The Do-Over (10 page)

“She doesn’t have any money.” His voice echoed in the shop.

Gretchen narrowed her eyes at him before she smiled at Mara. “It’s on me.”

“That’s so sweet.”

“You don’t,” he sighed, “have any money.”

“And?” She waited for him to respond, but he just looked at her and moved his hands around like he didn’t have to answer something so illogical, so she turned back to Gretchen. “I’m going to get an enormous sign and paint
AND?
on it. It’ll really save me some time.”

“You can’t stay, Janie.”

She studied him for a moment, the self-possessed, reasonable man he’d always been. It surprised her he possessed the ability to be such an asshole. It surprised her even more she’d thought it. Of course, he’d had some professional experience as a principal. He could strong arm a student or two during a school year. It was too damn bad it was summer, and it wasn’t going to work on her. She patted his cheek on the way out. “Watch me.”

But as she stepped out into the July sunshine and felt certain that her cardigan daisies bloomed, she didn’t care if he watched or not. She ignored him when he exited the shop behind her. She’d like to ignore him until she’d plucked the last chocolate from the bias cut satin teddy, but she’d need money to do that, and he’d certainly shut her down, the rat bastard.

She spotted Stella exit Abundance and scowl back at the door while she downed a mug of coffee. Mara walked over to join her, pleased that Dan stayed in Gretchen’s doorway. He’d better not think he could cancel her credit card and then cozy up to her landlady. “Hey, Stella,”

Stella eyed Dan then ignored him too. “Quit smokin’ ten years ago, but I’ll be damned if I don’t want one at least once a week.” She let out a breath and turned her attention from Abundance. “Nice daisies.”

“Thank you.” She admired them herself then watched Stella throw back the rest of her coffee and wondered how she didn’t scald herself. “You okay?”

“Oh, Hell, we’re tryin’ to make a catalog, and it’s crap.”

But it was Abundance. It had life saving properties. No catalog featuring Luscious Bubbles and butter balls could be bad. She heard Dan clear his throat, and she refused to turn and acknowledge him, although Stella didn’t hesitate. She stepped around Mara to study Dan over purple half-glasses.

Against her will, Mara felt her manners kick in, the curse of being the offspring of a doctor’s wife. “Stella, Dan. Dan, Stella.” Well, she hadn’t looked his way. That would show him.

He sighed like a long suffering man. “Husband.”

Stella gave a scratchy laugh. “Oh, I got that.”

Mara felt Dan move closer behind her. He stopped by her elbow, waved his cell phone, and proceeded down the sidewalk.

Oh, she’d call him. Call him names, like bully, and asshole, and rat bastard, and maybe some more she’d make up later when she’d had some practice. She was going to develop a whole new goddamn skill set.

“And?” Stella waited.

Mara sighed. “That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.”

Stella shook her head. “Come on, you can’t make the catalog any worse.”

“Thank you, Stella.” She followed her in and only when the door closed did it dawn on her it might not be a compliment, and that once inside, she might encounter the soapy almond stranger.

She spent a second scanning the workroom, relieved to see just the people she knew the names of. She felt a brief disappointment that the almond scent was gone, but plenty of Abundance still lingered.

Celia waved her over to take a closer look at the two pages laid out on a metal table. One had bubble bath sizes and prices listed like a plumbing supply catalog. The other page was zippier, but the dry descriptions were contained in superhero lightning bubbles. She wasn’t sure how to reassure them, since the catalog pages sucked. “Holy buckets, Batman! It’ll be good to have a catalog so everybody can order.” Everybody whose husband hadn’t cancelled their credit card.

“Hey,” Dylan laughed like he’d just had a funny thought. “You wouldn’t have had to move to Vancouver.”

She looked around the table. She wouldn’t have met anybody, wouldn’t have had the days, however few, of indulging herself. She wouldn’t have met Gretchen or be enjoying the sweater with the smiley daisies. The tears surprised her. They filled her eyes without any warning, and she sniffed, turning her face toward the ceiling in an attempt to stop them from coming down her face. They dripped anyway, and she had to leave. Everything was so messy. She was messy. Her life was messy. She felt like an embarrassing guest on a daytime talk show, the kind where Suburban Moms Turned Beggars cried right before the commercial for the little lavender pill.

She felt a towel in her hand and dabbed at her eyes, the scent of almond calming her down. She sighed, turned to hand the towel back, and he took it with the same smile he’d worn when he’d wished her a happy Independence Day.

“You’ve met John.” Stella waved Mara’s attention back to the catalog pages.

“I, uh…” She felt her face flush.

Stella laughed. “Yep, that’s my boy.”

Before Mara could process that, she realized Celia was patting her arm in concern. She gave Celia the best smile she could manage. “I’m okay.”

“I didn’t mean anything…” Dylan shifted uncomfortably, “about you coming to Vancouver. I didn’t mean to make you, you know, cry.”

“It’s not you, Dylan. I have to… It’s just that…” God, she didn’t want to say it. The stranger, John, the good smelling son of Stella, watched her. She could feel it. None of them needed to hear the mess that was her current life. A bad credit card, honestly, it was so low budget.

Dylan still looked stressed. “I just meant that—”

“It’s okay, really. I… I just have to go back, and I really wanted… I just really wanted to spend longer here.”

“Then do it.” John assured her with the confidence of a man without a cancelled credit card or probably kids or a husband. Wait, that was wrong.

Stella stepped in. “Is everything okay with your son?”

Mara put her hand on Stella’s arm. God bless a mom who could mom a mom. She felt tears again, sniffed them away. “Logan’s fine. It’s just. It’s nothing.” But Stella watched her with that no bullshit look she was coming to need, and she blurted it out. “Dan cancelled my credit card.”

Stella snorted with amusement. “I’ll be damned. He didn’t look that gutsy.”

Mara cleared her throat to stop another wave of tears. He’d had a couple of surprisingly gutsy moments, enough that he was forcing her to leave. Of course, his job was easy because… “I’m a sheep.”

“You’re great,” Celia defended her against herself. “You’re cool.”

No one in the history of the Earth had ever spoken those words to her before. She took one last sniff. Celia’s delusions deserved some basis in reality. She, at least, wouldn’t cry anymore. “Thank you, Celia.”

“Listen,” Stella lifted up the pages they’d created for the new catalog. “These suck.” She pointed to a lightning bubble. “They
Holy Shit, Batman
suck.” Stella looked at John, and he nodded. “Tell you what. I’ll let you stay in the loft and give you money for food if you take a crack at the catalog.”

Everyone turned to her with such confidence she stopped breathing. It was absurd. “I can’t make a catalog. I’m a middle school teacher trainer.”

John smiled. “You’re a woman.”

It sounded significant when he said it, empowering, and kinda dirty. Kinda dirty? She wasn’t a middle school teacher trainer, she’d become a middle-schooler. But Stella went on like it was settled. “If the pages are useable, we’ll pay you a sub-standard wage.”

“Is that even legal?” Dylan asked.

Stella shook her head. “Paying an American tourist anything is so far from legal, I don’t think it matters. Besides, I want to give Dan a fightin’ chance. Be a shame to undo all his hard work.”

Dan, fighting? He was Mr. Contained. Stella obviously hadn’t gotten a good look at him, and siccing his mother on her didn’t count.

Stella placed a hundred dollar bill on the catalog pages. Looking up at her was yet another man Mara didn’t know. This one lacked the kind eyes of the fifty dollar man and wore a mustache like the grill of a train engine, but he was worth a hundred dollars.

She picked up the pages and the money. “I’m gonna start over.”

She sat in her loft. Her loft, the one she’d bartered with her creative skills as a catalog… what? Writer? Developer? Psychic? Well, whatever her title, she would embrace the ill-defined work and tamp down on the panic she felt, in general, over being asked to do something besides operating a power point presentation about differentiated instruction and student centered multiple pathways to content.

And she’d do it even though the money would barely keep her in pizzas. Stella was taking sides alright just not all the way. Maybe it was a seventy/thirty split in her favor, but she could live on very little, couldn’t she? She had in college. Besides, how much food did she need? She had all the free bath supplies she could dream of and enough books for at least a week. She was going to do it, and maybe she possessed some hidden talent and would write an academy award winning bath catalog.

She laid out four sheets of paper headed with each category of bath products. There were fizzy bath balls, creamy ones, bubble bath, and shower gels. She set out an extra sheet for the slam-bang introduction. Ideas would flow now. She’d be on fire. On fire any minute.

But instead she sat, stared at the empty sheets, and waited. Maybe creative thought required a moon alignment that hadn’t yet occurred in her lifetime.

When, what felt like an hour later, the doorbell rang, it sounded like rescue. She hadn’t even ordered a pizza yet, but maybe she sent in a psychic request after all.

She went to the door and peeked through the smudged hole at Dan. “I’m not letting you in.”

He leaned closer to the peep hole but didn’t respond.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve even coming here.” A couple of days on her own, and she was already channeling Clint Eastwood.

He lifted a paper bag. “I’ve got a low fat turkey sub on whole wheat.”

Hell. He was playing hard ball now. She was poor and hungry. She thought of her recent enjoyment of pizzas and chocolate and realized Mara didn’t eat low fat subs. “I don’t do diet.”

A packet of mayonnaise danced in front of the peephole.

Shit. Was he going to be thoughtful now? That wasn’t fair. But her stomach didn’t know fair from hungry, and it growled. She wanted that sub. She needed that mayonnaise, and she unlocked the door, opening it just wide enough for her hand to get it. “Thank you.”

He pulled the bag and the elusive packet of fat to his chest. “Uh-uh. The sub comes in. I come in.”

While she considered it, he opened the sack and looked in. “I put some banana peppers on it.”

She smirked at him. He didn’t know anything. “I don’t eat banana peppers.”

He shrugged. “You’ve never had them.”

She rapped the door with a knuckle. “Don’t even.”

His voice, all innocence, rang out in the hall. “Don’t even what?”

She tried to think of a specific warning, but she was too hungry to be quick. “I don’t know exactly. But it’s not going to work. Come in with the damn sandwich, but when I’m done with it, you’re leaving.”

He handed her the bag. “Understood.”

She studied the last banana pepper, a sweet and sour, yellow gem in a sandwich. How had she gone so many years without the sweet pickley goodness of banana peppers? She put it in her mouth and enjoyed the last swallow before she kicked him out, but he pulled a DVD out of his coat pocket. “Charlie’s Angels, the first one, your favorite.”

It surprised her that he even knew that was her favorite. It was so nice of him. It was… “No. I don’t even have a TV, and if I tried to buy one they’d tell me my credit card was cancelled by you.”

He didn’t look like he was going to engage in that conversation, instead he wore his problem-solving face. He’d turn things over until he’d found a perfectly reasonable solution to the situation. They could go to a movie. They could go home, and she could watch her very own copy on her very own TV. Well, she didn’t want to be reasonable. “Don’t strain yourself, Dan. I don’t want to see it anyway.”

“But it’s your favorite. I’ve never understood it, but I rented it.”

She considered, while she stuffed the napkins and wrappers in the empty bag, why she had even liked the movie. It might be a movie Mara would like, but why had Janie? It was a very un-Janie-like movie. She picked up the three empty mayo packets she’d used, and headed toward the kitchen to throw everything away before she sent Dan away. As she shoved the bag in the garbage, it came to her, and she stood up, the bag still in her hand. “I wanted to be a Charlie’s Angel.”

Still parked on the couch, he looked at her. “You want to ride a motorcycle out of a helicopter in a fur bikini?”

“Yeah.” She pictured the kind of road rash a bikini motorcycle crash would inflict, especially coming from that height. “Well, I wanted to be brave and bold and secure enough to ride a motorcycle out of a helicopter in a bikini. I wanted to be daring enough to accessorize and… and…” She waved the mayonnaise packets. “Eat fat.”

He seemed to consider it. “That first morning at McDonalds,” he held his hands near his chest, “they were really Charlie’s Angels up there.”

She jammed the sack in the garbage, headed toward the door, and opened it. “Well, thank you. And thank you for the sandwich and the mayonnaise and the banana peppers.”

He shifted on the couch until she gave him the look that had been generationally handed down to her, the look perfected by millions of years of motherhood, the look that drove anyone who had ever had a mother to comply instantly. It worked, and he rose and stood beside her at the door. “You were fine during the sandwich. I don’t know why my bringing a movie set you off.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m tired of watching movies to make up for long, tiring days at work, at the grocery store, at the stove, or dryer, or volunteer meeting, or dishwasher. I don’t want to be satisfied witnessing other people riding motorcycles out of helicopters.”