Whole Latte Life (19 page)
Sara Beth glances up at the ceiling. Owen sits at the kitchen table in his booster seat and Tom jumps when he drops his cereal spoon on the floor. It pisses him off, the way he jumped, and the way Sara Beth would’ve felt it. He gives her a look that says
See what you’re doing? You happy now?
before letting go of her arm.
“Owen. Hey, there.” He wipes off the spoon on a napkin and sets it back on the table. It’s interesting how the kids separate them like this, getting Tom away from their mother, trying to keep peace when the tension between them tightens. Like Owen’s trying to separate them now. He uses the same napkin to blot off his forehead before running after Sara Beth walking out of the kitchen. He grabs her arms from behind and spins her around with a shake.
“Tom,” she says harshly. “
Please
.”
“Please what? Help me out here.”
She leans back against the wall and he fences her in with his outstretched arms. How can he already be tired, so much so that he wants to go back to bed? He feels his hair lying damp and flat and Jen yells something, some dark threat flung through the air straight at her sister upstairs, something about a shirt or dirt or shit or something.
“It’s late, Tom. You have to get to work.”
“How can I leave like this? I want to know what you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“I thought we were working things out. After last weekend?” Shiny hoops hang from her newly pierced ears and his hand moves to touch one.
“It’s nothing. I just…”
“Just
what
, Sara? If you don’t like the Volvo, say so.”
“Well a van might be better. You know. I’m driving three kids around now.”
“You always hated vans.”
“It’s not just for the kids. I could use it for my furniture, too.”
“Your antiques? I thought we decided to wait a few years on that.”
“I could get into it gradually having my own yard sales. Things like that.”
“You’re certainly not ready to take on a new endeavor right now.” His eyes shift to her hands. “Where are your rings?”
“My what?”
“Your wedding band, damn it. And your diamond.”
Sara Beth looks at her hand, then closes her eyes for a long moment. “I lost them.”
“How do you lose your wedding rings?”
“Well I don’t know. I must’ve misplaced them when I came back from New York.”
“They’ve been gone that long? Sara, those rings were blessed.”
“It just happened, Tom. I didn’t plan it.”
Tom drops his head, his arms still fencing her in. “So no rings and now you want a van? I think this midlife crisis of yours needs to be more give and take. Maybe after you take some therapy, I’ll give.” He stares at her then, and he’s tired, so tired.
Owen starts crying in the kitchen and pushes his bowl of cereal off the table.
“Jesus, this isn’t working, Sara.” His face is inches from hers. “We’re really messing up the kids the way you come and go and stir them up. I don’t want you spending the night anymore.” Then he drops his arms and goes to clean up the kitchen floor.
R
achel loves the way it happens every year, as summer nears. The nurseries overflow with flats of marigolds and snapdragons, dahlias and zinnias. Black pots of scarlet geraniums sit on front stoops. Purple and white petunias grow with abandon from hanging pots hooked onto country lampposts. And bright yellow marigolds fringe vegetable gardens. Walking through Addison is like looking through a kaleidoscope of flowers.
Her phone rings early Saturday morning.
“You sound surprised to hear me,” Michael says.
“I just hung up with Ashley. I thought she might call back.” Rachel checks her watch. Michael must be getting ready to go to work. “Gosh she’s having a hard time away at college.”
“Why doesn’t she come home for the summer?”
“She got a job on campus as a Research Assistant, and enrolled in a summer course.”
“Well later in the summer then, after the class.”
“Maybe. I get emails and text messages from her all the time. If we weren’t three hours apart, she’d be visiting too. I think it’s too much being away with her dad gone now.”
“She’s young, Rachel. And it’s like you’re gone too, being so far away. Can’t you go spend time with her?”
His words are the thoughts Sara Beth would say if they chewed on this over a coffee at Whole Latte Life.
How about this, Can you try that,
suggestions that see right to the heart. “Maybe I’ll ask her to quit her job and come home for a couple months,” Rachel says. “She’s only a sophomore and doesn’t have to work so hard.”
Ashley had cried on the phone.
After a pause when she’s sure he’s swallowing a quick bite of a bagel or sandwich, he tells her, “I know how you feel. The closer Summer’s moving day gets, the more I find her at my place. She’s reaching out too.”
“But you’re close enough for her to reach.”
“I am. I wish there were easy answers for you.”
Easy answers. Oh if life were only filled with them. She worries about her daughter and looks for answers where she always has. At Whole Latte Life. The Saturday tag sale crowd just dispersed, folded newspapers tucked under their arms, the tag sale column marked up with circled ads, coffee in-hand. She misses being part of that crowd on Sara Beth’s antique hunts. Here it is mid-June and the strain of her May disappearance has turned into these tributaries of quiet now. And if ever there was a Sara Beth moment, this is it, at this table overlooking the Green. She needs to sit across from her over two large coffees, getting her through this terrible longing with a suggestion, or a smile, or a call for
Road Trip
, the spontaneous destination being Ashley’s dorm.
Well, spontaneity works both ways so she calls Sara Beth’s home and gets the address she is staying at from Tom, then grabs a Colombian Blend, her eyes sweeping The Green outside the window. Addison’s Adopt-a-Barrel program has a few empty barrels left for planting, so a mini-road trip is in order. It isn’t that far out of the way. Old Willow Road is in the historic part of town, out past the covered bridge. Willow tree branches cascade alongside the street. If Sara’s staying at a friend of her mother’s, maybe she’ll have free time to plant their adopted barrels, like they’ve done every year. Some years they go all exotic in their choices, and others they overload the barrels with sweet summer geraniums. She’ll stop at the nursery along the way and pick just the right flower seedlings to plant.
What are ghosts, really? Nothing more than memories stirred up, rising to haunt you. To challenge you to wonder if you made the right choice. And it didn’t take much to awaken those ghosts. Sara Beth walks through the carriage house, silent but for the memories skimming her thoughts now, ghosts invited back with a couple of words.
“Where is everyone?”
“What?”
“Your family. Your parents. Aren’t they going to see you off?”
They stood in the kitchen of the old farmhouse. It was the first room her mother had renovated, the heart of the home. Sara Beth walked to the sink and glanced out the window to the yard. When she turned back and looked at Claude standing there, his hair moppy, his jeans, concert tee and jacket casual, his face was still unaware. There was a moment when she saw it, though, saw actual realization. When his eyes swept the room, looking for her luggage. Duffel bags, a backpack. Backpacks were their staples when they studied abroad. A suitcase. Anything. And then he looked to her eyes.
She shook her head. “I’m not going,” she whispered after a long moment.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t,” she said.
He stepped out into the hallway, walked through the living room then ran up the stairs to her bedroom. She knew, oh she knew just what he was doing. And he wouldn’t find the luggage he was looking for.
He nearly stumbled coming back down the steps, before stopping up short in the kitchen. “Parlez-en a moi!”
“I can’t go.”
“What? Pourquoi?
Nous avions prevu
.”
“Claude. No. English, please.”
“
We had plans
, Sara Beth. And one of them was
no
English. We’d live in the land and speak the language. Be a part of it. A part of the art, of the masters’ world. Let it assimilate us right into it.”
That’s what life seemed to be all about. Assimilation. Becoming who the environment around us dictated. Letting it be the arms holding us, nurturing our souls. Claude wanted her to return to France with him and become the artists the French countryside inspired. To live the carefree days of their college year abroad. But it’s hard to leave safety. To leave security. To step off that edge into a dream. And she’d been falling ever since. Falling in a downward spiral since she chose a different destination. One that put her on a date with Tom two nights after Claude boarded the plane alone. Two nights after his harsh words accusing her of cowardice, accusing her family of stopping her, angry words flung across the space in the kitchen as she stood amidst all the efforts of her mother’s passion. The refinished ceiling beams, the dried herbs hanging from them. The working kitchen fireplace. The antique farm table and chairs. And she defended all she was in that one moment with two simple words. Two words that set her on a plunge that it sometimes felt like she was still in.
Ghosts? Oh yes. The memory of her choice that day haunts her now. What if, what if she’d gone with Claude? All the what ifs return when she finds herself, all these years later, standing among stoneware pitchers and a cherry washstand and a chest of drawers and a secretary, oak, rosewood, cherry, leather tops, drop leafs, all beneath the ceiling beams of the carriage house.
“Holy moly,” Rachel says behind her. “I can’t believe my eyes.”
And isn’t it the same as Claude not believing his eyes. Not believing she was choosing a life, a dream, other than the one he’d assumed.
Sara Beth steps in front of her wearing jeans and a faded denim shirt, the cuffs rolled up and frayed. There are work boots on her feet and rubber gloves on her hands. Her cropped hair is tucked under a blue bandana. Grimy furniture finish drips from the rag in her hand. “Why don’t we go outside. Please? We’ll talk there.”
And in the hesitation, Rachel’s eyes sweep the room the same way Claude’s did. The same realization comes over them as his. That Sara Beth had chosen differently.
And like then, questions form each time their eyes meet.
What is this, your own shop? How did you find me? Where did you get this furniture? Can you believe what I’m doing? Why did you desert me in New York?
Because it always comes down to that, beneath all the other questions.
How could you expect me to let you walk out and not reach for you, not pull you back?
It’s their own sign language, the way they read each other.
Sara Beth pulls off her bandana and snaps the dripping gloves off her fingers.
“Tom told me you were staying with a friend of your Mom’s. He gave me the address, and,” Rachel stops then and turns around, taking in the antiques around her. “I was thinking maybe we could plant the—”
“Wait. Tom. About Tom, if you could just, I don’t know, not mention this to him?”