The Do-Over (35 page)

“You are. Now go pick out something really stunning from the jewelry case.” Gretchen pointed across the store, and Celia hesitated but left.

Gretchen took the moment to gather herself, turn back to the dresses, and pull out a ruffled green number. It was so awful, Mara couldn’t imagine it could be second hand. Who would have worn it the first time around?

Her horror must have been momentarily visible on her face because Gretchen, puzzled, turned her attention to the silky wreck in her hand and jumped. “Sorry.” She bit her lip, a sheen of tears in her eyes, and Mara reached out to put her own steadying hand on Gretchen’s arm, but felt her step away, move closer to the rack and stick her head into the mess of gowns. 

Mara waited, heard the gulp, shaky exhale of air, sniff, and sniff. Gretchen couldn’t stay in there forever. The smell alone would have to be pretty funky given the decades-old fabrics.

Finally, Gretchen sneezed and her head popped out, static sending her hair at angles from her temples. She gave one giant sniff. “Sorry.” Her hand wandered half way down the rack, skimming the dresses like a blind person reading Braille. She stopped, reached up for a padded hanger, and yanked the dress out.

It hung down to the floor, a shimmer of Abundance blue, simple and sexy even on the hanger. It called to Mara like the sirens had called to Ulysses. Jump overboard. Jump overboard. She reached out and touched the slick glow of it. “You’re great, Gretchen. You’re going to make it no matter what.”

“I am?” Gretchen went from mothering to needing mothering.

Mara wanted to provide it but felt her own tears. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

Gretchen laughed, but it didn’t sound any different from her crying.

“But I do know I need a pair of ruby red slippers.”

Gretchen laughed again, less of a sob this time. “Don’t we all.”

They winked in the bathroom light, two red shoes tricked out in rhinestones. They waited on the bathmat while the tub steamed lavender clouds.

She clicked one picture and set the camera beside the Dorothy shoes. Then she climbed into the luscious water and cried until it turned cold.

She’d not imagined herself inside the Granville Hotel the day she’d enjoyed the island with John. She’d not imagined the Abundance blue gown, whispering silk along her body, or the trickle of jazz escaping from the room ahead.

In the rich reds and golds of the hallway, the catalog met her. Page after page of photos, bath products, and copy she’d written sat larger than life on gold filigree easels. Like arrows they led guests to the party, but she wasn’t just a guest, she’d had a part in bringing the feeling of Abundance to life. The English picnic seemed a lifetime away, a dream of green lawn and delicate bonnets. She smiled at the slick black and grey photo of Renny with the wet alley cat. Unlike the actual moment, in the captured one, Renny held the cat with affection, commitment. Mara shook her head, a wishful trick of the light.

She stopped, though she wanted to go right past the page featuring her hands on the potter’s wheel. It made her heart clutch to see them held so beautifully in Dan’s. His wedding ring, a wave of clay over half of it, still shone. Her fingers were bare.

She tried to shut the image out by moving on, but the next photo, of the shoes from Oz as they waited on the bathmat, didn’t help her any. Could she click her heels and go back home? Would she? And what home would she choose?

She left the photos and moved along the hall, glancing down to watch the sparkle her red shoes gave off with every step. The matching evening bag hung from her shoulder with a strand of red glass beads, and the night of her life lay ahead. She wanted to stop and hold onto it like a girl would, a girl who didn’t know better and thought she could snap a moment in a locket to keep near her heart.

“Mara.” John appeared in the doorway, dark tux, dark hair, the kind of wolfish smile that was so much better than a compliment.

She gave him an almost imperceptible curtsy of thanks, and he closed the distance between them to put his hand on the small of her back. They didn’t speak, just walked into the party together. 

She let the crystal, silver, flowers, music enter her senses collectively, an abundance of sensual pleasures not examined or dissected but taken in as a wave of lushness to love.

“Let me get you everything.”

She lifted her face to the ceiling, shining in chandeliers, leaned her body into his warm palm, and laughed. “Yes.”

Everyone she knew in Vancouver was there. Stella and the shipping crew gathered at the bar, naturally and beautifully, in gowns and over-sized jewelry, the kind a woman has to grow into with experience. On a younger woman it would look like playing dress-up, but the shipping crew had earned their cocktail rings and old school clip-on earrings.

Celia managed to smile in her princess dress, Gretchen by her side. Renny skirted the edge of the gathering, staying in the shadows despite being encased in red from head to toe. And Dylan, at first she’d missed him. He’d grown all the way up once he’d put on the dark suit. Judging by the two girls he was moving in on at the buffet, he was aware of his newly found capacity for suave.

There were also plenty of people she didn’t know who looked at home at the gathering, people who had some practice at it and managed to be informal in formal wear. But before she could ask about them, John handed her a glass of champagne. She took a sip, enjoyed the fizzy bite and hoped it would go straight to her head. When the last caterer packed up the last tray and a man with a broom came in to sweep up what remained, she’d think.

She’d enjoyed her second champagne as quickly as the first and headed for the buffet for sustenance and alcohol absorption and because there was lobster on it.

One of the suit guys drew John away for what didn’t look like weather talk. She would just have to eat his share of the gangster of the sea. She spotted Renny near the bar, trying for nonchalance, but hitting stressed and uncomfortable instead, so she strolled the length of the buffet, and when she reached her, linked arms and walked her back to the food. She handed Renny a small white plate, felt the hesitation and then acceptance. Mara hit the spread, giving Renny everything she put on her own plate, and they sat at the nearest table, a circle of pure white linen draping it.

She forked in a lemony bite of lobster puff and motioned for Renny to do the same, and they ate their twin plates in silence. Renny spoke only when a white gloved waiter cruised by, and she ordered a vodka on the rocks. Mara considered another drink but wanted more than ever in her life to pace herself and take in all the pleasures of the evening.

The waiter left, and she decided the silence needed to end. She tipped her head toward Renny. “You know you want to talk to me.”

Renny shook her head.

“Oh, you do. Tell Auntie Mara all your troubles.”

Renny watched the party.

“You can trust me. We practically dated.”

The corner of Renny’s mouth twitched.

“I’ll just listen.”

Renny mumbled, “no, you won’t.”

“I’ll just listen and talk only when necessary.”

“You’ll tell me how wrong I am, and how I should dive right in because the water’s great.”

She snorted. “I practically drowned. You think I’m going to tell you to commit yourself?” She laughed. “I didn’t mean…”

“I need to.” Renny leaned in closer. “Everything is so fucking hard.”

She sighed, felt it so deeply to be true, crushing and true. “Yes.” She touched her forehead to Renny’s, and they sat back again, and smiled at each other.

John found them there and held out a hand to her. “I know Renny’s prettier than I am…”

Renny started at his shoes and made her way visually up his body. “Not by much.”

He laughed, and Mara felt the warmth as he took her hand. “Dance with me?”

The waiter arrived, set a highball glass on the table, and she left her purse with a more relaxed Renny, even as her own body tensed as John led her onto the floor.

The music slowly filled the room. It surprised her she registered it at all, that she could use the sense of hearing when feeling took her over when he held her close, his cheek warm against hers. She realized part of the wild rhythm of her heart was his foreignness. Not Canadian foreign, and not foreign in the negative connotation, a foreign object in the eye, a confounding experience, a foreign exchange student who never seems happy in the new family and continues to eat only their own cooking. This was the wide shoulders, thigh muscles bunching, spicy soap smell, chandelier glint off the dark hair curled just above the curve of his cheekbone kind of foreign.

She felt satiny and lovely in his arms. She felt womanly warm and cool in blue at the same time, but the song nudged her as much as John’s breath along her neck did. She closed her eyes to concentrate on both.

“True Love Ways.” He hummed, and she felt it sweep her collarbone. She shivered from the sensation and opened her eyes in question.

“Buddy Holly.”

“Hmmm.” She rested her cheek against his again. The song. She must have heard it before. Who didn’t know Buddy Holly tunes? He hadn’t left vaults of music behind. He hadn’t lived long enough. She blocked the image of a small silver plane falling to earth and curled in closer to John, hardly noticing his hands as they pressed her even closer. She hoped another dreamy number would follow and maybe another after that. She’d like to just keep feeling the sway of her dress and emotions.

“Mara.”

“Hmmm…”

“Mara!”

She jerked her head up to meet John’s eyes, but he shrugged, an elegant lift of black tailored shoulders, and tipped his head. Her line of sight followed to where Renny stood beside them, holding out a cell phone. Her cell phone.

Renny handed it to her with a wince of apology. “I tried to shut it off, but it rang and rang, and someone’s crying.”

She lifted it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Mom! Grandma fell, and I tried to tell her, but she just wanted to try, and I’m sorry, Mom. If I hadn’t…” Logan’s voice choked off from tears.

“Logan.” She waited a rapid heartbeat for him to say something, anything. “Logan!”

“Mom, I…”

“It’s okay, honey. Take a good, deep breath. Just breathe for a second.” She heard him take in a jagged breath, blow it out. “Another.” She waited, not breathing herself. “Now start at the beginning.”

He took another breath, calmer but still sounding shaky. “Grandma wanted to ride, and I said…”

“What kind of ride?”

“The skateboard, Mom.” His voice held the irritation of adolescence, as if the trouble of comprehension lay with her. “My skateboard.”

“Grandma rode your skateboard.” She repeated it, not for confirmation but correction.

“She tried and then bam!”

She jumped.

“She went down big time. I mean, she’s little, but she bit it hard, Mom. It sounded like…”

She felt the first flutter of panic for Lois after the intense mother-panic for her son faded. “Logan! How is your grandmother?”

“Not good, Mom. She busted her arm, her arm!”

She let out a relieved breath.

“She’s gettin’ a cast. A cast on Grandma because I let her.”

She half-smiled in relief and felt an odd sense of happiness that Logan was the kind of boy who knew how to care. “She was just trying something new, taking a risk.”

“Grandma?”

She laughed. “You’re never too old for that. Logan, it was about her stepping out. It’s not about you, sweetie.” She heard him let out a held breath, and her body relaxed with his. “Okay?”

“Yeah. And, hey, I’m comin’ home tomorrow.”

She looked up from the place she’d been with Logan and found herself on a dance floor in Vancouver, John and Renny waiting. She looked around the room, frantic. Stella. Gretchen. Celia. Abundance. But Logan kept talking, relaying the details of Grandma’s weeks in a cast, Grandpa’s inability to cook or clean. It washed over her even as she took in every detail from where she stood. Her fingers ached from gripping the phone to keep from dropping it.

“I gotta go. Grandpa’s coming with Grandma. Her cast is purple, Mom. Purple!” He laughed in relief, ready to let her go with his crisis over. “Bye, Mom.”

She still held the phone after the click and nothing.

She found herself seated, surrounded and seated and champagned. John had been sent away for an ice water Stella insisted would help her regain some color. She half expected him to return with clean towels and boiling water.

Stella and the shipping crew clustered like fully bloomed roses around the table. A few petals might be gone, but they were sweeter for having lived a full summer. Stella patted her hand. “Your mother-in-law will be just fine. She’s tough as nails. We saw it. Can’t hide that with polish.”

“Oh, I know…” She took a drink, unable, unwilling to tell them, maybe herself, that the last week of figuring out her life she’d lost in a phone call.

Stella kept trying to settle her down anyway. “Martha broke her hip, two…”

“Three,” Martha corrected.

“Three years ago. And she’s good as new.”

“When it rains, I’m…” Martha stopped when Stella glared at her, “good as new.”

“Women are hardy. Hardier than men. You just about can’t do us in. Even if our daughters-in-law sometimes wish we’d kick the bucket.”

“Or daughters.” Velma thinned her lips, a story there Mara didn’t want to hear and probably wouldn’t blame Velma’s daughter for telling.

Jennie elbowed Velma, and Velma turned on her. “What?”

All the women had quieted, and she realized they’d thought of her own mother, gone before forty. “Not all woman are hardy.”

Jennie nodded in encouragement. “Sometimes a woman’s just born delicate.”

She considered that. She’d never thought of her mother as delicate. It just didn’t fit. “She didn’t have any health problems, really.” She pictured her mother, a stronger build than she had. “Just some sleep problems. Her nerves, she’d say.” She’d been a doctor’s wife, and she’d found a lot of stress there. Mara had seen the lines around her mother’s mouth, beneath her eyes, in the days leading up to a dinner party or when her father worked for days and days and they hadn’t seen him much. And he was a doctor, wouldn’t he have seen a long running heart problem?