Whole Latte Life (28 page)

Rachel moves to the bedrooms, bringing along the wand of her touch. It lights on white wicker covered with pastel linens that beguile the weary eye with images of the sea. Thin cotton curtains, the kind that puff out with gentle sea breezes, frame the white-painted windows. In one bedroom, side-by-side paned windows overlooking the distant Sound bear only a crisp white valance, white as a sunstruck sail on a boat.

Michael calls to her from the kitchen. Fruit and a box of pastry are on the counter along with the extra flashlight and smoke detector he bought, and late day sunrays stream in through the window. Dried flower bunches hang from painted ceiling beams. He stands at the French doors opening to a back porch, a room big enough for a lunch table and a corner to deposit your sandy flip flops.

“What do you think?” he asks.

Rachel turns on the kitchen tap. The water spits and sputters until finally flowing in a clear stream. Then she reaches over the sink and cranks open the window.

“Do you like it?” Michael asks. He leans against the counter, watching her.

The cottage is high on a hill and she sees the Sound through the window, blue gray on the horizon. She turns to Michael, steps close to him leaning against the counter with his wavy hair and slow smile and his hands reaching for hers.

“It’s heaven,” she says, and he kisses her tenderly once, then again near her ear as his arms circle her waist, pulling her close against him. She moves her thumb to his lips, sweeping it across and thinking how lucky she is when she feels his mouth on hers again, hears her whispered name.

Chapter Nineteen

I
t feels like they’ve been dating, Tom a little awkward and Sara Beth unsure. She figures it’s something you have to do every ten years or so in a marriage. Go out on dates. It even made it into her journal.

We’re dating again, Tom and I. Maybe it’ll help, maybe I’ll see he wasn’t to blame for your dying. I don’t know. I’m not sure anything can convince me of that. My life’s all maybes lately. Maybe it’s time I tell him I feel like it was his fault. We’ll see.

Love,

Sara Beth

If this is going to work, he has to know how she feels. She’s moved back home, and tonight Tom’s taking her out to dinner.

“Dress up. We’re going somewhere special.”

Black, she decides. A black silky halter, black skirt, with the gold scarf from the Greenwich Village boutique and a gold bangle bracelet.

“I can’t believe you cut your hair,” Sara Beth says in the car, checking out the new Tom, buzz cut and all. “It’s a new you.”

“I wanted to see how it felt to change my life a little.”

“And?”

“I guess I’m still getting used to it.”

Sara Beth brushes her hand across his head. “Well the new me sent in the small business loan application. I included a business forecast, projected expenses, expected revenue, even seasonal shopping swings.”

“You used to always be that way.”

“What way?”

“Remember when we met, when you got back from Europe? I couldn’t believe the way you took your education all the way, going to the Louvre to finish your art studies. I liked that about you, the way you were in things one hundred percent. So it’s good to see that again.”

Sara Beth thinks that was before he knew about Claude being in Europe with her. So there was that. Some things she didn’t take all the way, like her relationship with Claude. She didn’t take it all the way to marriage. Though he proposed, she could not take her life permanently all the way to Europe back then.

Taking things all the way or not, haircut or not, Tom still resents her changes, resents her running away. She feels it, little ambiguous wisps caught in a room with them, or trapped in the car doing errands. He’s having a hard time with this still. Time alone at dinner will help. They’ll talk.

They drive sleepy back roads, deep evening shadow laying long among the overhanging trees. Music plays softly on the radio. She never suspects anything until Tom turns onto Old Willow Road and into the carriage house driveway.

“Tom? What are you doing?”

In the low blush of twilight, wavering candlelight glows in the paned windows and spills in a pool of gold from the opened carriage house door. Impressionism. The visual effect of light and movement on objects. Beyond the historical carriage house, a field of wildflowers gives way to deep green trees rising against a violet sky. This painting captures the golden light of dusk within the carriage house, illuminating the artifacts inside.

“Wait.” Tom takes her arm as she reaches to open her door. “This isn’t my doing. I don’t want you to go in there with false hopes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Melissa planned sort of a dinner party. When you showed her the carriage house the other day, well,” he pauses, squinting out the window. “She wants you to know that we understand. Whatever you find inside,
she
wanted to do for you. It’s her idea.”

“And you?”

“I agreed to it because I’m trying. I still don’t like the
way
you went about all this, but I don’t know if it’s worth losing a marriage over.”

So there’s that now. No matter how much they try, no matter how considerate they are, the same thought’s occurred to her. What is worth losing a marriage over? A chance, maybe? Or blame? Doubt, imagining life with someone else? Claude?

Tom lets go of her arm and they step out of the car in silence.

Some things she can’t help. Like the gasp that escapes when she walks into the carriage house. Life moves in slow motion when her gaze sweeps the room, a room Melissa has transformed. Much of the furniture has been pushed back, leaving center space for a long mahogany pedestal dining table, with a hydrangea, twig and feather centerpiece anchoring the place settings of antique botanical plates and white glazed French dinnerware her mother chose. And candlelight, ornate silver-on-copper English candelabras on the table, French bronze on the sideboard. The room is bathed in age and elegance, even when someone sounds out a jingle on the piano Sara Beth found in the online classifieds:
Like-new condition, plays happy songs, needs a good home
. And she knew it had been loved.

“Sara Beth,” Melissa says, hugging her. “When you told me you were opening an antique shop, well, I can’t believe how Mom came through for you. It’s sad now, but she’d be so proud. And this is what I think she’d do for you, a dinner like this.” She stops then, unsure.

“What?” Sara Beth asks.

“Maybe it’ll help you, in a way. With everything you’ve been dealing with. You know, missing Mom so much, starting a shop. That’s why I’m doing this. To bring some of Mom into your plans.”

So the layers build, just like in Impressionism. Wet paint is applied directly over wet paint, before the initial layer is dried. The effect is diffused edges and intermingling of colors. Exactly the way this room depicts her life’s soft edges, intermingling tonight with the colors of her mother in days gone by.

And it works, Melissa’s Old World dinner party. The French country chairs upholstered in a floral fabric finish the mahogany table. Tea lights adorn the dining table and candles are scattered throughout the large space, turning the furniture into shimmering pools of browns. Sara sits and looks at her life with cautious satisfaction: Tom beside her, her sister Melissa and brother-in-law Kevin, her mother’s dear friends who own the property, Lillian and Edward March, and her neighbors Julie and Connor, who’ve lived beside her and shared in her life for many years now. Somewhere in the shimmering light, she knows her mother is there as well, watching with sweet wistfulness.

Once they are all seated, the caterer serves the Tomato Bread Salad and Roasted Rosemary Chicken, baby carrots and red potatoes and grilled zucchini, heavy goblets of wine. Someone brought an old record player and a scratchy jazz record fills the room with music.

“Your girls will love this place, Sara. When will you show them?” Julie asks.

“In the morning. Maybe we’ll have breakfast here while the table’s set like this.” She turns to Melissa. “Let Chelsea come, too, okay? My treat for her babysitting the kids tonight.”

“Sure. I just called her. They’re all settled in at your place, Owen’s asleep.”

“Oh, I hope they love this the same way I loved Mom’s antiquing,” Sara Beth says. To continue this passion of hers and her mother’s to the next generation means the world to her.

“Love it? They’ll be arguing over who gets to help in your new shop, whenever you finally take the plunge! Kat’ll be whipping out her day-planner, Jen calling dibs.”

To have her kids back and understanding her, it’s all that matters. Ever since her mother died and she lost her from her life, her plans, her phone calls even, she knows. Every bit of it matters. Every layer of paint. She has to build those same layers with her children.

When they settle in afterward with coffee, Julie hands Sara Beth a thin, wrapped package. “We love you, hon. Best wishes,” she says with a hug.

“Oh come on. This was enough, this beautiful meal together.” Sara Beth peels back the wrapping paper on a dollar bill mounted and displayed behind an old cherry frame.

“It’s your first dollar earned,” Julie explains. “Consider it my deposit on that piecrust tip table.”

“Thank you so much,” she says, laughing as she gives Julie a hug. Tom reaches over and takes the gift from her. Can’t he feel it? How right this is?

Edward March excuses himself and returns carrying a cardboard carton. In the past several weeks, Lillian often brought Sara Beth a cup of chamomile tea and they sat and talked about her mother. One of those times, Lillian returned to the main house with a framed Currier and Ives print of two kittens lapping up spilled milk. She wanted to pay for it, but no way would Sara Beth let her. “It’s my gratitude. For bringing Mom back to me like this.”

Now Lillian, wearing a long layered skirt reaching her ankles, a necklace of coral and mother-of-pearl hanging over her loose tank top, passes the box along to Sara Beth.

“You need a mascot to keep you company here, and to breathe some life into the stuffier pieces.”

The carton tips from the uneven weight of an animal crouched in one corner. She opens it to find a tiny silver tabby with silver and black stripes running down her sides in perfect unison. “You didn’t,” Sara Beth says.

“Remember I said we had a few wild strays on the property?” Lillian asks. “One of them had a litter and this bugger never leaves me alone. When I hang the clothes or do my gardening, she follows me everywhere! She’s a real people cat.”

And so it goes for the evening, timeless comfort, wine and coffee in wavering shadows of candles and antiques, easy conversation. Sara Beth feels the effort to help her move forward, to accept the place of her mother’s loss in her life. Several toasts ring out, including a personal one between Tom and herself, Tom honoring her mother. Paul Cezanne’s words come to her:
We live in a rainbow of chaos.
And she knows life can be that, a beautiful chaotic rainbow. Occasionally someone plucks out a bar on the piano.

“Love the piano,” Melissa says.

“We’re moving it home, actually. I want to have one in the house again.”

Still, one thing’s bothered her all night. The final place setting left in front of an empty chair, across from her own seat. She asks her sister about it.

“I’ve been trying to reach Rachel, but I keep getting her machine. I was hoping if she got the message, she’d show up.”

Sara Beth thinks of how she and Rachel shopped at Sycamore Square. If in the end she lost her very best friend, was this all worth it? The carriage house doors are thrown open onto the summer night, the sky heavy with stars. Impressionists capture moments in landscapes, moments in people’s lives, caught in fleeting light. There’ll be more moments, that’s all she can believe.