Blue Moon Bay (13 page)

I remembered standing in this very spot with my father, long before I was old enough to understand why the woman behind the counter always snorted and headed for the stock room when we came in. I was holding my father's hand, watching the shadows play over the well-worn wooden shelves, waiting for Dad to take me on the elevator. I was certain that he would. He knew all of the building's secrets. He'd worked there as a teenager.

I wasn't aware then that, until my mother swept through town one summer, my dad had been engaged to one of the girls he worked with. He was going to marry her as soon as he graduated from college, but my mother stole him away from his hometown sweetheart, Claire Anne, and from the rest of the town. A few years later, my father's jilted fiancée had married Blaine's father, the recently-widowed owner of the hardware store, the bank, and a huge ranch outside town. Mr. Underhill was twelve years Claire Anne's senior, but he had more money than my father could ever hope to accumulate.

“Are the clothes and shoes still upstairs?” Emotion cracked my voice, and I cleared my throat, wiggling out of my coat. I felt Blaine's hand grasping the hood, helping me slip free. His fingers brushed the wispy hair on the back of my neck and sent an electric tingle down my back. I stiffened against it.

The coat swished softly as he tossed it over the long, glass-front counter along the west wall. “Same as always,” he said, and I had the sense that he was talking about me, rather than the store. For a moment, I wanted to be
not
the same, not the reserved, walled-off girl he expected. I couldn't do that, of course. I had to remember why I was here. Business. Just business. And a pair of shoes.

I started up the stairs, watching from the corner of my eye as he set his keys on the counter, slipped off his coat and laid it over mine, then followed. Beneath the low, eight-foot ceilings of the upper balcony, the space felt cozy, steeped in languid morning light.

“What'll it be?” He swept a hand toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves, crowded with shoe boxes, some of which looked to have been there since slightly after the turn of the century. “We got your steel toes, your stacked heels, your Mary Janes, flip-flops, wool socks, boat shoes, whites, browns, and blues. What's your pleasure?”

My mind jumped back in time again. I remembered Blaine's grandfather repeating the same singsong sales pitch when my father had brought me in for a pair of pink wading shoes with little cartoon fish on the toes. Looking up at Blaine now, I could see a bit of his grandfather in him. They had the same warm, brown eyes and slightly lopsided smile. What would it be like to have your present and your past so closely interwoven, a tapestry in which threads didn't begin or end but meshed so completely that there was no way to know where one ended and another began? Clay and I never had ties to anyone or anywhere. There were the issues between Dad's family and my mother, and Mom's mother and father were divorced and remarried; the family an odd mishmash.

I was jealous of Blaine. In truth, it wasn't the first time.

He grabbed a box from an upper shelf, blew off the dust, and pulled out a cowboy boot that must have been there since the days of
Hee Haw
. It had a silver eagle emblazoned in the vamp, and a ghastly long, pointed toe. “How 'bout some cricket killers?” He fanned a brow and gave the one-sided grin of a snake-oil salesman. “I can get you a discount. These are closeouts.”

“From what year?” A chuckle-snort pressed from me. Very unladylike. I slapped a hand over my nose.

Blaine studied the boot, straight, brown brows drawing together in the center. “Not sure. Give 'em a try. They might grow on you.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

He sighed, indicating that I was difficult to please. I remembered now why every girl in high-school chemistry class had been gaga over him. He was charmingly goofy up close. His attention was like a flame you couldn't help wanting to stare into. “Come on, live a little,” he urged, extending the boots my way. “When are you ever gonna get the chance to slip your feet into fine footwear like this again?”

“This side of the Grand Ole Opry, you mean?” Even as I said it, I was reaching for the boots, consumed with the odd notion that if I didn't put them on, I'd be sealing my fate as a mindless gerbil running endlessly on the same, boring wheel—missing some weird, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: The chance to wear silver cricket-killer cowboy boots on the second story of a hardware store.

Kicking off my bedraggled footwear, I pulled on the garish boots, stood up, and walked the length of the balcony, feeling like Dolly Parton—on the lower half, anyway.

Blaine crossed his arms, rubbing his chin appraisingly. “They've got . . . attitude.”

I rolled a look at him, then leaned over to observe the boots.

“You'd be the only one in Seattle with a pair,” he urged. “You could start a whole new trend.”

“Yeah . . . tempting. But maybe something a little less . . . silver.” It occurred to me that he'd mentioned Seattle. How would he know that, unless he and Clay had been talking about me?

The thought was strange. I wasn't sure whether to embrace it or be afraid of it.

He pulled out a pair of tall mud boots, the black rubber kind the Mennonites used in the mucky corrals around their dairy farms and in the Proxica poultry barns over in Gnadenfeld. I remembered borrowing similar boots when Clay and I went home with Ruth and visited her family's dairy. We did that occasionally when Aunt Esther was planning social events at Harmony House and didn't want us in the way. “Tempting . . . but . . . no. I remember those things from my short stint as a cow milker.”

“You were a milkmaid?” Blaine's look of interest followed me as he leaned against the shelf.

I sat down on the bench to release the silver Dolly boots into the wild again and told him the story of my one and only attempt at helping the Mennonite kids with milking chores. Ruth and her husband lived a few miles away on a Proxica poultry farm, but they maintained an interest in the dairy, and Clay loved to visit there. My ill-fated milking career had ended when I sucked cow parts and my own ponytail into the vacuum end of a milking machine. The cow kicked, I panicked, and things went downhill from there. I was saved by a brawny Mennonite boy who was somehow related to Ruth. It was embarrassing. He was only seven.

Blaine laughed goodnaturedly at the end of the story, and we continued perusing the footwear. Finally, I selected a pair of hiking boots, along with some warm wool socks, two pairs of jeans, and a couple of fleecy Moses Lake sweatshirts from the stack near the counter. The only thing I didn't score was a new electric heater. They were out.

As Blaine wrote up my charges, I caught myself thinking it really was too bad that he was potentially in a position to ruin my family financially. He was kind of likable, otherwise. Fun.

But you don't get to the senior manager stage by being drifty-minded. I knew how to stay focused on a goal, how to tune out distractions like Facebook, office chatter, funny email videos of dogs who could dance the cha-cha while wearing ruffled skirts and sunglasses . . . cute guys who want to lure you in, so you won't wonder why they're cultivating your family's good graces.

He offered to walk me back to the cottage after we finished shopping. I told him I was fine. I knew the trail well enough. I used to walk it all the time, back in the day.

On the way back to Uncle Herbert's, my feet warm inside the new hiking boots, the bedraggled fashion footwear and a sack of new clothing swinging at my side, I tried to keep my mind out of the past. I thought, instead, of the silver boots. Maybe I'd go back and buy them tomorrow—well, not tomorrow, because, come to think of it, the hardware store was always closed on Mondays. Trish would think the boots were a riot. I could keep them in my apartment as a conversation piece. A memento from my unplanned detour to Moses Lake.

Then again, I wouldn't be around when the hardware store opened on Tuesday. I wasn't supposed to be, anyway. Somehow, I had to wrap up this mess and get back to work before Mel went postal and my best chance at leading a design project slipped through my fingers. I couldn't let myself forget everything I had to lose if this project fell apart.

I returned to Uncle Herbert's house with that thought in mind, determined to get the whole family into one room so we could get to the bottom of this mess and hash it out. Surely, with enough injections of reason, everyone would have to wake up to reality. A nice, quiet Sunday morning would be the perfect time to do that.

But the house was anything but quiet when I went in. Mom was in Uncle Herbert's kitchen, cleaning up from breakfast and, oddly enough, wearing a dress, which my mother rarely did. The rest of the family was bustling around upstairs. I heard doors opening and closing, feet moving, pipes rattling. Mom quickly informed me that I'd better hurry up, if I wanted to ride to church with the family.

She made the suggestion without missing a beat, and after I reeled my chin off the floor, I said, “Since when do you get up on Sunday morning and go to church?” That was rude, of course, but I couldn't help feeling that they were all playing some sort of game, with me as the patsy. Maybe they thought that by putting on a show they could confuse me into giving up and going home.

Aside from the fact that my mother getting dressed for church on Sunday morning was about as believable as a hippo in toe shoes, I found it slightly offensive that she would choose this particular means of creating shock value. I'd always prided myself on the fact that my occasional church attendance—holidays mostly, with Trish at a historic downtown church, where the architecture of the building was in equal parts inspiring and distracting—was to some degree better than my mother's flavor-of-the-month spiritual existentialism. At least I knew what I believed, in the official sense. Most of the time, Sunday morning found me heading for the office to either meet Mel and prep for a presentation, or get in a little extra time, shoveling at a workload that piled on as fast as I could dig it out.

Mom had the nerve to give me a
you're crazy
look and say, “Well, both of the uncs are deacons, and now Clay and I are going into business here. How would it look if we sat home on Sunday mornings?”

I was speechless again. Twice in one conversation. The fun, relaxed feeling that had bloomed during my footwear safari quickly faded.

“Besides,” she added, and I sensed that she was coming in for the kill—putting my battered and bleeding sanity out of its misery. “I feel close to your father there.”

The blood drained from my cheeks, flowing downward through my body, abandoning me to a hollow numbness. My mother had been through more boyfriends and live-ins over the years than I could count. How dare she stand there, acting like she'd been pining for my father all that time, particularly considering what I'd seen her doing right before he died. I opened my mouth to say something venomous, then closed it, opened it again.

Mother took advantage of the conversational lull. “And this afternoon, we're driving over to Gnadenfeld. It's Ruth's birthday, and they're having a little get-together for her at the dairy. She lives with one of her nieces now. You know that her husband passed away several years ago, and she's been diagnosed with cancer, right? She can't live on her own anymore.”

My head swirled. I leaned against the door frame, my vision of Ruth shifting. All this time, I'd been imagining her still dividing her time between the Proxica poultry farm she ran with her husband, and the family dairy. I knew she'd quit working for Uncle Herbert shortly after I went away to college. She'd told me about it in one of the letters my freshman year of college. Her husband was experiencing some health problems, and she was needed at home. “Ruth has cancer? Is it bad?”

Mom nodded, the first honest look of the morning passing between us. “Yes, it is. Which is reason enough to go get ready for church, right?”

“I don't have anything to wear.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I was still stunned, just babbling out words with no real meaning.

“Oh, anything will do,” Mom insisted. “Just go get ready. Ruth will want to see you, especially considering the shape she's in.”

I quit the kitchen and left her there. Grabbing my things in the utility room, I went out the back door and walked down the hill.The bracing air pulled tears from my eyes until I found myself inside the cottage, looking at my carry-on bag, my new clothes, my laundry pile. I had the urge to throw everything into the suitcase, force the zipper around it, and leave for the airport, to return to a world that was only big enough for one. A world where nothing else, especially anything that happened in Moses Lake, could affect me.

I dressed for church instead, and we headed off in one of the funeral sedans, Mom driving, Uncle Herbert in the passenger seat, and me sandwiched between Clay and Uncle Charley in the back. Clay and Uncle Charley talked about fishing. I thought about Ruth.

Amy was waiting on the small porch outside the church when we arrived. She walked in with us, and I heard whispers around the room. Blaine Underhill's stepmother stiffened in her seat, pretending not to see us sliding into the row across the aisle. I noticed Blaine at the far end of the Underhill pew. A blonde was whispering in his ear, tapping him on the shoulder. I couldn't decide, from this angle, if I remembered her from high school or not.

Reverend Hay took the pulpit and began the announcements by pointing out his new fiancée, Bonnie, in the front. The congregation twittered approvingly. I was glad to have their attention diverted from us, but it quickly returned in the form of covert looks, whispers, little notes jotted in the corners of bulletins, a nudge here or there.

What are they doing here?
The question was like smoke in the room, making it difficult to breathe. Sun streamed through the squares of colored glass in the arched windows, choking the air, stirring the voices of the church ladies in my mind.
Sit up straight, hon. Don't slouch like that, you'll get a hump in your back. . . .