A Soft Place to Fall (30 page)

#

Teddy Webb had been working for the
Shelter Rock Cove Weekly News and Shopper
for more years
than he cared to remember. He had covered the last twenty Labor Day
picnics on the green and had run out of adjectives to describe
hamburgers, hot dogs, and Ceil's award winning apple strudel. Once
you got past
delicious, mouth-watering,
and
delectable
the next step was
scrumptious
and the day
his gnarled old fingers typed a word like
scrumptious
was
the day he handed in his press pass and retired for good.

Teddy had filled a small reporter's notebook
with details and once he got back home, he would take a shot of
Pepto Bismol then type it all up on his computer and zap it over to
the office before they put the issue to bed.

But he still needed a photo to go with it.
Oh, he'd snapped a few of apple pies bursting with fruit and one of
Eileen Galloway's sons with a faceful of watermelon but nothing
that really rang his chimes. Hell, he could just recycle last
year's sack race and be done with it. Nobody would ever know the
difference. He was debating the viability of that idea when his
gaze happened to land on a sight that did his grizzled old heart
good. Annie Lacy Galloway was gazing into the eyes of some guy he
had never seen before and you could just about see Cupid aiming his
arrows straight at their hearts. Everyone in town loved Annie and
they were bound to love seeing her looking so happy again.

Grinning to himself, Teddy aimed the camera
and two clicks later he had his page one photo.

#

Susan was extolling the virtues of a central
vacuum cleaning system when she saw the kiss. She had been about to
tell George and Lily Williams about the glories to be found in not
dragging around a ten pound canister when Sam Butler lifted Annie's
hand to his lips and kissed it.

"Susan?" asked Lily, who operated the day
care center near town hall. "Is something wrong?"

"Sorry," she said, trying to snap herself
back to attention. "What was I saying?"

"About the vacuum cleaning system," George
prompted her. "We were wondering about filtration
capabilities."

Was that English they were speaking or some
foreign tongue Susan had never heard before? She couldn't make
sense of any of it, not when Annie was looking into Sam's eyes that
way, as if she had been waiting her entire life for that
moment.

A deep yearning awoke inside her chest and
its power almost knocked her flat. The last time she had felt
anything close to this depth of emotion was when her children were
born. When she heard her babies' first cries she had been filled
with a rush of love so intense she thought she would die from it.
That was how she felt as she looked at Annie and Sam, radiant with
new love, as untouchable as the stars.

#

Hall was brushing grass off the back of
Willa's white shorts when Mariah pointed across the green.
"Eeeyewww," she said, making a face. "That man's kissing
Annie."

"Yuk," said Willa, without even looking.
"Gross."

He knew he shouldn't look. What was the point
to seeing everything he had dreaded come to life in front of his
eyes? He couldn't change it. He couldn't make it go away. More to
the point, he couldn't make Sam Butler go away. Butler came to town
without history or baggage. He didn't give a damn that Annie was
Kevin's widow. He didn't know squat about the gambling, the babies
that weren't meant to be, all the things that had kept Hall trapped
in place. No, the guy just drove into town, took a look around,
then swept Annie off her feet and into his arms while Hall sat on
his deck, nursing a scotch and wondering where to begin.

"It might not last," Ellen said, joining him
as the girls ran off to play. "I don't think Shelter Rock Cove is
his kind of place."

Hall shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he
said. "Do you see the way she's looking at him?"

Ellen's only answer was a sigh.

#

"Will you look at that!" Roberta nudged
Claudia. "If that's not the most romantic thing I've ever seen, I
don't know what is."

Roberta was too late. Claudia had watched the
whole scene unfold from behind her sunglasses. She had seen Annie's
smile disappear. She had watched as he fumbled for words. Her
breath caught when he took Annie's hand and looked at it as if
reading her palm and when he lifted her hand to his mouth, she
thought her heart would break.

She wasn't one for crying. Tears had never
changed a thing in this world. They certainly didn't pay your bills
or fix the roof on your house and they could never bring back the
ones you loved and lost. But those damn tears slid down her cheeks
and there seemed to be nothing she could do to stop them.

"I'll be right back," she said to Roberta.
She started out across the green toward Annie's Flowers where she
could compose herself but wouldn't you know that old coot Warren
fell in step with her before she was halfway there.

Warren didn't say anything and neither did
she. They met each other's eyes and a lifetime of memories passed
between them. He reached for her hand as they approached the hill
and this time, just this once, she didn't pull away.

Chapter Fifteen

Their
lovemaking that night was fierce and deeply thrilling, as if they
were trying to forge a bond that nothing, neither time nor
circumstance, could ever undo. That they both believed such a thing
was possible forged a deeper bond than either realized. After a
while Sam slept but Annie was too filled with energy to close her
eyes. It had been years since she had been all one piece, her body
and soul and mind working together as one seamless entity. She was
more than an intellect, more than a body, and it was their
lovemaking that had restored her soul and brought it all the
disparate parts of herself together again, the way it should be.
The way it used to be before disappointment and sorrow became her
constant companions. She could feel the energy flowing from her
heart to her mind and shooting out from her fingers and toes in a
rainbow of color and form.

Nothing lasts forever but this is real . . .
this is real.

Was it? You couldn't see or touch the bond
between them, the sense of destiny, but she knew it was there just
the same. He knew what it was like to lose your parents before you
were old enough to vote. There was nothing in the world that could
prepare you for that, no club you could join to help you through
it. They both knew that life could be both cruel and capricious and
there was nothing you could do to sway the outcome. That knowledge
had kept her paralyzed for so long but suddenly she didn't feel
stuck in place any longer.

She wanted to capture it all, gather up the
stars and the moon and splash them on a canvas, run her hands along
a satiny block of wood until she found the form hiding within.

Quietly she rose from the bed and slipped one
of Sam's tee shirts over her head. Stepping over Max's sleeping
body, she let herself out of the bedroom and padded down the short
hallway to the room where she'd stashed the boxes left to unpack.
Way in the back, tucked behind the boxes marked "Music, Books,
Misc" was an old picnic basket that had belonged to her mother. It
was an enormous wicker contraption with foldout trays and neat
little compartments for cutlery and dishes and food that made a
perfect storage box for her pens and inks and painting supplies.
She pulled out a vine of charcoal, sharpened it against the
sandpaper block, then dug out a nice toothy sketchpad that still
had a fair amount of empty pages left.

She could see the six figures deep inside her
head and now she called on them to materialize on the page before
her so they could get acquainted. Her hand moved automatically
across the paper, leaving shape and shadow behind. The man was
young, twenty at most, wiry and strong and fearless, and the five
children radiated out from him like spokes in a wheel. Each stood
separate and apart but were somehow linked to the man in the center
by invisible threads. Sorrow was in their eyes and hope too because
that was the gift he gave them. Hope and love, a home of their own
where no harm could find them. It was all there, waiting for Annie,
flowing from heart to hand as if by magic. She filled page after
page with sketches of those people. Long shots, portraits,
individual and group. She played with proportion and angle, tried
various groupings. In every sketch, the man looked like Sam.

She saw it as it would look when it was
released from a shroud of maple: six figures forming one perfect
unit as they gazed out over Shelter Rock Cove, waiting for the
sailors who would never come home.

#

Sam watched her from the doorway. She worked
with intensity, her hand inscribing graceful arcs and angles on
page after page of drawing paper. He couldn't see what she was
working on but watching her in motion was more than enough. She sat
there in that tiny room, lost in the middle of a pile of boxes, and
created beauty just by the act of being. She wore his tee shirt and
nothing else, her lush curves barely hidden from view. George and
Gracie slept happily atop her bare feet while Max looked up at her
with open adoration.

Me too, Max,
he thought as he caught a
yawn with the back of his hand. She looked rosy and sated as she
sat perched atop a cardboard box filled with books and pursued some
private vision of her own. He could spend a lifetime watching her
smile. Was that love? He didn't know. He had never felt this way
before about anyone: just the fact that she existed in this world
was enough to make him happy. His siblings had told him that he
would know when the right one came along. Some secret door to his
heart would swing open and she would step inside and fill all the
empty places.

It had sounded like a lot of romantic crap to
him and he had said so on more than one occasion. Now he was
beginning to think they might have been right.

"You'll see," Marie had said to him a few
years ago over pizza and a bottle of Bolla. "When you least expect
it, she'll show up and you'll be a goner."

Marie had the head of a reporter and the
heart of a romantic novelist. She believed in love at first sight
and happy endings, and while her own marriage was filled with the
stuff of daily life – diapers and deadlines and bills to pay --
there was no denying she was happy.

He felt like his best self around Annie. When
she looked at him, he wanted to try harder, do more, be the man she
believed him to be, and the only way he could do that was to push
her away.

"Are you going to stand there all night,"
Annie said, "or do you want to see what I'm doing."

"How'd you know I was there?"

She threw him a glance over her left
shoulder. "Max's tail started thumping so I figured you were close
by."

He picked his way through the stacks of boxes
to where she sat by the window. "What're you working on?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "Maybe something
for the Museum." She laughed nervously. "Or maybe something for the
circular file."

He held out his hand. "Show me."

"I don't think this is such a good idea after
all," she said, then handed over the sketch pad.

What he saw took his breath away. His younger
self looked up at him from the page. He saw loneliness in his eyes
and fear and strength of character he wasn't sure he had ever
possessed. His brothers and sisters surrounded him and somehow,
through what magic he couldn't say, Annie had managed to capture
bits and pieces of each one of them.

"They're just preliminary sketches," she
said. "I'm trying to block out positions . . . " She saw the
figures carved from maple that would grow rough and weathered with
time.

"Warren was right," he said when he could
find his voice again. "You're gifted."

"You're partial."

"Not in this. You've never met my brothers
and sisters but here they are on the page."

She blushed deep pink with pleasure. "You
told me about them and I improvised the rest."

"This is what you should be doing, not
arranging flowers."

"Believe me, every bit of my training comes
into play at the flower shop."

"You know what I'm saying."

"Pretty pictures don't keep a roof over your
head," she said simply. "I had to find a way to make a living."

"Warren said your husband was a teacher.
Didn't he –"

She shook her head. "Big house, big mortgage.
We were your typical two-income family, over-extended to the
max."

Now it was beginning to make sense to him.
The move to the tiny house by the water. The empty rooms. The beat
up truck. She was digging out from under the same American dream he
had sold to others at Mason, Marx, and Daniels.

#

If anyone had missed seeing Sam kiss Annie's
hand at the Labor Day picnic, the front page color photo in the
weekly newspaper brought them up to speed.

Annie turned bright red on Friday morning
when Sweeney dropped a copy of the paper on the sales counter and
said, "Way to go, girl!" Claudia peered over Annie's shoulder to
see what the commotion was all about and when she saw the very
romantic photo, her smile grew tight and then she turned away.

As the days and weeks progressed, Annie found
herself thinking of the Labor Day picnic as the dividing line
between her old life and her new one with Sam. Suddenly her life
was filled to the brim with passion and joy and a renewal of
creativity that had lain dormant for far too long. She felt truly
herself in all the ways that mattered. Each night in Sam's arms she
rediscovered another long buried part of the woman she used to be:
the sensual, curious, happy woman she had come close to losing.