Healing Stones (16 page)

He scooted to the edge of the chair.

“You're going to get
yourself
back. You didn't just cheat on your husband, Demi. You cheated on you.”

She looked at him helplessly, as if she'd grown ten years younger since she walked in. Maybe a little of God's light was peeking through the cracks.

“Ever watch Family Feud?” Sully asked.

“What is with the game shows?” She finally let the corners of her mouth turn up. “Okay—yeah—years ago.”

“On that show, within thirty minutes there's a winner and a loser, and everybody immediately starts to adjust to the new shift. You see what I'm saying?”

“Yeah . . .”

“You have your own family feud going on, as I see it—only it's going to take more than half an hour to determine who wins.” He leaned so far toward her, his own chair almost tipped. “I hope everybody does, Demi.”

And then he waited.

She pulled into herself as if she were gathering everything he'd dropped into her lap so she could take it away for examination.

“So I have to come back, then?” she said. Her tentative smile was bemused. “I'm not going away fixed today?”

“If you want to come back, I'll be here.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“You might need a little more time to process what we've talked about.”

“Process how?” She planted her fingers on the sides of her head. “Tell me what to do.”

“Ding! Ding! Ding!”

“
What
?”

“That's what happens when you ask the right question.”

“Do you have the right answer?”

“No—but you do. We'll take Childhood for $500. Will you find a picture of yourself as a little girl before age ten?”

She pulled in her chin. “That's it?”

“Put her where you can see her and talk to her often.”

She didn't give him the incredulous
What?
this time. In fact, she seemed resigned to his inanity. “What do you want me to talk to her about?” she said.

Sully looked into the brown eyes he could imagine as dark pools of fudge on a child-face.

“Ask what she believes about herself,” he said.

She straightened her shoulders and stood up, hand outstretched again. The college professor slid back into place.

“Thank you. I'll think about it.”

“You want to come back a week from now? Tell me what you've thought?”

“Tentatively,” she said. “I'll call you if I'm not coming.”

Sully nodded. “Fair enough.”

He walked her halfway through the garage, until she picked up the pace and went the rest of the way alone.

No little girl showed herself in the woman who drove away in the toy she came in. Sully leaned against Isabella. Little Demi had the answers. He hoped he'd have the chance to find out what they were.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

H
i, Jay,

I just had the most bizarre experience on the planet. As you yourself
would say, it totally weirded me out.

I went to see a therapist. Counselor, shrink—I bet you'd have a funky
word for it. That would have been strange enough—just going to someone
I don't even know and telling him my deepest desire—to get you
back, Jay. You and Dad and Christopher. That's all I want in this
world—and that's why I went to him, because I hope he can help me.

But it was
so
not-what-I-expected, and I'm not sure even you would
have a word for it. Less like what you see on TV and in the movies, and
way more like being on a game show—you know, Wheel of Fortune
meets Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. There I was with Regis, Vanna,
and Bob Barker all rolled into one.

Are you getting a sense of how desperate I am to figure out what it
was that made me betray you as I did—so we can be together again? Jay,
please—

Mom

I put down the pen, folded the letter in half, and stuck it into my bag with the ten others I'd written to my daughter. Letters to Christopher had their own folder. So did the ones to Rich. I hadn't sent any of them. Every text message and e-mail I had sent to each of them—every day—had been ignored. If I didn't send the letters, I didn't run the risk of having them returned.

“Demi—meet my kid.”

I straightened up from the bag and turned to greet the college daughter Mickey told me would be coming back in to help out at the Daily Bread now that her spring break was over. I expected a younger elf from the gnome-like clan. I didn't expect a former student.

“Dr. Costanas!”

“Audrey?”

She was that little wisp of a thing who'd transferred in at the start of the semester. Of course she was Mickey's daughter, with a marvelous mouth that took up the entire bottom half of her face and fudge-colored hair that capped her head, probably no matter what else she tried to do with it.

“What are
you
doing here?” Her eyes were bigger and rounder than Mickey's, especially now.

Mickey squinted at us. “You two know each other?”

“This is Dr. C.!” Audrey dove at me and, to my surprise, put her arms around my neck. “I've missed you—everybody has missed you!”

“Okay—can I play?” Mickey said. She pulled a head of garlic from the bunch dangling near
her head, but she kept her eyes on the two of us.

“This is Dr. Costanas, Mom,” Audrey said. “She is—was—one of my teachers at CCC.” Audrey stepped back from me, arms dangling as if she didn't know what to do with them now. “And the only one who was worth fifty cents for a box of Twinkies. I don't even know where they dug up the guy they replaced you with.”

I must actually have looked as if I'd just had my nose hairs yanked out, because she prayed her hands at her lips and drooped. “I'm sorry—I guess you don't want to talk about that, huh?”

She had no idea how much I didn't want to talk about it. It was one thing to have Mickey now know where I was unemployed
from.
But if the why came out, there would be one more person I couldn't look in the eye. They were stacking up so high I could take a body count.

“But how cool is it that you ended up here?” Audrey said.

“Oh—pretty cool,” I said.

“I mean, this is great for me. Like I said, we miss you. It just bites without you and Dr. Archer. But now we can, like, hang out—”

“Right now you're going to go ahead and hang out with the customers,” Mickey said.

“We'll talk later,” Audrey half whispered over her shoulder as Mickey ushered her toward the door.

That's what I was afraid of.

I reached for the celery and turned to the juicer. Mickey got herself in front of it, arms folded.

“Don't go getting that I'm-such-a-loser look on your face,” she said. She nodded toward the dining area, where Audrey's voice lifted like the song it was. “You want me to get her off you? She can ask more questions than a civil litigator.”

I didn't know what to say. I felt like my brain had gone through the juicer.

“Done,” she said. “Do the apple-celery combination—and use the Granny Smiths.”

As she started for the door, I leaned on the counter, looking down at the pile of stalks, struck with an aching loneliness. “I don't want her to not talk to me,” I said. “I didn't get a chance to know her before I left.”

“Feel free to get to know all you want,” Mickey said, pushing the swinging door to the kitchen open with her back. “There're a few things I'd like to know myself. She just doesn't need to get to know
you
any better at this point. Am I right?”

“Thank you,” I said to my celery.

“Don't mention it,” Mickey said.

I didn't know what Mickey said to Audrey. Audrey and I worked side by side for the next few days, but she didn't ask me anything about why I left, what happened to Zach, or whether I was coming back.

She did talk though. While she grated lemons—over the washing of kale—between the words of the orders she called through the opening to Oscar, who, I figured out early on, was her stepfather.

“She can talk longer than you can listen to her,” Mickey told me.

The first day I learned all about her roommate in the dorm, who listened to Kelly Clarkson and left her toenail clippings on the floor—and for Pete's sake, who needed to clip their toenails that much anyway?

I had to wait for the next day's lull to hear about Boy, the new guy Audrey was dating.

“Boy is
so
cute,” she told me over the sink full of soapy muffin tins we were wallowing in. “I have never dated a guy so cute—no, he's hot. I mean it.”

“Does Boy have a name?” I said.

“He does. But I'm not referring to him by it yet—you know, to my family, friends like you. I just call him Boy.”

I stopped, hand suspended and full of soap. “And that would be because . . .”

“Because until I know a relationship is actually going somewhere, I like to keep it impersonal. If I say, ‘It didn't work out with Boy,' people go, ‘Oh, that's too bad. Next?'”

“But if you call him by name . . .”

“Then it says we have a relationship, and if it doesn't happen, it's a bigger deal to say, ‘Percival and I broke up.'” She gave a sigh.

I took that to mean she'd had her share of Percivals. And what was she? Nineteen?

“So—tell me about Boy,” I said. As if she needed an invitation.

I listened with deeper and deeper interest. There was something comfortingly familiar about that feminine, still-teenaged voice that tripped up and down its melodic ladder, making sounds and forming words that could only come from a girl-child trying to figure herself out.

We were well into an analysis of how Boy could be so, like, ridiculously intelligent and yet so—well, hot, at the same time, when I realized tears were backing up in my throat. She made me miss my daughter. Jayne was quieter, more serious, and less concerned with “hot,” as far as I knew. She could have been Jayne nonetheless—but she wasn't. I was brewing jasmine tea with someone else's daughter, not mine.

“You okay, Dr. C.?” Audrey said.

“Does this jasmine scent affect your sinuses?”

“No—but—” She brought her voice down to conspiratorial level. “That nasty ginseng stuff makes me feel like I'm gonna throw up. Don't tell my mom, though.”

“Your secret's safe with me.”

“What are you two cooking up over there?” Mickey called from the table she was wiping down. “I don't think it's tea.”

Audrey and I looked at each other and giggled. The moment I had a chance, I went into the bathroom and breathed hard until the tears were safely banished.

Audrey was off at two. I was too, actually, but since I had no place to go, I stayed and sat on a stool in the kitchen, grinding Himalayan salt while Mickey prepped the afternoon's goodies.

“So,” Mickey said, “does my daughter have another new boyfriend?” I looked up from the salt grinder, but she already had her hand up to stop me from answering. “Sorry—I'm gonna go ahead and take my foot out of my mouth now. Whatever she's told you, it was obviously in confidence. I wouldn't know what that feels like, mind you. Oh—late customer.”

She hurried out to the dining room, pad in hand.

So—not so much with the mother/daughter relationship. That surprised me. I personally was almost ready to bare my soul to Mickey. I hadn't met anybody that non-judgmental and intuitive since Mama Costanas.

I stopped, hand full of salt crystals. What would my mother-in-law think of me now? Even the memory of her round, freckled, unwrinkled face cinched around me like a vise. I'd married a family as much as a man, led by a matriarch who would put her baggy arms around me, skin falling against me like panels of silk, and span the distance my own mother had enforced between herself and me.

My mind clicked back to the Daily Bread kitchen, where Mickey had returned to unroll a blanket of dough. Mama Costanas would have words for me now. I couldn't hear them. I could only hear myself cry.

“I've been wondering when you were finally going to do that,” Mickey said.

“I'm sorry.”

I reached for a paper towel. She stopped me with the sharp pause of her hands on the dough. “Touch that and you draw back a nub.”

“You're paying me to work, not—”

“Right now I'm paying you to sit there and bawl your eyes out and hopefully tell me what's
going on with you.”

“I can't,” I said. “You'll think . . . I can't.”

“The way I see it, you can't
not
.” She didn't take her eyes off the almond butter she smoothed across another flat of dough. She still didn't look at me as she rolled it into itself, a roll, a tuck, another gentle roll. “I'm going to go ahead and admit I know what's going on down in that apartment.” Roll, tuck, smooth. “You've tried the pacing and the hand wringing and the forgetting to eat. Then came the hibernating. Now it's put a cheerful face on the agony that's ripping you up.”

She used a tool like a triple pizza cutter to cut the roll into wraps, pecans peeking their faces out of the spirals. I cried on.

“You think I'm losing it,” I said.

“No—I think you're doing everything you can to find it.” She picked up each roll and placed it firmly in the pocket of a muffin tin. “That's the reason you ended up in our apartment and in our restaurant.”

A sob bubbled from my nose.

“Now you're getting real.” Mickey slid the muffin pan into the oven, closed the door, and folded her floury hands onto her arms. “You're here because this is part of you finding yourself.” She nodded at the cinnamon sticks hanging in bunches over her head. “It's real here. You won't find anything fake. Including yourself.”