“Of course. I’ll have the chocolate mousse,” Julia said.
“And I’ll have the crème brûlée.”
“We are
sooo
predictable,” Julia noted with a grin. “Every time we come here we order lobster bisque, the chicken dijon crepes, and our desserts.”
“We just have good taste,” Pam stated.
“You have outstanding taste. That’s why your floral wedding design business is such a hit at the nursery.”
“My parents weren’t convinced it was going to work out, but it has.”
“So things are going well?”
Pam nodded. “You’d be surprised how many people are planning a December wedding. Maybe they want the tax deduction for the year.”
“You’re such a romantic.”
“Not me. I like having my feet on the ground.”
“Me, too.” Seeing Pam’s look, she added, “Okay, okay, for one moment—”
“For four minutes, twenty-three seconds,” Pam inserted.
“—I let Luke sweep me off my feet.”
“You actually lifted your right foot clear off the ground and were up on your tiptoes with the other foot . . .”
“I don’t need to hear the play-by-play, thank you very much.”
“I’m just saying that it looks like Luke is already halfway to sweeping you off your feet.”
“Halfway doesn’t count,” Julia firmly stated.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Angel said. “I’m not abandoning you. Really I’m not.”
The llamas blinked their long lashes at her.
“I explained it all before. Remember, Lucy? Ricky? You’re going to love it here. Look how much room there is for you to wander around and explore in this pasture. You two have it all to yourselves. And your own stalls in the barn. The Millers are very nice people. You’re going to have a great time here.”
She paused to pat Ricky’s neck reassuringly.
“And I told them how much you like bananas and cookies, Lucy.” The llama’s long hair draped over her spectacular dark eyes and eyelashes. Her fluffy pure white wool was clean now, but that might not last long with the threat of rain in the grumbling gray skies.
“I’ll come visit you as much as I can. At least a couple times a week.”
Lucy moved closer to “snuff” her face with her black nose. Angel bit back a sob as she buried her face in the soft fur she dampened with her tears.
She wasn’t just being emotional with llama separation anxiety. Her issues with Julia were always there at the back of Angel’s mind. And now they were bubbling up as she hugged her llamas.
“It’s just temporary.” She reassured them and herself. “We’re going to have our own place soon, and everything will work out for the best. I can feel it. I just need to trust my inner guide.”
Angel took a healing deep breath. When she got in her vintage VW van, she had to take time to do a whole body chakra meditation. She worked hard to focus her power of attention directly toward her entire energy system, but the fear and anxiety were hard to remove.
And so it was that later that night, she found herself unable to sleep. Getting up from the futon mattress she’d placed on the floor of the den, she recalled how dismayed Julia had been when she’d seen her there. Julia had been looking dismayed a lot lately.
Angel had reminded Julia that she liked sleeping on the floor, like they did in Japan.
Julia hadn’t been reassured.
Angel pulled on wool leggings and tugged on a coat. She added her favorite fuzzy knit cap and scarf in hot pink and navy blue before heading for the door.
The skies were clear as she quietly let herself out of Julia’s house and walked down the deserted street. Midnight and not a soul around. The place was quiet as a tomb. All the houses were dark, no lights shining in any windows.
Yes, some people had their porch lights on. But it seemed they did so more with the desire to keep strangers away than to welcome anyone.
Angel kept walking, trying to escape her thoughts.
She heard him before she saw him. Tyler. Rollerblading.
Angel hadn’t spoken to him since he’d come to Julia’s house and fixed her bathtub faucet. Julia had gotten so upset about her offering Tyler a massage that Angel had felt reluctant to make any waves.
But that didn’t mean she was going to welch on their agreement. She still owed Tyler.
“Nice night, huh?” she said.
She’d startled him; she could tell by the way his body stiffened. Wanting . . . no,
needing
to keep him nearby, she said, “I couldn’t sleep. I moved the llamas from my daughter’s backyard tonight. That was hard. Not that moving them was hard. They went into the trailer without any trouble at all. But it was hard for me to leave them at the farm I’d chosen for them. Not because I don’t think they’ll be well cared for. But it seemed like I was abandoning them.” She shivered. “I told them I wasn’t, but I’m not sure how much llamas understand. Well, I know they understand a lot, but I’m not sure if I was communicating effectively with them. Maybe I should have said something else. Maybe there’s a Peruvian phrase that would have reassured them.”
“Sounds more like you’re the one needing reassurance.”
She was surprised by his insight.
“Have you ever had a secret so big you didn’t know how to fix it?” The words tumbled from her lips.
There was a long pause before Tyler spoke. “Yeah.” His voice was gruff.
“Really? What did you do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing for the past . . . well, thirty years now. Nothing. But that’s not working for me anymore. I have to do something to make it right.”
“Thirty years is a long time.”
“I know.”
“Goes by fast,” Tyler said.
“Yeah, it does. Scary, huh?”
“I would have thought a New Age woman like you would have a positive perspective on the subject of time.”
“I do most of the time. There’s that word again.
Time.
A strange concept, isn’t it? It’s just one way of marking our shared planetary presence here on Earth.”
Tyler made no comment.
“Anyway, I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you a massage. Unless there’s something else I can do for you? Some way I could help you the way you helped me?”
“I’m beyond help.”
His words wounded her heart. “Don’t say that. No one is beyond help.”
“Now you sound like Sister Mary.”
“Do you know her?”
“Our paths crossed.”
“I helped her at the food pantry over in Rock Creek. I liked her.”
Angel liked Tyler, too, but for once she was cautious in telling him so.
“Dog races.” Angel shuddered as she spoke to Julia after work the next day. “Seems barbaric to me.”
“This from a woman who was keeping two llamas in my backyard.”
“I wasn’t whipping them in a race.”
“Trust me, no one was whipping any of the dogs. They were all pampered pooches. But Toni totally messed things up.”
“She was just playing.”
“In the middle of the race. Disrupting it completely.”
“I heard that you kissing Luke did that as well. Disrupted things,” Angel said. “That made me proud.”
Julia was clearly at a loss for words, so Angel changed the subject. “I found the perfect place for Lucy and Ricky and moved them yesterday to an Amish farm less than an hour’s drive from here. In case you were wondering why the llamas weren’t here any longer.”
“What was wrong with the dairy farmer’s place?”
Angel shuddered. “He uses chemicals and growth hormones.”
“Well, he wouldn’t use them on the llamas.”
“Ricky and Lucy wouldn’t flourish there. What have you got against the Amish farmers? You’ve never even met them.”
“I don’t have anything against them.”
“Some people do, you know. Because they’re Amish.”
“Well, I’m not some people.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I didn’t raise you to be
some people.
I raised you to be open to all the possibilities in the world. To realize that the unknown is just another term for creation.”
Great. Her mother was quoting Deepak Chopra to her. Well, that might be his view of things, but in Julia’s book,
unknown
simply meant “chaos.”
And she’d had enough of that to last her a lifetime.
Or several reincarnated lifetimes.
“By the way, did I tell you that your neighbor signed up for my yoga class today?” Angel asked.
“Mrs. Selznick likes taking classes. She’s taken everything from Spanish to tap dancing to introduction to opera everywhere from the park district to the library. If there’s a class offered, she takes it.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing if you’re not the owner of the Candlewick Store. Mrs. S almost burned the place down when she took a candlemaking class there.”
“She probably lacked a good teacher, that’s all.”
“And an asbestos vest.”
“Asbestos is poisonous.”
“But inflammable. Don’t light any candles around her, that’s all I’m saying.”
“But you know I like to use aromatherapy in conjunction with my yoga . . .”
Julia shook her head. “No open flames.”
“But I could use those tiny hurricane lamp things . . . And I may have to smudge to rid the space of any negative energy.”
“You’ve already done that once and set off all my smoke detectors.”
“Yes, well, there seems to be a lot of negative energy around, so it needs another smudging.” Angel paused to study her a moment. “You look tired. Have you been using that herbal remedy I gave you?”
“No.”
“How about the sea kelp?”
“No.”
Angel sighed. “You always were a stubborn one.”
Julia was thirty, had a mortgage, and contributed to a 401(k) plan. She shouldn’t have to hide her Pop-Tarts in her own house.
If she were really stubborn she’d make a stand, lay down the law.
Problem was, it wouldn’t make any difference. Her mother would just continue doing what she wanted.
There was no changing her.
Angel stared at her daughter and wished she could read her mind. Julia had never been an easy one to decipher. Angel could read other people’s auras, the energy emanations of the physical body, but not her oldest child’s. Knowingly or not, Julia blocked her out.
Angel tried not to be hurt by the barricades, reminding herself that Julia had always maintained a stiff-upper-lip approach to life. Even as a toddler, she wouldn’t cry when she fell down, but would instead set her jaw with determination and simply get up again.
Angel, who freely admitted to being sensitive and not at all stoic, knew her oldest child hadn’t inherited that toughness trait from her. When a bird hit the window of their apartment last spring, Angel had cried for an entire afternoon. She hated seeing others in pain or upheaval.
Not that Julia was indifferent to other’s suffering. Not at all. But when Angel “felt your pain,” she showed it. Julia hid it.
Julia hid a lot of emotions.
Even so, Angel was fully cognizant of the fact that her daughter was going through a period of upheaval right now. And that Angel was partly to blame. True, Julia tended to take things too seriously while accusing Angel of taking them too lightly.
And although it was true that Angel was low on monetary funds at the moment, she had come to see Julia for another reason. The guilt of not being completely honest with her oldest daughter was starting to eat Angel up inside.
Normally, Angel led a very truthful life. That was a cornerstone in her belief system. Except in this case.
Angel desperately wanted to do the right thing. She just had to figure out what that was.
The tarot cards and runes were clear about one thing. Angel needed to reconnect with Julia on an emotional level before she could reveal her darkest secret.
What happened beyond that was anyone’s guess.
“If you’d rather not talk about it, we won’t,” Patty told Julia in the library staff room.
Julia looked up from the
Library Journal
article she was trying to read during her lunch break. “Talk about what?”
“The Wiener Races.”
“And the kiss,” Laurie added.
“I’d rather not talk about it.” Julia took a bite of her salad. She’d decided she was becoming entirely too dependent on junk food as a crutch in dealing with her family . . . or her attraction to Luke. At this rate, she’d soon have health issues to go along with all her other issues.
Not that she was about to trade in her Pop-Tarts for tofu or soy milk. Not going to happen.
But she was a believer in the Socrates school of thought regarding moderation in all things. Even Pop-Tarts.
“It’s a good thing that Alice is on vacation with her family at Disney World,” Patty noted.
“They were driving down and stopping in Washington, D.C., so Alice could speak to our representative there. She wants to tell her what she’s doing wrong,” Laurie said.
“That’s certainly is one of Alice’s specialties,” Julia conceded.
“It’s sort of sad that she doesn’t get pleasure out of anything aside from being critical.”
“I’ll tell you what’s sad,” Patty said. “That a library board member wanted to know why we’re carrying ‘those trashy romances’ in our library.”
“How many of their bones did you break?” Laurie asked.
Patty scowled. “Believe me, I was tempted. Instead, I gave her my biggest smile.” She paused to demonstrate. “And asked politely if she was referring to the most popular fiction on the planet. I added that those unfamiliar with the genre had a lot of misconceptions about it. Then I handed her a copy of the article in last year’s January/ February issue of
Public Libraries
on the romance novels’ appeal and suggested she read it.”
“Did she?” Julia asked.
“Surprisingly, yes. She came back to me this morning and thanked me for—”