Whole Latte Life (23 page)

Sara Beth sits up in bed, her laptop propped against her knees. One ear is tuned to the noises in the house, waiting to hear Tom lock the front door, climb the stairs, come to bed. Her bedside lamp throws light on the computer screen, the coverlet is folded down at the foot of the bed. She pulls up one site as a cover: Sotheby’s.

With that page in place, she Googles Claude and cannot believe the first few entries. A curator? In a French museum north of Paris? He never stopped living the dream!
Art is my oxygen
he used to tell her. It kept him going, apparently. Sustained his life, breathing it every day. And she thought of Monet’s words, “Colour is my daylong obsession, joy and torment.” It had been hers, today. And Tom actually liked the red painted wall. So she has that now. That, and their effort to keep the marriage together under one roof again.

But can she do the rest? If she’d stayed in France all those years ago, would she be happy? Would she own a small antique shop there? Would she have mastered the language? What if, what if? Would her mother still be alive? What was she looking for?

When she hears Tom coming up the stairs, she backs out of the museum site and her desktop background fills the screen. The candid photograph is of her and her mother laughing, her mom turning to her. She sighs, reaching forward and touching her face.

“What are you doing?” Tom asks.

“Oh.” Sara brings up the other site. “Just cruising Sotheby’s.”

“As long as you’re only cruising.”

And she leaves that screen, too, seeing her mother again, noticing the scarf casually wrapped around her neck, feeling the chill of that autumn day when they went pumpkin picking. Autumn was her favorite time of year. The rich scents, apple cider, woodstoves, turkey cooking in the oven. When she was little, she told her mother she wanted to do this forever, linger in the pumpkin patches in the golden light of fall. And they’d never missed a year together. She looks up at Tom at his dresser. He always welcomed her mother into their home, their lives. He had taken the picture, after all.

Chapter Sixteen

H
ow many times has she told those kids not to slam the door? A few days passed under the auspice of calm, broken by the slam and Sara Beth spilling her coffee in a long stain on the front of her top. Jenny storms through the kitchen, her hands clenched in tight fists, her body rigid.

“Jenny!” Sara Beth calls after her, blotting coffee off her tank top with a paper towel.

Her daughter flies up the stairs in a staccato beat before slamming her bedroom door shut. Then comes a cushion of silence before the stereo cranks. Owen looks up at the ceiling from his booster seat. The music puts him on alert, his eyes wide, his spoon frozen midair. Sara Beth goes to the kitchen window. She’s surprised Kat wasn’t right behind Jenny, holding on and rising upstairs with her, the tail on her sister’s kite. Outside in the sun, Kat’s sitting on the picnic table wearing last year’s bathing suit. Her bicycle lies on the ground all cockeyed.

“Come on, fella. Let’s go see KittyKat outside.” Owen hooks his sippy cup with his fingers as she lifts him and a few drops leak out, enough to sticky the floor. Okay, so there’s that, too. Cleaning the kitchen floor. And the thought brings on another headache.

“Katherine?” Sara Beth sets Owen down on the grass near the wayward bike. Her eyes squint in the sunlight.
Brain aneurysms sometimes run in families.
Please don’t let it be a migraine. “What’s the matter with your sister?”

Kat doesn’t turn back. “Swimming lessons started today.”

“Swimming lessons.” She closes her eyes for a long second and says it. “Oh shit.”

Now Kat turns to face her and Sara catches every bit of recent neglect she tossed their way like an old bone. Her daughter’s gaze moves from her bandana to her earrings to her old jeans. Kat pulls at her pinching bathing suit strap.

“We better get you a new suit?” Sara Beth asks.

“You didn’t sign us up.”

“Oh Katherine.” A duffel bag stuffed with their towels and goggles lies on the grass.

“We rode our bikes all the way to the pool and waited for Nicole to call our names. Nicole is my favorite lifeguard,” Kat starts. “And she’s teaching my level this session.” She blinks her eyes against her tears.

“Except you’re not in the session.” The girls love to swim. Tom teases them, searching behind their ears for gills when they come out of the water all wrinkled. Every summer, they’re the first to enroll in each two-week session. Until now. Signs-ups for the summer programs were held in May at the High School gym. Sara Beth never went.

“Oh gosh, I’m sorry.” She sits on the bench next to her daughter, hands limp in her lap. Sometimes, well there’s really nothing she can do and it’s her fault, her fault, her fault.

“Jenny was going to make it to Lifeguard level this summer, and now she can’t. And Nicole won’t be teaching me.” Kat takes her anger, jumps up from the picnic table and rushes to her bicycle, pushing Owen away from the pedal he’s been spinning. He falls backward in the grass. “Stupid Owen,” she yells and picks up the bike, jumping on it and wobbling off through the grass to the front of the house. Owen starts to cry.

Something that passes for music spills into the yard from Jenny’s bedroom window. Sara Beth looks up, not sure who she’s angry at, Jenny in her music cave, Kat for plowing into Owen, or herself for causing the whole damn mess and this killer headache. “Owie, Owie,” she assures him as she scoops him up and runs her hand close over his head. Her fingers lift his hair and find no bumps.

By the time they get to his room, Owen calms and Sara Beth’s wet tank top is stretched out of shape from holding him against it. “Let’s pick a book from your new blue bookcase.” Owen sits dead center in front of it and starts pulling all the books off the shelf. “Mommy will be right back,” she says, kissing his moppy head, straightening her top.

Down the hall, she jiggles the knob and pushes at Jenny’s locked door. She knocks, listening, and when she tries the knob again, the door opens.

“Just get out,” Jenny says over the music.

Her gaze moves from her daughter to the stereo shelf system. The music is too loud, Jenny sounds too mad, Sara’s shirt is still coffee-wet, her patience is gone and so when she glares at the stereo, the controls blur. The last thing she needs to do is seem inept fumbling with them, because won’t it prove to Jenny that she is inept at everything? She walks over to the stereo and yanks the plug from the outlet. Jenny sits straight on her bed, staring out the window.

“Jenny, listen. I’m really sorry.”

“Would you stop calling me that?”

“What?”

“Jenny. Jenny. It sounds like I’m four years old.” She turns and glares at Sara Beth. “It’s Jen.”

“Since when don’t you like Jenny?”

“If you can be someone else now, so can I.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why do you dress like that all the time? You’re so embarrassing.”

Sara Beth glances down at her clothes.

“God. Those crappy old jean shorts, a dirty shirt, your short hair pulled back under an ugly bandana like you’re going to a rodeo. You take Owen and disappear all day, then come back all sweaty and happy. So if you can be someone else, so can I.”

“Listen. Jen. I’m going down to Parks and Rec now. Why don’t you come with me? We’ll sign you up for swimming lessons. I really forgot about it last month.”

“That’s because you were too busy in New York. Kat says you were having a midlife crisis. That that’s what happens when you turn forty. She heard Aunt Melissa tell Uncle Kevin that you ran away on Rachel. You left her there. Now you’re probably going to get a divorce.”

“Katherine? She said all that?” Sara Beth thinks of her young daughter trying to grasp those words, to lasso them into some corral where she can look at them closely and understand them. “Well, I’m
fine
, so she must have heard wrong.”

But there is truth to Katherine’s words. Sara Beth knows it, facing off with her sullen daughter, facing off with the knowledge of Claude’s whereabouts. The truth is right there, right between them in the room glaring at her, hands on its hips. If Tom stands in her way, she really might leave. Because there
has
to be more to her days than quibbling with her kids about swimming lessons, or school, or friends. And play groups and committee meetings. There needs to be a balance, a personal balance; something for herself to keep the scales even.

She waves off Jenny’s accusations. “If this swim session is filled, we’ll try the next.”

“Forget it.” Her daughter walks to the stereo. She slides the cord from the back and calmly plugs it back into the socket, the music blaring right where it left off. With all the cool Jen can muster, she turns the unit off. “I like it better when you don’t live here. And I don’t want to swim anymore.”

“Of course you do. You’re just upset because I forgot to sign you up.”

“Even Aunt Melissa went today, with Chelsea, who’s a lifeguard this summer with Nicole. Auntie had her sand chair and visor to watch. And an iced coffee waiting for you. Like every year.”

“Melissa did? What did she say?”

“If you want to know, ask her yourself. Because I’m not swimming anymore.” She turns her stereo back on. “And I mean it!” she screams, no longer able to maintain her indifference to this odd Sara Beth, her odd mother.

“Please come with me to Parks and Rec, Jen.”

Sara Beth waits. Her daughter’s back is turned to her as she skims through her iPod playlist. She isn’t even seeing the titles. It’s like when a storm is coming but there is more than a storm. It is the humidity, the dead calm, the sky darkening, the heavy clouds.

So Sara Beth turns around and closes the bedroom door behind her, leaning against it in the hallway before going into her own room for her purse. What an enormous effort it takes to simply do something for yourself. All she wanted was to take Owen to the carriage house and spend a couple hours cleaning up some furniture. Now one glance in the mirror does her in. A half hour ago, she looked fine. Pretty even. Her clothes were clean and unwrinkled, her bandana in place. She even put on lip gloss and a stone bracelet.

Who is this woman? How can she have turned so disheveled? Her bandana is slipping off, wide strands of hair hang out the front, her tank top is soiled, her shorts are wrinkled and where the hell did those haggard eyes come from?

Sometimes the day keeps on tainting you, leaving the detritus of family life on the fabric of your clothes. Coffee stains, crumbs, wrinkles, tears, what have you. She pulls a t-shirt and denim capris from the dresser drawer. This won’t be the last change of today. She kicks off her flip flops, sending them flying across the room, then peels off her clothes before slipping into her second outfit. And it’s only ten o’clock. So there are another twelve hours of possibility, of summer outfits. Even her hair is limp. And her headache, will it ever stop?
The warning headache averages about two weeks before a ruptured aneurysm. It is known as the sentinel headache.
Maybe she needs a prescription.

When she was in college, her mother would often call in the middle of the day. Just call and listen to her campus stories. And those phone calls meant so much, connecting simply over everyday life. She turns to the phone on her nightstand. Her mother’s voice would fix this. They checked in with each other all their lives, from her mother poking her head into Sara Beth’s bedroom to calling the dorm to sending letters to Europe to Instant Messaging daily. It’s all about the minutiae. Sara Beth picks up the phone, slowly presses in her mother’s number, then hangs up before the connection goes through. She wants that same bond with her own daughters and has to fix things with them first.