldn’t remember it ever being before, certainly not since her
childhood.
Yes, Andi was this ‘new agey’ that Carmen
had described. There were crystals and bundles of herbs placed
around the shop, and Andi wore caged crystals on a satin cord
around her neck. The stereo played exotic kinds of music, too, but
it wasn’t all pan flute. There was Celtic music, too, and Gregorian
chanting, and occasionally music from South America that gave
Sabina a vague cramp in her heart, sepia memories fluttering
briefly to life.
The shop was a rainbow of color, and from
the first time she walked in, Sabina felt at home. One whole wall,
from the wide-plank floor to the ceiling, was shelving, white cubes
set on corners to make a diamond pattern, and every cube was
stuffed with a different color and style of yarn. Some of the yarns
were machine spun, and some were handspun right in the shop. Tables
in the middle of the shop had bins for knitting and crocheting
supplies and patterns. On the wall across from the yarns were
shelves for fabrics and baskets of raw wool and batting for
spinning.
The color gradations alone bent Sabina’s
mind. So many reds and blues and purples and yellows. So many of
all of them. She was learning that she needed color, lots of color,
in her life. Auberon had favored neutral tones in décor; in that
way, too, Sabina’s life had been empty. Now, she wanted scarlet and
cyan and violet and goldenrod and all of it, and it was all
here.
Andi spoke of chakras and rhythms and other
things that Sabina didn’t really understand, but she did it in a
matter-of-fact way, as if these things were foregone conclusions
and thus didn’t require a lot of discussion. Mostly, she had
stories. The back part of the shop was set up like a studio, with a
spinning wheel and a hand loom, and Andi would sit at one or the
other, her bare feet working the treadles, and talk nearly nonstop
as she worked. She had stories about Quiet Cove, and about her
childhood and her wayward youth. She had stories about Carmen and
the other Pagano siblings, too, she said, but instead of sharing
those, she would turn up her mouth in an enigmatic smile and pass
the shuttle through.
She was fascinated by Andi’s artistry and
craftsmanship. The acts of weaving and spinning seemed
simultaneously simple and complex, and no matter how carefully she
watched, she could not entirely understand how Andi was able to
make such beautiful pieces.
Sabina’s job was simply to ring sales and
stock the merchandise. Though the shop had a fairly steady traffic
of crafters who trickled in throughout each day and often stayed to
chat, it was rarely particularly busy. So she would sit on the
stool behind the counter, and Andi would weave or spin, and they’d
talk. After a while, Sabina began to answer Andi’s conversational
questions. It was strange to speak to someone about the life she’d
once had and not feel a taint of shame over the story. She wasn’t
sure when she’d lost that shame. She was glad. She felt
liberated.
After the shop closed up each evening at six
o’clock, Sabina would stop at one of the restaurants for takeout,
or she’d go to the market and pick up a premade salad, and head
home to her little attic apartment, fragrant with the scent of cut
roses and carnations. She spent her nights reading, or walking on
the beach, and then she’d go to bed and dream of Carlo.
She was happy, and yet she was not
content.
And so, finally, she called him. She had not
needed Carmen to give her his number. She had had it all along.
~oOo~
“If there’s somewhere you’ve got to be,
sweetie, you can just tell me. I can certainly close up on my own.”
Andi spoke without looking up from her spinning.
Sabina blushed and turned away from the
front window. “No, of course not. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, it’s fine. But that’s at
least the fifth time in the past fifteen minutes you’ve gone to
stare out the window like you’re waiting for somebody. You have a
hot date tonight or something?”
Sabine blushed more; she felt feverish from
the infusion of blood to her cheeks.
“You
do
! Oh my goddess, you do! Who
is it?”
“It’s not…a date. A talk only.”
Andi gasped and stopped the wheel. “It’s
Carlo! Is it Carlo? Did you call him?”
Carlo was among the things Sabina had opened
up about with Andi. She’d been a good ear and a good shoulder,
with, as she’d said, ‘no dog in the hunt,’ which meant that Sabina
could talk to her about Carlo in ways she couldn’t talk to his
family. “Yes. Last night. He’s coming to town for the weekend.”
“Is this the first time since…?”
“That I will see him, yes. He came on
Independence Day, for the opening on the beach, but I stayed away.”
That had been difficult, to stay away from the opening of the
cottages Carlo and his family had built, all of them working on the
project, and it such an important event for the town. Everyone
everywhere had been talking about it, and most of the town had
gone. Sabina had stayed tucked up in her attic for the day and the
night, thinking about Trey falling asleep in Carlo’s lap, Elsa at
their feet.
It had been held on the same day that
Auberon’s annual clambake would have happened. She would have liked
to have been able to celebrate on that day with a real family,
feeling real happiness. But it had been only shortly after she’d
sent Carlo away, and she had not yet been ready to see him.
She wasn’t sure she was ready now, but she
felt an ache that would no longer wait for her to know.
The bell jingled behind her, and Andi, who
was facing the front of the store, smiled broadly, her eyes like
blue diamonds. “Oh, I will definitely close on my own tonight.”
Sabina turned, and he was there.