Whole Latte Life (20 page)
Rachel’s eyes stop on a clean change of clothes hanging over the back of a wooden chair. So she can figure Tom never sees her in her work clothes. Those stay behind in the carriage house. And the leather journal she carries everywhere, it’s here, on the chair too.
“He doesn’t know about this place?” Rachel asks.
“No, but wait.” Sara Beth walks to the one-drawer stand she has been working on. “There’s so much to tell. Sometimes, honestly, my head spins with it all.”
“That’s what New York was for. I waited all that weekend for you to spill big stuff like this.” Rachel looks around the room. “I don’t know what to make of you anymore, Sara. I don’t know what to make of your marriage, if it’s working, if you’re getting a divorce. You’ve clearly planned something big here. But listen, don’t tell me if you’re opening a shop or if you’re dealing antiques. Don’t tell me anything. I’m not keeping anymore of your secrets.”
“Rachel.”
“No.” She holds up her hand. “I wish you’d come to me in New York and talked to me about this. Because now I don’t want to know what you’re doing. You’ve taken this really considerable life of yours and twisted it all up somehow.”
And so two words, said once again, will bring new memories. This one of Rachel standing outside her car, shielding her eyes from the sun. At the thought of those two words, she’ll forever summon that image, and the one of Rachel dropping her keys, bending for them, straightening with a deep breath that might begin a sentence trying to get past all this.
Maybe, to salvage what remains of their friendship, she has to shut her out of her life. Not permanently, but for a while, to save Rachel from being further hurt. When her life is back on track, she’ll try to recover this friendship. So she does something that scares the hell out of her. And what she realizes is that she’s done this before in her life. Getting scared, making instant decisions, doing a double take at herself.
“Listen,” she says, before she can change her mind. “Please don’t come back. You’re not a part of this.”
Sara Beth feels like some sort of an arrow slung from the great heaving bow of her life. She has to move Rachel out of the way until she straightens things out. Hopefully, over a huge pot of coffee some day she can’t even fathom yet, she’ll be able to explain this all. Because incredibly, she feels more like a new person, the right person, the more she follows her heart. So Tom can’t know about this carriage house just yet, the risk being he might stop her somehow. And this friendship can
not
be a bitter consequence.
Sara Beth’s heart almost breaks with Rachel’s quick breath then. That one breath holds a possibility of saying
I’m sorry,
somehow.
Let’s fix this once and for all.
“Sara.”
“No. Rachel.” This is the hardest thing she will ever in her livelong life say to her best friend, to save their friendship in the long run. She glances up, praying first for a special
some day,
the kind you hope for, the kind when all the stars are aligned in your favor and magically grant a wish, hers being to find this friendship again. Because their whole life is mapped out in the constellations, in the sky, they always thought that, especially those summers at the beach. If you looked up long enough, you recognized something in the celestial life, something of yourself. Someday she hopes she can find this part of her life again, this Rachel part.
“Get out.”
Rachel moves to speak, then stops and turns, getting in her car and driving away.
And Sara Beth stands there, and what she’s hearing, echoing, are those words,
Get out,
as they come storming back into her life. She never dreamt she’d say them again, and doing so spins her back twenty years.
Maybe that was the mistake that landed her here today, one simple error in judgment that turned her away from her self. That ultimately cost her mother’s life. One little decision two decades ago, and her life did an about-face. She chose safety.
It was between Claude or Tom. She’d chosen wrong when she’d stood in her kitchen and told Claude to “Get out.”
Would it help to find that old constellation again? The one with Claude in it?
She goes back in the carriage house, drawn in by the leather journal.
Where are you Mom? I really need you right now. Because I’m not sure if I’m doing this right. Any of it. How can I be, if it feels like the carriage house just cost me Rachel? This would’ve been so much easier with you here. Okay listen, I don’t know if it’s possible, but can you at least send me a sign, somehow? Please?
S
ome people say that white is not a color, it’s simply the absence of color. Sara Beth disagrees. She loves white because it is the color of beginnings. A clean palette. And the next week, she’s ready to Feng Shui it into her living room because what better room to shift the energy in her
living
.
The idea to focus on the energy of her home came at the same time she won the bid on the Sotheby’s antique. After lifting the carefully packed white hued snake leg candlestand from its box, she decided to keep it in her home until she had her own antique shop. It felt right, and so she finally had a little of this: A white antique, a new beginning, circa 1765.
You always loved red, Mom. Burgundy window treatments, throws, a velvet chair. Bold and daring and passionate. So I’m going to Feng Shui it into my “Living” Room.
And a can of deep red paint came into her life to cover one living room wall.
“Mom?” Kat asks, walking into the newly painted room.
“Hey there, Kat. Do you like it?” Sara Beth steps back to admire the wall.
“I guess. But red?”
“Yes. I’m doing a little Feng Shui. You know, changing the energy in our home. I like the red. Fire! Passion! Don’t you feel it?”
Kat drops into the wingback chair and studies the wall. “It needs something.”
“And I have just the thing!” Sara Beth sets the white candlestand at the north corner of the wall. “An accent piece. White, for clarity and balance. We’ll put a vase of flowers on it.”
“Do they have to be a certain color too?”
“I guess they would now. Want to help me? We’ll buy silk flowers and make a big spray.”
“What colors can we buy?”
“Well, it’s the north wall, so a color that works in the north. According to the Feng Shui chart, that would be Earth colors, yellows and beiges. Maybe sprigs of forsythia? That would be really pretty, and the earth colors nourish our relationships.”
“How about a color for money? Like green?” Tom asks as he walks into the room holding a piece of mail. “Something to nourish the bank account.”
“What do you mean?”
“To cover this five thousand plus charge to Sotheby’s, dated during your Manhattan escapade. And you can explain what you’re doing in my house, and this red wall while you’re at it.”
“It’s Feng Shui,” Kat says, curled in the upholstered chair, mesmerized by the new color.
“Feng what?” Tom asks.
“I’m just changing things around, Tom,” Sara Bath says. “It’s no big deal.”
“Five thousand is a big deal. And so is your being here redecorating. You’re supposed to call first and clear it with me.”
“I did call. No one was home. And come on, Tom.” She moves closer to him and whispers, “This separation isn’t forever.” When he stares at her, she continues, “Or is it?”
“Dad,” Kat says, and Sara Beth turns. She hears the anxiety in her voice, the worry about her parents splitting up. Kat the peacemaker. “Want to come with us to buy flowers?”
“Flowers for what?”
“For that table. The white one.”
Tom looks at the white painted snake foot candlestand, then at Sara Beth. “Sotheby’s?”
Rachel didn’t know how else to reach out to Sara Beth and thought planting the flower barrels on The Green would be her olive branch.
Get out
or not, she got the job done regardless with a few other friends, beneath the warm June sun. Life always has a funny way of filling up Rachel’s days.
But now those two words still ring.
Get out.
Last week’s flower planting without her friend feels like a farewell. Today she’s alone instead of patching up a broken friendship. Absence becomes a piece of her heart, a real concrete absence in place of her friend and daughter on this Wednesday morning with the sun streaming and the flowers in bloom. But fresh from the shower, when she steps into her sunroom and tunes in Stevie Nicks on the stereo, doesn’t life go and give her what she needs when the doorbell rings?
Life calling. For Rachel DeMartino.
“Holy cow,” she says with a smile as she opens the front door. It’s early, just after nine o’clock.
“Hi,” Michael says on the other side of the screen, a cellophane-wrapped grocery store bouquet in his hand. She hasn’t seen him since their New York weekend and his presence now is huge. She crosses her arms in front of her. “Hey stranger,” she says through the ear-to-ear grin that life just delivered.
“Hey. Do you want to go to the beach?” Michael asks. “Maybe? With me?”
He wears a Yankees cap backwards, aviator sunglasses, plain dark t-shirt and khaki cargo shorts. Okay, she can’t help it and eyes the length of his body. He has on Docksiders, with no socks.
“Is this a date?” she asks through squinted eyes, so glad she changed out of her robe and into capris and a tank top with a light cardigan.
“Could be. If you’d invite me in.”
“Did you drive all the way from New York?” She swings open the screen door and sees his pickup truck parked on the street.
“I did,” he says. He pulls off his cap and hands her the flowers. “For you.”
“Come on in.” She is still smiling and has a funny feeling that she’ll be smiling all day. Half way to the kitchen, she turns, reaches up to his face and kisses him. “I can’t believe you drove all the way here. It is so good to see you.”
“You too,” he says, taking off his sunglasses.
“How did you find my house? And, wait a minute, how did you know I’d be free today?”
“I MapQuested you.” Michael stands near the kitchen counter while she fills a vase with water. “And I knew you wouldn’t be busy. Well, prayed was more like it.”
Over the sink, slats of sunlight stream in the kitchen window through its white half-shutters. She looks over her shoulder to see if the nerves and prayers that got him to Connecticut show. Not really, except that he fidgets with his cap. She sets the flowers in the vase and motions for him to take a seat. The table is small and square, a country table with a white tile top and golden pine trim. French doors open to the sunporch behind him.
“You knew I wouldn’t be busy?” She places the vase on the table and sits across from him. “Am I that predictable?”
“No. It’s just that today is the day of the eleventh commandment.”
“I can’t wait to hear this.”
“Wasn’t it on your teaching certificate? All teachers shall spend the first Wednesday of summer vacation at the beach, at the water’s edge.”
School let out Monday. “I am on summer vacation, aren’t I?” She wriggles her bare toes beneath the table. “You really want to go to the beach?”
“That’s why I’m here. Do you want to come with me? I mean, I just assumed, maybe.”