Whole Latte Life (21 page)
“Let me get changed and pack a bag.” She stands and starts out of the kitchen. “But can I make you a coffee first?” she asks, turning suddenly back and catching him dabbing a napkin on his forehead. “Or would you like some juice?”
Michael shakes his head no.
“We’ll stop on the way and get something?”
“Sounds good, Rachel.” He sits back in the chair looking a little relieved.
“Awesome.” She stares curiously at him again. “Is this for real? You drove all the way from New York to do
this
? Aren’t you tired?”
“Time’s wasting.”
“Let
me
drive to the beach then?”
“Fair enough.”
She hurries from the kitchen still smiling, thinking
Yippee!
Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, it’s a perfect word.
Michael stands and stretches his legs, stiff from two hours in the truck. His shoulders are tense too and he rolls out a kink. Each darn love song on the radio made him wonder if he was making a mistake, if Rachel would be glad to see him, if his feelings were exaggerated by her absence. Until he finally switched to an all-news station. Now a month of time stands between them. He rolls his shoulders and picks a ripe peach from the fruit bowl on the counter.
Music comes from the sunporch and he bites into the peach and wanders out there. Tall windows let in sunlight warming upholstered furniture and hardwood floors. Hand-painted wooden herons stand in the far corner beside spiky cattails spilling from a large clay floor vase. Soft music rises from a shelf system on a built-in bookcase where pale pink conch shells nestle among books.
The room is so intriguing, he backs right into an antique easel, its dark oak frame holding a large blank paper in place. He catches it before it falls over, but not before a case of drawing charcoals slide from the lower tray. When he sets them back in the case, the back wall has him do a double take.
Sketches mounted in silvery-gray wooden frames fill the space. Most are pencil on paper, some charcoal, and a few are pastel. He studies them, biting into the peach as he goes.
A couple of sketches portray a man at two different times in his life, a man who must be Carl. He’s a little older than Rachel and he sees respect in her pencil lines. There’s a sketch of a young girl with long, fine hair, and he touches the glass of the frame lightly. From the tender gaze caught in the artist’s charcoal strokes, this can only be Rachel’s daughter.
The next portrait is Sara Beth. But not the woman he saw in New York. This shows Rachel’s personal description of her, the gentleness, in the rendering and in the artist’s touch.
There are other sketches, too, filled with incredible background detail and colors. There are stone jetties and sunset scenes drawn with such a fine touch, the medium seems to be pastel, though it is pencil. He sees hot afternoons when beach umbrellas line the shoreline like a row of swirling lollipops, and dark windy days drawn in a thousand shades of gray. Seagulls perch on weathered pilings. Rachel’s pencils find the softness in marsh grasses and swans and neglected wooden rowboats, contrasting with the straight lines of her summer home’s imposing two stories, its large old windows opened to the sea, and salty breezes, and seagull cries.
This is her heaven.
Rachel breezes into the room carrying a large canvas tote.
“You’re very talented,” Michael says, turning to study the artist. She changed into black Bermuda shorts, a white tank top, flat leather sandals. Her hair is French braided in an artist side he didn’t see in New York.
“Oh, my sketches. They’re a hobby of mine.” She glances at her work.
“You could make money with your talent. Or teach art instead of fifth grade.”
“It wouldn’t be the same then,” she says, straightening a frame. “
Having
to do it, you know?”
“Couldn’t you get used to it? Making a living doing what you love?”
“I am,” she says. “With my job, I’ve got two empty months in front of me to spend as much time as I’d like,” she pauses as she studies her pictures, “here.” She points to the row of colorful beach umbrellas. “I don’t go as much as I used to, but I’ve got this room at home when I’m not there.”
“It’s a great space.” The large windows open onto a green lawn where a stone birdbath is tucked into a rock garden and a birdhouse hangs from the low branches of an old maple tree. Rows of baby tomato plants fill a vegetable garden off to the side, away from the cool shade of the trees.
“After I sold my share of the cottage, I used the money to build this room. My beach room.”
He turns back to the wall of sketches. Their frames are a blend of grays and browns, driftwood from the beach.
Rachel picks up her tote. “I’ve got sand chairs and an umbrella in the garage. It’ll be hot in the sun. Ready?”
On the way out of the sunroom, she reaches for one of her sketch pads and tucks it into her canvas striped tote the way a photographer might grab a camera, or a writer a notebook.
“You have everything you need? Keys, sunblock?” he asks her in the garage.
“I do.”
“And you locked up the front door?”
She looks at him for a second, pausing before nodding and picking up the umbrella.
“Show me around a little,” Michael says once they’re in her hybrid.
“Do you mind walking?” she asks as she drives through Addison.
“No. Walking’s fine.”
She parks in a spot on Main Street in front of a Smith’s Hardware. The summer day is light on traffic and getting warmer as the sun moves high in the sky. He lets it slow him, this easy day outside of the city, walking past the potted flowers at the nursery, looking into the windows of a five and dime.
At the coffee shop, as they wait at the counter for their order, she points out an important landmark. “That’s our table.”
He considers the empty table beside a large window facing The Green. “Yours and Sara Beth’s?”
“If possession is nine tenths of the law, we should own that table.”
They take their coffees outside and walk across the street. Rachel explains the eclectic barrels of flowers dotting The Green. “Anyone can adopt a barrel and plant their choice of flowers. It can get pretty artsy.” She points out her barrels of zinnias among the snapdragons and black-eyed Susans and roses even, mixed with ornamental vines and spikes.
“Sarah and I’ve adopted barrels every year except this one. Some other friends helped me out this time.” They walk among the flowers. “She loves this Green. It’s as pretty as it is because of her volunteering.”
Colorful birdhouses hang from trees. The American flag flies from a tall white pole. Even the litter baskets are placed within wood slatted containers. There are no visual sore spots. They stop at a stone wishing fountain.
“Does this have the same potency as the stars?”
The spewing water reaches for the sky and falls in an arch of infinite silver droplets, like tiny falling stars. “I like to think so.”
He slips a penny into her hand. “You first.”
Rachel clasps the penny to her heart and closes her eyes, then tosses it into the stream of stars. “What about you?” she asks when he continues walking.
“I’m saving mine for later.”
“Later? What do you mean? At the beach?”
“Never question wishes.”
H
e made her a flower chain necklace, his fingers weaving daisies and wildflowers and long green grasses together outside the horse stable at Chateau du Masnegre. It was a beautiful July day in Valojoulx, France, and her memory of it bears the soft, liquid qualities of a canvas painting: The brown stable with the brick red roof sitting nestled into a hilltop, the slant of sunlight falling on the sloping lawn, varying the shades of green, the wooden fence surrounding the corral, with peels of white paint curling from the wood.
Sara Beth sat in the cool grass and watched Claude’s hands weaving, very much aware of the sounds around them. Has anyone ever defined the sounds of love, she wondered. Birds sang from deep in the green trees, whose leaves rustled in the breeze. An occasional nicker came from the horses in the barn, and the sound of hoofsteps rose and fell as a lone horse cantered past. The sky, watercolored blue, was the big transparent bubble around that world.
Claude finished the necklace and put it gently around her neck and she laughed, stood and spun around in the grass. “I’m so digging this, we’re having our own little Be-In. Flower power and all!” And he told her Peace, and they sat cross-legged in the sun like they were in San Francisco, circa 1969. Later she bought a pair of vintage hip-hugger bell bottoms with satin cutouts stitched into the bell from a secondhand boutique and life was hippie sweet, as it can only be in Europe at twenty years old, no matter the decade.
This is what she remembers when a piece of summer slips between her and her daughters. Kat and Jenny went with her to buy silk flowers for the candlestand. Afterward they stop at the cove with ice cream cones. A stone wall dating back to colonial times holds back the surrounding woods, weathered picnic tables are tucked in the shade of ancient maple trees, and lazy colorful sailboats bob in the river inlet.
They sit in the shade, lulled by the motion of colorful vessels on water, the sails snow white. “Pretty, isn’t it?” Sara Beth asks.
Kat agrees, but Jenny acts too intent on licking her mocha fudge double scoop to answer. Sara Beth notices other times, when she glances up, that Jenny looks quickly away, caught observing her silently. It’s how Sara Beth feels, too, observing this other woman she wants to be, trying to figure herself out with furtive glances. She gets it, gets Jenny, but they stay silent in their sentry, easy to do near water and boats of summer, both unsure of the woman Sara Beth.
What fills their quiet are the birds singing, a boat engine idling. It would be nice to catch it, she thinks, to reach to the sky and snatch some of that summer sound and put it in a flowered box and when you need it, you open the lid and a robin’s call rises. Sometimes you’ll hear the boat far off idling, waiting for you to board on a crystal lake framed by tall green pines. And she thinks the sound of a horse nickering would be in that box as well.
Sitting with her daughters on the slivery table, she is acutely aware that so much of what we have in life slips away. She catches Kat’s eye. “Good?” she asks, and Kat tells her it’s the best. Her daughters sit with her on a summer day. They’re here with her, the same way Claude was. But who’s to vouch for the permanence of their presence, their love? So many of her loves have faded away, layers of her self diminishing. The piano, art, old lovers.