The waitress walked onto the trolley, took one look at them squaring off over the table, dropped the bread basket, and left.
Dan pulled the cloth napkin back and closed his eyes as he breathed in the warm breadsticks. He plucked out the largest one, took a bite, and sat back with a satisfied smile amid the chewing.
She grabbed a breadstick and pointed it at his chest, and he stopped smiling when she poked him. “What am I doing that’s so terrible?”
He frowned at her. “Besides getting parmesan on my shirt?”
“Is it illegal? Immoral? Irresponsible?” Mara jerked the breadstick up, ignored the flurry of cheese on the table. “Okay, it’s a bit irresponsible, but I’m due. I’ve never been irresponsible even a little in my whole life.”
His eyebrows shot up. “A bit irresponsible? This is completely wrong. You’ve left your house, your family, your work.” He brushed at the front of his shirt with his left hand while power eating the bread with his right.
“I’ve taken a couple of weeks’ vacation from my house, which will still be standing at the end of the month even if it’s out of paper products. Logan is enjoying his time with your parents whether I’m home or not. You
chose
to sleep in the car when you could have gone home. Maybe you could use this time to do what you want to do. There’s a crazy idea. And my work doesn’t start up again until school, which you know perfectly well.”
Dan didn’t respond but reached for another breadstick and ate his way through it with even, methodical bites. He didn’t look confused anymore. Mara cursed herself. Encouraging him to raise his blood sugar had been a mistake.
The waitress peeked up the trolley stairs, and Mara motioned her in and handed over her credit card. “I’ll pay for
three
breadsticks.” She pointed one at Dan. “Two, he ate, and this one’s used because I poked his shirt with it.” The waitress took the card but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. She left, reluctantly, and Mara watched for her return, avoiding Dan, who stared across the table. There’d been a shift between them, a shift of power maybe, of advantage. When they’d walked into the restaurant, she’d felt strong about staying, but Dan had gone from rumpled to resolved, and her grip on her month felt shaky. She needed to get off the stuck trolley and back to her reason for taking a break. She needed to get a whiff of Abundance.
“Those are so cute.” Celia admired the sunglasses Mara had just added to her peach dress/pink butterfly sandals outfit. Gretchen had helped her pick them out after she’d escaped the restaurant and Dan. The shades were red with blue rhinestones, but things didn’t have to match to be
so cute
apparently.
She touched the cat eye corner. “Thank you. Gretchen’s got everything.”
“I never go in there.” Celia shook her head, “I’m saving my money, and I want everything I see.”
She laughed, enjoying the enthusiasm of Celia. She tried to think back to her own life at nineteen. Had she wanted everything she’d seen? She’d wanted things, experiences too, but always with an internal reserve. She had things to learn from Celia. She thought of the women she knew at home, pictured the teacher friends, the neighbors in the subdivision. She’d never realized they were all, except for the cranky Mrs. Laird, the same age as she was. They were possibly even her same make and model, like a factory that chugged out wives and moms built to drive the distance without breaking down. But she had, that night in Seattle, and if she didn’t fix herself she might end up being the bitter, dried up Mrs. Laird. She took in a shaky breath and froze.
Celia laughed. “Can you smell it?”
She breathed in deeper, and the most delicious scent spread to her brain and relaxed her very cells.
Celia sniffed the air. “I could earlier today, but when you’re here a while, you get used to it.”
“I know how that is.” Maybe everybody needed some perspective now and then. She didn’t at the moment because every scent receptor in her nose communicated a sweet, creamy perspective. It smelled like a modest flower had given it up to a pound of butter. She felt weak in the knees.
“You should test it.” Celia nodded her head toward the workroom.
“I should test it.” Mara grinned and skirted the counter, heading towards the workroom and the intoxication of Lusciousness.
She stopped a foot into the room.
He was up to his elbows in a vat of what looked like the love child of vanilla ice-cream and sugar cookie dough. Dark curls messed around his forehead, and when he looked up, she registered that his eyes were green, and she’d stopped breathing.
He spread his hands in charming invitation, and she made her way towards him despite the small part of her brain that asked,
an invitation to what?
He slid his hands back into the giant bowl that rested on a low table already flecked with bits of soap that had flown out like soft white rain drops.
She watched him concentrate on the mix, glad she’d kept her sunglasses on so staring was theoretically less obvious. His hands squeezed the batter, studied it for something, a texture, a thickness, a softness. Around him the smell of vanilla, almonds, and soapy sugar circled like an aromatherapy fog, and he looked at her through the scent haze and tipped his head toward the work in a clear invitation to join him.
She stepped up to the table but felt unprepared to offer any help. It was like she’d just walked into a test she hadn’t studied for, but the buttery smell, so compelling, made her reach out just to discover if it felt as warm and velvety as it looked. She dipped a finger in the heat of it, found a lump and squeezed it between her finger and thumb until it melted like a pat of butter. She slid the rest of her fingers, the ones still out in the cold, into the batter, and they heated instantly. She waved her hand back and forth in the cream.
She didn’t notice that he watched her as he curved around the bowl’s rim, loosening the wave of vanilla that slid back into the mix. He moved his hands together, pulling the batter toward the center.
It was a Luscious whirlpool, a Luscious eddy, a Luscious ocean crest. Mara plunged in past her wrists and brought the heels of both hands together. She pushed toward the center, and the cream rushed over her fingers like a slippery river.
In the middle of the bowl she felt the tangle of his fingers as they brought the batter inward. She watched the ripples of it, like art unfolding before her, a study of working hands and cream blurring together.
She moved to cup the inside of the bowl and brought more warm silk back to the center, watching his hands shape it.
“It’s great, huh?”
Mara jumped as her attention came back to Celia standing beside, and she pulled her hands out and took the towel Celia offered her. “Lost myself for a minute there.”
The man lifted a hand full of batter from the bowl and palmed it into a rough ball. “Lost. Found. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.”
Celia opened a cellophane bag, and he dropped the butter ball in. She twisted it closed with a silvery-blue tie and held it out.
Mara took it in her palm, felt the warmth through the cellophane, and met his green eyes. “I’m Mara.”
He smiled and continued to work, filling the indentations of a metal tray with the batter. “I know.”
“I’m married.”
He didn’t slow, just continued to form the soaps. “There are only two kinds of women who need some Abundance. Single women. And married women.”
Her head lowered, and she stared at him over the top of her sunglasses.
Celia patted the top of her bag, and Mara jumped again at the crinkle of cellophane. Celia smiled at her. “Tell us what you think.”
About his eyes? “Oh, the soap. Right.” She pushed her sunglasses back on the bridge of her nose, leaving a delicate smudge of soap on two rhinestones. The phone rang at the desk, and Celia pulled on her arm, taking them both toward the front with perky chatting. “The almond’s pretty new, but I think it will be really popular because it just smells so good. I can’t really smell it now, but I did earlier, and it was great.”
Mara tried to focus on Celia and get out of the workroom without looking back, but despite her best intentions, she glanced over her shoulder and saw him smile as if he knew she’d take one more look. “Happy Independence Day.”
Celia tugged, and Mara tripped around the corner.
She paced the loft, moving from the windows to the kitchen bar, where a few odd chocolates still clustered in the bag. She popped one in her mouth and studied the teddy calendar. It was the fourth of July. Independence Day. That’s all the man meant. How had she not known? She’d never missed a holiday before. Her mother-in-law had given her flags for most of them, little garden ones with bunnies or pumpkins or snowmen. God, wasn’t it just one more thing to keep track of? She even had a red, white, and blue one just for the fourth.
She reconstructed her flagless day. She’d slept through half of it, recovering from her reading bender the night before. Then there’d been the bad lunch with Dan. She was going to think of the trolley fiasco as
three breadsticks and a plate full of guilt
. Then, well, she’d plunged up to her elbows in a vat of vanilla with a stranger. What kind of woman did that kind of thing?
She’d left the United States on Canada Day and then on the anniversary of her country’s, well, anniversary, she’d found herself swapping soap with a nameless Canadian.
She was in trouble. A woman in trouble was the kind of woman who did that. She needed to ground herself. She’d call Logan and remember her real life, her real country, her real job… raising an American child to adulthood. Adulthood. That’s where she lived. That was her home country. She was fine.
She dialed her in-laws and sat back on the best couch she’d ever had. There, gratitude. Gratitude was grounding, even on Independence Day.
“Mulligan residence.”
“Hi, Lois. It’s Mar… Janie. Just calling to check on Logan.”
Mara waited for the usual quick update, the efficient grandmother status report and then the phone pass to Logan. But there was silence, the pause too long. It was Logan… stitches, a cast, an undiagnosed rash… “What’s wrong, Lois?”
“Nothing’s wrong
here
, Janie. I know that you can’t say the same for your own state of affairs.”
Mara’s mouth opened on a sharp sip of air, and she sat on the edge of the couch, like she might need to bolt. What had Dan told her?
“I don’t care to know the particulars, Janie. But may I remind you, you are a married woman with responsibilities. Whatever you’ve done, you ask for forgiveness, and prove yourself to be a good wife from here on out.”
Mara shot off the couch. For fifteen years of marriage, she’d been the good wife, the good daughter-in-law. She stood shaking in front of the windows. “I’m not doing anything I need to ask forgiveness for. I just wanted some bubble bath.”
“What you’ve done is none of my business, Janie. I do not want to hear the sordid details.”
She sucked in more air before speech came. “There aren’t any sordid anythings.” She shook out the image of slick fingers and green eyes and cleared her throat. “I’m taking a couple of weeks in Vancouver, and I’ll be home when Logan is. That’s it.”
“Janie, there are lots of things out there to help a woman in your situation.”
“I have a situation?”
“You go see someone. There’s no shame in getting help.”
Lois suggesting therapy? Mara hadn’t realized Lois knew there was therapy in the world. The woman thought good manners could cure anything, and housework was a rewarding hobby. “It’s thoughtful of you to be concerned, Lois, but I don’t think I’m interested in therapy right now.”
“Of course not, heavens, what would people think? Honestly, Janie, Dan has wonderful insurance, and I’m sure it would all be covered.”
“What would be? I came for bubble bath. Insurance is gonna pay for bubble bath?”
“Prozac, dear, or one of those other ones. You know there’s a lavender pill they advertise so much for. I’m sure you’d have your choice. Your father was a doctor, and you know how much help they can prescribe.”
Mara felt her breath hitch and blew out slowly to steady herself, but Lois rolled on before any steadying could occur. “Get yourself all straightened out and everything will be fine.”
Hadn’t she said nearly the same thing to herself? But when Lois said it, it sounded less possible, and she felt panic flutter again. She couldn’t be that far gone, and she didn’t need that kind of help. “Lois, I don’t have a Prozac deficiency. I just wanted a little time for myself.”
“This is not about you.” Lois’ voice snapped sharper. “You’re a wife and a mother.”
She wanted to snap back but felt the judgment and her own guilt weighing her down. She couldn’t decide which one angered her more. “And? Why don’t I get any part of my life for myself?”
“You have a lovely home. Janie, you’re needed there. Dan needs you. Logan needs you. I sent a thank you note right to your house for the birthday scarf Logan brought me.”
The scarf. The damn scarf she picked out every year so Lois had something from Logan. Year in, year out, she’d shopped, bought Lois a present she claimed to love but probably never wore after Logan left, and then Lois would write the dry thank you note saying just the right thing for just the right gift and why? So they could both go on, safe in the grinding normalcy of their lives? So they could hang holiday flags, get all strung out on Prozac and lilac pills, and be needed? “Let me get this straight, Lois. I need to medicate myself so I can put a smile on my face. I need to go home because my husband can’t function without me for one month without telling his mom, and I have a thank you note waiting in my lovely home that’s out of facial tissues?”
She waited out the long pause while Lois presumably checked the nineteen-fifty’s etiquette book burned onto her brain’s hard drive. “Well, I don’t know anything about your facial tissue situation, but yes.”
“I’m never buying you another scarf.”
Lois made a yip of a sound, like a small dog experiencing a jerked chain.
“Put Logan on.
Please
.” Lois had better put Logan on or Mara would hunt the biddy down and open a can of whoop ass on her. She didn’t know what a can of whoop ass consisted of or what opening one would do, but it sounded really good, and for the first time in her life, she felt up for it. She waited, and the silence stretched on, then a shuffle, and a boy huff of breath in the receiver.