She laughed and met his eyes, serious under the drape of his orange-scented hair. For a moment she took in everything, the slick of his skin, the rough of the cement beneath her feet, the in and out of his breath, the fullness of her own held. She leaned closer, smelled the mint of her skin slip into the orange of his, and then her lips moved against his. The cream slid between them with heat and the long slow exhalation of her breath.
She hadn’t felt herself move, hadn’t registered inching her feet along the rough floor, but her body nearly touched his, and in the intake of one breath, he closed the sliver of a gap between them and returned her kiss.
She felt them bend together, the ancient way a man leans forward and the arch of a woman’s back keeps them strong against the pull of gravity down. She gathered the wet cotton of his shirt in her hands and wanted nothing between them as she felt his own hands slide under the hem of her shirt, slip along the small of her back, and bring her closer.
When her eyes drifted open, her right one snapped closed, clenched and instantly tearing. The burn shocked her, made her stagger back, and his hold on her was the only thing that kept her upright. She tried, but her right eye wouldn’t open, and her left one blinked spastically opened, closed, opened. It was testing the waters, she imagined, trying to protect itself from the excruciating pain its twin suffered.
His voice was close to her ear. “Is it your eye?” He was checking out her eye, at least she thought he was. In the blink, blink vision her left eye provided, it was like deciphering the first motion picture. She felt his hands on her shoulders as he moved her over several feet, then stepped away. She stood alone, reached out for help. “John?”
A waterfall. She heard the gush of water and his barely decipherable voice saying
Get Betty
? Why on earth had he said
Get Betty
?
The blast of cold water struck her in the face, took her breath, and nearly knocked her down.
“Sorry.”
She’d heard that. She sucked in air and shivered. She was still blinded and now freezing too.
The next shot hit her with less force and more warmth. She’d have to thank him later for… “What the fuck are you doing?”
She heard the metal slink of the sprayer as he pulled it closer. “Irrigating your eye.”
“Oh.” Well, that was a good idea. An eyeball on fire could probably stand some irrigation. She turned her face to him and braced herself.
The click, as he depressed the handle, warned her of the next blast. But this time it just gave her face a gentle shower. She rubbed her hand over her eye, felt the soap wash away until her skin practically squeaked under her fingers, and finally he turned off the sprayer and waited.
She opened the eye she would always think of as
the good one
. She wasn’t even going to try to see out of
the bad one
. John, even though she could only view him in two dimensions, looked worried. His eyebrows, still orange, were drawn together. She gave him the best smile she could muster, standing there soaking wet, one-eyed like a pirate. “You could have warned me.”
“I said
get ready
.”
“Oh…”
“What’d you think I was doing?”
“Um… asking me to
get Betty
?”
He smiled, leaned closer to examine her eye. “Wanna try to open it?”
“No.”
“Can I help?”
“No. I’m just gonna go.”
He kissed her forehead in response, and she leaned into it, god help her. A lip kiss hadn’t been enough trouble, she continued to want to stay even one-eyed. It took all the strength she had to head toward the door with what dignity remained, which was none. Then her bare toe caught on the doorjamb, and she involuntarily grunted. She might also be crying, but with her weeping eye and dripping hair, she’d never know for sure.
She heard his voice behind her, amused and concerned. “Not seein’ three D?”
She limped on. “No. No, I’m not.”
She cleared the workroom, made it around Celia’s desk, and shuffled out the front door. The turning left part she knew, of course, and about where the door was that took her up the stairs to her loft. She was more sorry than she could say, though, that she hadn’t committed the exact number of stairs to memory since she was half-blind and forced to fumble up stair after stair, hanging onto the railing hard enough to say a prayer that it was well attached. Janie would have had an emergency plan for an eye mishap. Good thing the loft was only seventy-six steps and counting from Abundance or else living-on-the-edge Mara would be sitting on the curb waiting for her eye to open. Mara, the one-eyed wonder, the one-eyed bad wife who kissed a man not her husband. Nobody had an emergency plan for that.
And she couldn’t even kid herself that she’d given John a relatives-at-Thanksgiving kiss. They had experienced a bonafide backseat-of-a-car kiss. She imagined. She’d never made out in the backseat of a car, but it seemed to drive teenagers to staggering rates of underage pregnancy, so it had to be pretty compelling. And what she’d experienced in the store room, all slippery and good smelling counted as compelling, brain-shut-down, body-melt-down compelling.
Her right foot kicked the door, and she felt pain and relief to reach it at last. She fumbled for the doorknob, but her fingers slid off. She rubbed her hand along the wet drip of her skirt, waved it around to dry, blew on it, and tried again. The knob turned, and she stepped inside. “Aiii!” The bad eye popped open and a wave of burning swept across her field of vision. “Holy Hell!” She realized the Halloween scare was just Lois standing in the loft with her makeup off and judgment on.
Mara blinked like a mad woman, felt the tears pour down the right side of her face. Finally the pain ended, and she sighed in relief until she saw that Lois wore extra disapproval when viewed in three D. Mara braced herself for another onslaught of icy water. The talk would begin with
young lady
and end with a pro-wrestling smack down in which the mother-in-law would emerge the winner because she was a little bitey thing and because, for the first time, Mara knew she really had done something wrong.
Lois stood, hands on hips, prolonging the start of the lecture until Mara wanted to offer to spank herself. Then with a quiet sigh the mother-in-law spoke. “You were never that dramatic before.”
Mara waited for more, but Lois walked over to the bed and tucked herself into the sheets with the precision of a military officer.
Well, what was she supposed to make of that? She shifted from wet foot to wet foot, then, trying for quiet, she dripped across the floor toward the bathroom. She nearly fell, twice, and couldn’t help but admire the irony of it. After all that soap and water, she needed to come clean.
It wasn’t until she’d stepped fully clothed under the blast of warm water did she realize she should have confronted Lois about being in the loft at all. At dinner she’d felt she had some kind of moral high ground to stand on. Not really high ground, maybe a small hill. She’d just been taking a little vacation from warehouse shopping and mothering and ironing Dan’s chinos. But now, finding Lois in the loft, she knew she couldn’t kick her out. Lois somehow knew it too, somehow understood that Mara had crossed the line.
Knocking could only be bad. Knocking could only mean Dan stood outside her door because he knew. She’d hidden out in the loft all day to avoid him, mumbled
headache
to Lois. They’d retreated to opposite ends of the room where she pretend to read and Lois worked crosswords until evening fell.
Mara considered maybe he’d go away, but Lois headed toward the door. Natty in a gray knit travel suit, she still ran a hand to smooth down her jacket before she reached for the doorknob. She’d open it, Mara knew, to her beloved son who deserved a better wife. Her son, who would stand in the hallway as the door swung open, with the deadly combination of a bad attitude and the moral high ground.
But it was Stella who stood in the hallway, bold in purple sweatshirt and sneakers. Mara ran across the loft and hugged her. “Stella!”
Stella gave her a squeeze then stepped into the loft to assess Lois. “Thought you might be glad to see a friendly face.”
Lois huffed a little at that, but not so loudly that she could be accused of it.
The two women circled each other like dogs at odds. Before they could bare their teeth she stepped in for introductions. “Stella, this is Dan’s mother, Lois. Lois, this is Stella. She and her son, John, own Abundance.” John. She cringed. Maybe Stella wasn’t there to save her from her mother-in-law. Maybe Stella was there because a married woman had kissed her son, and she didn’t approve. Why would she? Hell, Mara didn’t approve, and she’d been the one doing it. Lois certainly wouldn’t approve and Dan would… what
would
Dan?
Panic washed over her. Divorce her? Really divorce her? She hadn’t ever considered that it could genuinely happen. She put her hand to her throat and felt her pulse pound there. Dan would take Logan, the one person she could not, under any circumstances, hurt and couldn’t bear to live without. She’d thought she could manage a little break from her life without breaking everything. Dan would get the house. She’d been the one to go off the deep end. And he’d get the checking account. He’d already cancelled her credit card. Why not her warehouse card or her library card? She’d be a fallen woman on the street not even able to check out books.
“Mara?” Stella shook her. “Mara?”
She focused on Stella’s sharp blue eyes and understood the command. “Get dressed.”
She responded instinctively, turned to her clothes stacked beside the crate that held Lois’ knit collection.
“You got a hat?” Stella took a seat on the couch. “We’re going out with the shipping crew.”
She stopped, considered her haul from Gretchen’s store, no hat.
Stella waved it away. “We always have a couple of spares, no worries.”
“I’ll get my handbag.” Lois invited herself, and Mara hoped she got a really ugly hat.
“That’s a fine idea.” Stella sounded so cheerful, Mara wondered where they were headed. Out with a bunch of teamsters, it sounded like, but it had to be at least a step up from an evening in the loft with Lois.
She stared at the clump of hat wearing grandmas waiting outside the bland cement building. “You’re the shipping crew?”
Stella pointed to a pair of round women. “The Marthas.” There were two. “Velma.” Stella rolled her eyes a little, and Mara could see the cranky lines around Velma’s mouth that might have inspired Stella’s general annoyance. The beautifully soft faced one Stella introduced as Jennie. And the tiniest woman Mara had ever met in person, the crew member who had to be the owner of the child-sized work overalls she’d seen in Stella’s office, was Sadie.
She tried to concentrate on the interactions as Lois was introduced to them, but the women had such elaborate hats on, she found herself distracted by feathers and ribbons, a bird, cherries, and a mermaid in a red bikini. Plus, they were the shipping crew, the ones who packed the boxes and lugged them to the truck and…
“We lift weights.” Sadie, the tiny one, sounded like Minnie Mouse.
Stella nodded. “Osteoporosis is a bitch. And the women of the shipping crew do not go down without a fight.”
Lois picked imaginary lint off her sleeve, the word
bitch
no doubt driving her to distraction.
“Mara’s gonna help us load the next shipment.” Stella made a Rosie the Riveter bicep pump, and Mara smiled despite a twinge of disappointment. She should be glad the crew was a whole mess of senior citizens and not a bunch of young toughs who would show her a night out on the town. In fact, she was glad. These darling ladies would give her a lovely evening, and she needed to stay out of trouble.
The men weren’t naked. Yet. Probably never. She downed her margarita and watched the stage. Surely they’d still have on some bit of fabric when the music stopped. She felt Stella elbow her and leaned in closer to hear above the deafening country western song the three cowboys danced to. “Didn’t think a bunch of old ladies would be draggin’ you here, did ya?” She gave a scratchy laugh, and Mara laughed in return. A nervous laugh? A happy laugh? Everything was so strange how could she tell her own state?
She looked down the length of the table at the shipping crew, all decked out in their purple outfits topped with jaunty hats. Mara reached up and touched the loaner hat Stella surprised her with. It bore flowers worthy of Easter and would have been appropriate for a tea house. From her peripheral vision, Mara caught a stripper pump his pelvis and changed her hat style from tea house to
he
house. She shook her head, felt the ribbons of her bonnet tap against her cheek. She’d decided she wasn’t even going to check on Lois. Lois probably needed an EMT to shock her back to life. Maybe one of the guys would be a fireman stripper and have some equipment.
She felt a giggle escape her despite the fact that it was getting pretty serious on stage. The music picked up its tempo, and the ranch hands gyrated quicker in response.
She felt Stella’s elbow in her side again. “Enjoy yourself, girl.” Stella had to shout when the crowd began to hoot and whistle, the shipping crew leading the call to arms, or groping hands as the case may be.
Smiling back at Stella, she could feel the crooked nature of it, one side failing to rise as far as the other, but her hesitation didn’t deter Stella, who lifted her drink and waited until Mara lifted her own. “Everything will work out.”
She took a cool green sip, enjoyed the sweet and the bite of necessary alcohol. “You’re right. Everything works out for the best, doesn’t it?”
“For the best?” Stella snorted, “Life’s a cluster fuck.”
Mara coughed when she choked on the swallow.
“Sometimes things are better after change and sometimes they can really go in the crapper.”
She took another gulp to soothe her throat then had to put her hand to her head to stop the cold headache forming there.
“Things go well. Things go poorly. And someday you’re an old woman wearing a big ass hat.” Stella motioned down the length of the table. “That’s why you should enjoy yourself.”