Whole Latte Life (25 page)

There is meticulous order here, where his home life seems to have lost it all. This is where Sara Beth stops her world from spinning out of control. The furniture is precisely arranged by room, then by style and size. Smaller pieces, the pewter pitchers, stoneware, picture frames, line long shelves running along the walls.

“Tom! What did you do? Follow me here?”

He stands across the room from his wife. Her short hair curls behind her ears, her silver hoop earrings shine. The funny thing is, she looks pretty, all soft, slender curves beneath her wrap skirt and fitted tee. Gold bangles hang from her wrist. It all hints at her college-days style. He moves to a Windsor rocking chair and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket.

Sara Beth takes the paper, her eyes locked onto his. “Where did you get this?”

“When you changed your purse yesterday, you left that old journal on the dresser. You always keep it with you, so I knew something in it meant a lot. And I read it.”

“You looked in my things?”

“I love you, Sara. So I looked, okay? And I saw the way you write to your mom, telling her you’ll send emails, and about little things that happened, like in New York, with the peach sauce on your ice cream. So I kept looking and found her birthday letter inside the back cover. Sara.” He stands still behind the rocker, his hands resting on its top. “This is pretty incredible. Elizabeth did this for you?”

“I can explain.” She sets her mother’s letter on the table she had been shining and wipes her hands on a rag. “Don’t be mad. It’s just that Mom wants me to have this.”

“Sara,” he says again, watching her closely. “Wanted.” His gaze sweeps the room, until he finally walks over to an old table where her laptop is set up. His hand is shaking, but still he turns the laptop in order to read the screen:

When he looks up from the unfinished message, Sara Beth is sitting in the Windsor rocker, staring outside, her chin raised defiantly.

“We have to talk.” He clicks into the Sent Mail file in her mailbox and sees the log of emails posted to her mother the past few months. “You know, Sara—”

“Don’t,” she warns him.

“But you have to hear this.” He steps closer.

“No I don’t.”

“Sara,” he says, taking her hand. She closes her eyes, as if that’ll block what’s coming. “She’s gone, sweetheart. Your mom’s been dead for over a year now.”

“But not completely,” she answers. “She gave me this! For my birthday! It’s like she came back for me, Tom. To help me.”

Tom moves through the space, his hands lighting on vases and candlesticks and picture frames, picking objects up and setting them silently down. A little bit of Sara and her mother, of their connection, are in each piece. It’s a world purely Sara’s that finally spun into his orbit. A world she’s desperately trying to hold onto. He opens the desk drawer where she does her paper and computer work, brushing aside tissue paper. There’s an old chain of flowers, daisies dried out and flattened, in the tissue. Someone’s junk left behind.

Tom pulls up another chair, a Louis the Tenth, or Sixteenth, something from another century, that much he knows. He leans his elbows on his knees, his head dropped. Then, looking up, says “Tell me about this gift, sweetheart. Tell me about the key and this building and what your mom did for you.”

“Why?” Sara Beth had asked on the morning of her birthday, brushing tears from her face. “How?”

“I went to school with your mom,” Lillian March said. She’d come up behind Sara Beth as she looked at the antiques from her mother. “We’re old friends, Sara. She called me last year and asked if she could store this furniture here. Just for a while, she said. Until you opened a shop.”

Sara Beth looked at this Lillian, noticed how she was the same age her mother would be, the same free spirit, her jeans tucked into a pair of leather riding boots, a cashmere tunic hanging just right, a turquoise necklace, her silver hair clipped back.

“She was so excited to start this shop with you.” Lillian moved into the carriage house, her hand lighting on a rolltop desk. “When we’re young, we make a lot of choices, Sara. And again when we get older. Sometimes in the middle, life bogs us down. Your mom thought forty would be the right time for you to break out. And when you got pregnant,” Lillian said, laughing lightly, “Elizabeth said you never took the easy path. Always roundabout. But she knew you’d get here. Oh, she knew.”

“But this letter,” Sara Beth said, holding up the birthday note. “Did she know she was sick? And not tell me?”

“No, not at all. She would never do that to you. Or to Melissa. My God, if you only had the grace of a goodbye. A few weeks before the brain aneurysm, she had some terrible headaches, like she’d never had before. They affected her vision and it scared her. All the
What ifs
came to mind and she panicked a little and gave me the letter. Just in case.”

“So she did know,” Sara Beth insisted, believing her mother aware, in her heart, of the loss to come.

“Well, maybe she sensed something. I don’t know. But she gave me an envelope, to deliver to you today. That was all her doing. Even the balloons are. She left a letter for Melissa, too, but I haven’t delivered that one yet. She loved you both so much.”

Sara Beth turned and looked at the accumulated antiques in the carriage house. Her mother chose every piece, Sara’s partner right to the end.

“So that’s how it happened, Tom. It’s like she knew she was going to die and was afraid I wouldn’t follow through on an antique shop without her.”

“Okay, I get that, as incredible as it all is. But not the rest. The haircut and the clothes and the piano lessons and Feng Shui and whatever else.”

“You know, everyone told me grief takes a year and I’d feel better after that. But I didn’t Tom. Every day started out more sad missing her. Then in March, getting this birthday gift, well it was like a little of her came back. She wants this for me, expects it, knows it’s me. So I felt her with me. By the time Rach and I celebrated turning forty, it was May. Two months had passed and I still didn’t know how to start all this.”

“Start what?”

“This. Pursuing the dream alone. So all the other stuff, I don’t know. I had to refashion my life and I took it literally. Starting with my
fashion
. And actually, I kind of like that part too. It’s fun. Okay? I had some fun.” But she knows that as she says it, her tears say something else. She remembers the night on the ferry in New York, dumping so much of herself into the river so that she could rebuild piece by piece. Her right hand covers her left, feeling for the missing ring, still feeling her mother’s death was Tom’s fault. Will that resentment ever fade? Can she keep on hiding it? “But the sadness felt even worse, doing all this without Mom. I missed her even more. It got so bad, I didn’t know how to stop it except to run away from it. And still, still. Sometimes I still hear her voice. Like a breeze, a wisp of it. But it’s there, I swear. It really is.”

Tom walks through the room, winding through the antiques. Sara Beth watches him. He wears khaki shorts and a navy polo. Sneakers and sport socks. But she sees the weariness in his eyes. He turns and meets her gaze.

“What?” she barely asks.

“Other people are regular, Sara,” he says. “They’re at the park waiting for the concert to begin. They’re talking about what happened at work or about a noise the car is making. They’re sitting together on a blanket. They’re having a little wine. Maybe cheese, and crackers out of a box. They’re dancing tonight, Sara Beth. Maybe that’s all I wanted.”

“To dance?”

He looks long at her. “To be regular. Something’s happened. I don’t know what we are anymore.”

“We can be that again. Nothing’s wrong with me,” she insists.

“Okay. Then what about Claude? He’s part of your plan. It’s in the journal.”

“Oh Tom,” she says, taking his hands. “Haven’t you ever wondered?”

“Not really. No.”

“Not that you’ll tell me anyway. I just wondered, that’s all, in the middle of all this. Wondered what my life would be if I made different choices back then. Would I be in this place now? Would the sadness be gone?”

“So you’re thinking of an old flame?” He tugs his hands out of hers.

“It’s not Claude I’m thinking about, it’s—”

She sees the anger in his eyes, sees him trying not to let that anger win, not to let anger lift his arm and sweep every ceramic vase off the shelf.

“
I’m going to find Claude. It might help, Mom
,” he says. “That’s a direct quote, from your journal. Find. Claude. So don’t you dare tell me it’s not about him. It’s all spelled out. So have you? Have you seen him?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. She’s never felt so close to losing everything. “No. Claude was a time in my life when I was free, when any opportunity was mine. That’s what I wanted back. Opportunity.”

“If I have to worry about Claude now, don’t come back, Sara. I don’t need that in my life on top of the kids and working and the house and everything else. We’re over then.”

“Don’t you see?” she says, and though she’s not sobbing, not crying, she feels the tears streaking her cheeks. “It’s the options I want.” And she can’t say the option to live over with Claude. The option to not be so delayed that dreaded day a year ago all because of Tom. To have a chance to get to her mother sooner. “The choices.”

“You’re not satisfied with me then? Is that it? So you’re wondering?”

“I wasn’t satisfied with my life.”

“Which I’m part of. So I’ve got to deal with that, Sara Beth. And everything else. And the bond with your mother. You have to let her go. And move on.”

“Tom, I loved her, and I still love her. It really helps me to talk to her.”

“With email? Come on.”

Sara Beth decides not to explain. He won’t understand her thoughts about cyber space, and what is cyber space, where is it? Can her mother be there, in some virtual place? “It just feels like it keeps her close to me, that’s all.”

“And you’re going to do this? Open a shop?”

“Well why couldn’t I? Can’t we talk? Can we go get a drink, maybe?”

He stands there in her world, seeming so unsure, his hair lying flat in the heat.

“We can stop at the bandshell?” she asks, crying freely. “Dance with me there?”

“Just like that? Have a drink and a dance?”

“No, of course not. But it’ll help. To start.”

Tom watches her for a moment, closes his eyes and nods, then turns and walks out into the June evening.