Star Dust (6 page)

“Planting bulbs.”

“Need any help?”

Her answer was a stern “No.”

He put his hands up in surrender. “Have a good morning then.”

It will be once you leave
. She didn’t answer him. She merely smiled as coldly as she could. And when he left, she went back to planting hope—which had nothing to do with the astronaut next door.

Nor did it when she was struggling to get a floor lamp out of her car the next day. Her car was parked in her driveway. She needed to get the lamp out and into the house and get over to her mom’s to pick up the kids or else bedtime was going to be entirely too late.

The lamp had other plans.

The man at the furniture store had helped her load it, but now she wasn’t sure how he’d made it fit. She craned into the car and tapped around beneath the front seat for the cord. If it was tangled on something, that might explain her difficulty.

And sure enough, when she found it, the cord was wrapped around some sort of support beam under the seat. She gripped it as best she could and tugged. Her hand, slick with perspiration, slipped off. She tried again. And again. But it was to no avail. The lamp wasn’t moving.

She wedged herself further in the back seat. She was outright kneeling in the car, though it was quite possible that neither she nor the lamp were ever going to get out.

She tugged and tugged on the cord and then grunted in frustration.

“I keep finding you in such interesting positions.”

The fact was, she could get out. When she knew Kit Campbell was staring at her bottom, she could be quite speedy indeed in extricating herself from her car.

“Do astronauts ever work?” she demanded as she attempted to straighten her curls.

“No.” He shook his head apologetically. “We drive around town bothering people and
not
preparing to go to space.”

Actually, he was dressed as if he were going out: crisp white shirt, charcoal gray suit, skinny ultramarine tie. He could be headed out to accompany Anita Ekberg to dinner in that getup. Ekberg seemed like his type.

Anne-Marie tried not to think of how she always seemed to be at her messiest around him.

“Are you so desperate to get your scissors back that you keep finding excuses to bother me?”

“That’s it. I’m useless without them. The future of the American Space Department is in jeopardy.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled at her. It wasn’t precisely the
Life
smile. It was too rakish for that. America might not like this version of Kit—though a certain segment of American women would probably think it was just fine.

“I’ll go get them and you can cross me off your list in the future. All the way off.” It wasn’t like she could sit around in the dark trading confidences with a man like Kit.

The mirth in his face evaporated. “I was only joking.”

His words seemed… earnest.

For a few seconds, she considered apologizing, but then she remembered: He’d insulted her far worse when he’d propositioned her. And he’d never apologized for that.

Instead she sighed. “It’s been a long week.” This was true. She only had one more day before starting her new job, and the house wasn’t nearly finished.

He nodded. His eyes were still full of concern, his brow slightly furrowed. She couldn’t decide if this was better than his naughty innuendo or not. “Moving always takes longer than you think it will,” he said.

“We’ll be settled soon.”

“Where are your kids?” He glanced around.

“My mom’s.”

“Your parents are in Houston?”

“Yes, River Oaks.”

“Oh.” He was clearly not a Texan and so didn’t know what this meant. It was a relief he wouldn’t imply that her father’s money made her life possible, even if it was true. “Do you—” he gestured toward the car in an obvious offer of assistance.

“
No.
” She hadn’t meant to sound so emphatic, but she no longer felt bad about being firm with him. He, like everyone, thought she was incapable.

He watched her as a chef might a new recipe simmering in a pan, closely, trying to make her out, with a bit of appraisal. He didn’t seem repulsed, and certainly she’d given him reason to be. He seemed intrigued—and not entirely lustfully.

Astronauts were odd.

He gave her a half-salute. “Duty calls, then.”

He climbed into his Thunderbird and drove off, leaving her with a stuck lamp and some confusion.

The confusion was still present when she got to her mother’s. Freddie, precocious and still so much a little boy at nine years-old, was sitting on the couch reading the Perseid Six issue of
Life
for approximately the forty-seventh time.

Kit Campbell was following her.

“Did you have a good day?” she asked as she kissed him.

He made a face. “Pretty good. Grandma had us help her polish silver.” He looked into the dining room and wrinkled his nose.

“Ah.” She’d gotten roped into that game a time or ten in her childhood. “Always makes you feel accomplished, though.”

Freddie looked at her as if she’d said something wild.

“Mom, look at this,” Lisa called.

When Anne-Marie went into the dining room, her seven year-old daughter held up a hand mirror. It was the kind that paired with a brush and comb, all three meant to be displayed on a dressing table.

“It’s pretty,” Anne-Marie said.

“Part of my mother’s trousseau,” Anne-Marie’s mother put in. She took the mirror from Lisa and smiled at it lovingly. She turned it over in her hands and brushed her fingertips over the rosebuds engraved on the back.

Those were the kinds of flowers Anne-Marie still felt bitter about. The entire thing, actually: the performance and stage props of proper womanhood.

Anne-Marie released a scoff as loudly as she dared. Sometimes, especially since the divorce, it felt like she and her mother were from different centuries. Kit might one day leave the planet; her mother still saw a woman’s life as the accumulation of silver-backed mirrors. Neither world had much to offer Anne-Marie.

She turned from her mother to her children. “We need to get going.” Over her shoulder, she said, “Thank you for taking them, for feeding them.”

“My pleasure! When I found that house, I wasn’t thinking of how far away it was. I really should have pressed for something closer.”

Thank goodness you didn’t
. “I like the house.” Well, she would when it was unpacked. And when she figured out how to handle Kit…

“Have you met the neighbors?”

“Not yet.” And she hadn’t met the neighbors; she’d just met the one. “Not all of them,” she amended. As much as she might not understand her mother, she loved her and she hated lying to her.

“Well, I’ve heard it’s a very friendly place.”

Lake Glade hadn’t existed long enough to develop a character, so Anne-Marie suspected this was a real estate agent’s tale. As a group, they’d never met a house or a neighborhood they didn’t like. Reality didn’t matter.

“Are you ready for school tomorrow?” she asked as she drove the kids home.

“Yes.” Lisa packed an awful lot of introspection into the one syllable. She was ready, but she was also nervous.

“I’m sure both of your teachers will be nice. And you’ll meet lots of kids, and pretty soon you’ll have friends here.”

In the rearview mirror, Anne-Marie watched Freddie fingering the interior of the door. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even offer token agreement.

It had been right to leave Doug. It had been right to leave Dallas. But some days, it was hard to remember that.

“You’ll see,” she promised.

Kids moved all the time, even kids whose parents didn’t get divorced. But she could do better than that. “How do you feel about some ice cream?”

Freddie popped up and smiled, big and true. “Really, Mom? We already had cookies at Grandma’s.” Freddie was ever honest. He hadn’t yet learned to lie.

“Just this once.”

But an hour later, Anne-Marie was willing to consider instituting an “ice cream for dinner every night” rule if it could make such a difference. Freddie was animated in a way he hadn’t been in weeks as he spooned whipped cream onto his sundae. Lisa belly laughed so hard when they were playing pinochle on the living room floor afterward that they had to take a break.

Dairy products were all it took?
Evidently.

She lingered in the bathroom while they got ready, watching them brush their teeth and squabble over counter space. Then she tucked them in—an hour later than normal—and kissed them.

“That was fun,” Lisa sighed, already mostly asleep.

“The most fun we’ve had in a while,” Anne-Marie agreed.

But no answer came back to her.

She cleaned up the living room and the kitchen without once glancing toward the back door—or in the direction of the astronaut next door.

Like spilled gin, the allure of work evaporated quickly for Anne-Marie. Mr. Chambers’s travel agency was large, disorganized, and colorful. Around the room, a number of men and women talked excitedly into phones. Stacks of brochures threatened to explode from every surface. Posters lined the walls touting exotic vacations.
Try Nice! See the Grand Canyon! Sunny Spain!

Anne-Marie was certain that if she stayed here for any length of time, the chaos would induce insanity. Or perhaps the woman Mr. Chambers was talking to would bury Anne-Marie beneath all the papers, where she wouldn’t be found until someone needed prices for luaus in Waikiki. The woman’s expression said she might consider it.

“Oh, Mrs. Smith, I didn’t know you were starting today.” The blonde held herself rigid as a column, her military posture at odds with the full pink skirt and perfectly matched heels. But her glare made the voluminous crinoline appear less festive.

Anne-Marie tried to smile, but the blonde’s expression just tightened. So Anne-Marie swallowed and fumbled with the buttons on her coat. The other men and women in the office were watching the exchange curiously. It was a test, then.

Anne-Marie examined the blonde, taking in more than the woman’s clothing and displeased mien. She wasn’t wearing a ring. It was hard to say whether the ones with the rings were more bitter than the ones without—which didn’t make much sense. Divorce couldn’t possibly threaten this woman if she weren’t married.

Mr. Chambers, apparently unaffected by the woman’s tone, beamed at them both. “Roberta! Just the person I wanted to see. I’m certain I mentioned to you last week that Anne-Marie would be here today. You’ll show her everything, right? Get her all settled in?”

“Uh-huh.”

That was ominous.

“Great!” Mr. Chambers responded. “We’ll go to lunch about noon, okay?”

Anne-Marie blinked a few times. Oh. He wasn’t speaking to Roberta. “Of course. That would be lovely. Thank you.”

She didn’t want to have lunch with Mr. Chambers. She wanted to learn what they meant for her to do here and then to master it. And if she could, she wanted to get home early so she could cook a decent meal for the kids. They’d need it after their first stressful day at school. But even she knew that keeping the boss happy was important, so she’d have lunch with him.

With a little wave, he jogged off, leaving her alone. Well, as alone as one could be with Roberta.

The other woman twitched her skirts and turned. There probably should have been rustling, but there wasn’t. Eerie. She started off, and it took Anne-Marie a few seconds to move after her.

“You’ll be back here,” Roberta explained when they reached a desk in the back corner.

It had a typewriter, a phone, several large bound books, and a mound of papers: impersonal and intimidating at once. Roberta gestured, and Anne-Marie sat. She immediately regretted it. Now she was at a height disadvantage, but then she generally was.

Several seconds passed before Roberta said, “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

Maybe the other woman’s frustration didn’t have anything to do with Anne-Marie’s marital status or the nepotism that had led to the job.

Trying to use the opening to change the tone, Anne-Marie said as apologetically as possible, “I’m sorry about that. I can come back.”

“No, you’re here now.” Sadly, there had been no change. “What we’re going to start you with is the airline reservations. This is the backlog. Honestly”—she leaned close, as if imparting a secret—“most of the girls can’t make heads or tails of them.”

Anne-Marie wasn’t certain how she felt about being a girl, but she did know that she’d rather be in the group than out of it.

“Um, okay.” She began flipping through the papers.

Roberta set a hand on top of the stack to stop her. Maybe the order was important. “Those are the schedule and rate books. Any flight that anyone can take anywhere in the world is in there. And these”—she tapped the papers—“are the flights we need to book.”

“My word.” It was a quite a stack.

Roberta then explained how, once you knew the flight you wanted for the client, you called the airline to schedule the flight and then entered the information into the sheet before returning it to the appropriate agent for filing. The tickets followed in the mail a few weeks later.