The Do-Over (39 page)

She swung her legs over the side, let the day move around her at its own pace and then she made her move into it like merging with traffic. One bucket, one brush, and she’d be back in bed.

The ceiling glowed yellow. The walls glowed yellow. She admired the empty bedroom, and felt it was a good thing the neighbor boy had been home with a friend because moving a bed and a couple of dressers had been nothing with three people.

She stepped out of the fresh, painty smell of the bedroom into the hallway, careful not to rub against the wet walls.

The living room looked so much larger without furniture, and yellow suited it as well. What didn’t look good in yellow? She glanced into the empty dining room, yellow, then out the front window where the dining room table and chairs had been abandoned at crazy angles like an outdoor dinner party abruptly ended due to natural disaster.

She went to the front door, careful to only handle the knob, turned it, and stepped outside where the couch looked pretty good with a rhododendron behind it. She pictured a pair of squirrels arguing over who hadn’t used a coaster on the end table.

“Janie?” Mrs. Laird perched on her front porch as if, despite her rigid frame and rubber-tipped cane, she’d just flown out of her house.

Janie turned from the furniture carnage on her front lawn. “Mrs. Laird, how are you today?”

“
I’m
fine, dear.” She seemed to wait for clarification.

Of course, Janie would offer up an explanation of why every stick of furniture she owned was camped out on her lawn. Janie had a reasonable answer for everything, didn’t she? She tried to see if she did, in fact, have a reasonable answer, but nothing came to her.

Mrs. Laird arched a thin eyebrow at her. “You’re having a tag sale?”

Janie knew, as did the entire ten block radius, that Mrs. Laird held a strict no-rummage policy, and she insisted that her neighbors rise to join her. Did any other human feel as strongly about public displays of unwanted items? And wasn’t life just too short to care about your neighbor’s “shit.”

Mrs. Laird wobbled on her porch. At her age she could probably break a hip just experiencing moral outrage. Janie wondered if she should feel responsible for the potential danger, but she didn’t. She thought of the shipping crew of Abundance. No, it wasn’t aging that made someone brittle, it was disappointment that did. It was allowing the world to make you smaller and smaller until you couldn’t hold yourself upright anymore. That, that made a woman break.

“Janie?” Mrs. Laird regained her balance, shook her tightly curled gray head once, and went on as if she couldn’t believe Janie had sworn, so she must have heard wrong. She waved around the yard. “What is this?” But instead of answering, Janie just smiled at her because maybe somewhere in all that crabby fussiness was a woman who’d once let a man she wasn’t married to put his hands on her ass dancing to
Mood Indigo
. Maybe Mrs. Laird had given her heart to a milkman, or worked a stripper pole, or maybe, just maybe, she’d once taken a thirty-day vacation from her life.

“Janie! I am speaking to you! Why is your furniture out of doors?” Mrs. Laird’s lips pinched together so tightly, even from a distance Janie could see them turn white.

She continued to smile and felt some genuine warmth for Mrs. Laird. The woman wasn’t any meaner than Velma, and she kind of loved that cranky gal. “You think this is my furniture?” She studied the yard as if every piece was a stranger to her. It was. “I’m starting over. This stuff belongs to the squirrels.”

She faced the confused Mrs. Laird and felt her smile spread into real joy. “One minute they’re padding a nest with twigs and then WHAM!” She threw her arms wide, and Mrs. Laird jerked. “They’ve mastered the living room set, and they only want queen-sized beds. That’s evolution for ya. I keep telling them, less is more.” She lowered her hands to her sides and looked down at her chocolate stained yellow painted sweat suit. She was never wearing it again.

“Welcome the new squirrel family for me.” She waved and headed back into the newly painted house.

She reached for the silvery blue bottle of Abundance, stopped herself, and let the hot water of the shower run like a million tiny rivers down her body. Abundance didn’t really come in a bottle, and it didn’t wait in Canada either, or hide inside a can of yellow paint. Maybe it couldn’t be found at all. It was a possibility that she’d have to pick something smaller than abundance, like minor satisfaction, or comforting routine, or being quietly alone. She hoped the rest of her life didn’t require that kind of compromise, but she understood it might.

She reached for the gold bar of soap that smelled like Dan, and for the first time since she’d pried open the paint can with his screwdriver and set out to turn her world a different color, she faced the prospect that he wasn’t going to want… wasn’t going to want maybe.

He’d not wanted change in Canada when there’d been the perfect break from their lives. He could have embraced the time, made love again on the carpet or in the backseat of a car or in a park, or they could have flown to Nova Scotia or Des Moines and eaten whatever exciting things people ate in Nova Scotia or Des Moines.

The bubbles, yellow tinged from the bar and lush in their own way, ran down the length of her body. They skirted around a clump of paint on her foot and swirled toward the drain, clockwise. She stuck her toe near the drain, tried to turn the flow to counterclockwise and failed. Some things couldn’t be changed.

Sitting cross legged on the floor for an hour wasn’t as painful as she would have imagined.
Criss cross applesauce
Logan’s first grade teacher had called it. And she felt a little like a nervous and excited first grader as she sat in her daisy cardigan in her yellow house and stared out the window past the squirrel furniture while she waited for Dan to come home. 

Of course, her first grade teacher was long dead. She didn’t know that for a fact, but when she roughed out the math, it was highly unlikely Mrs. Thornwall lived. She’d be Guinness record old, although weren’t adults always really ancient when you were seven even if they were only twenty-three? Mrs. Thornwall seemed a hundred back then, but maybe she’d only been thirty or forty and just never had any abundance, never even taken a shot at it.

She heard the car in the driveway, the smooth roll of rubber on pavement, the sharp crack of the doors being slammed one and then the other. She put her hand on her fluttery stomach as Dan walked in.

“What the Hell?” He looked around like he was investigating a crime scene. His
what the Hell
didn’t seem promising. Also the no eye-contact seemed bad. He just glossed right over her like a criss cross applesauce spot on the carpet and continued his inventory down the hall to the bedrooms.

Logan’s face lit up like an emotional pinball machine. Every ding signaled another bumper of feeling: happiness, fear, confusion, amusement, doubt. She had to stop herself from reassuring him. She wouldn’t say,
it’s just paint
because it wasn’t, and she couldn’t say it would be all right. Hadn’t Stella taught her that damned if anybody knew if anything would turn out? She wanted to be positive but also accept that optimism might be nothing more than the mind’s way of reassuring a human that they weren’t human.

Logan did smile at her daisy cardigan then the smile left. “This is about what happened when I was gone, isn’t it? When you weren’t here?”

“How’d you know?”

“We’re out of facial tissue.”

She shook her head. “I had my hands on a box.”

“Plus, Grandma’s got this vein right here…” Logan pointed to the side of his left temple, a worldly young man again. “And it was completely huge for, like, weeks, until Grandpa and I left for a couple of days to fish. When we came back, she was better, but something was up.” He shrugged. “And you were weird on the phone.”

“Weird?” She felt a clutch in her chest that she’d failed him when he’d needed her.

“Different. Not bad. Different. And then Dad’s not talking to you.”

She shook her head at the vastness of her underestimation of him. “You noticed.”

He rolled his eyes. “Dad was in the other bedroom. I mean, I don’t want to hear anything about it or anything, it’s just weird. Not different weird, but kinda bad weird. It’s not like you have sleep apnea.”

She smiled. “No, it’s not like I have sleep apnea.”

“Where were you?”

“Vancouver. I took a vacation from here. But you know I love you, Logan, and no matter what I’m your mom, and I’ll be there for you when you need me.”

“Duh.”

She smiled at him, felt her vision blur, and blinked back the tears. “Duh.”

“What’s gonna happen?” He waited for her.

If wishes were useful things, she’d wish she could answer him. “I don’t know.”

He nodded. “I’m gonna make a sandwich. Want one?”

She rose and walked over to the tall boy who had never in the history of the universe asked her if she wanted a sandwich. She put her hands on either side of his face and tipped his forehead down to kiss it. “Thanks for asking.”

Dan stepped into the living room with no expression on his face, not even a divot between his eyes. It was too bad he didn’t have a reliable poker tell like his mother did. There weren’t any jumping veins or nervous tics she could spot.

Logan hooked a thumb toward the kitchen and left so quickly, she wondered if he saw something she didn’t. Maybe Logan read Dan and saw a finger tap against one leg or a flare of a nostril. But Dan didn’t even blink, just mirrored Logan, and hooked a thumb toward the back of the house. She’d never noticed they shared that in common, the caveman approach to communication. Maybe it was the way of all men under stress.

She was pretty sure, when Dan disappeared, that she was supposed to follow him. She did, but slowly, just in case the thumb motion meant something else like
I’m out of here, and you’ll have to manage alone because I don’t stay married to crazy women who paint things yellow and give the furniture to squirrels
. Of course, he didn’t know about the squirrels and the coasters on the end table.

She heard the back door slam and made her way through the laundry room. She put her hand on the door and thought it still vibrated. She stepped out into the backyard, which, free of furniture, was lots roomier than the front yard. Dan stood at the storage shed, his hands on the combination lock, not looking to see if she’d followed.

“Dan?”

He didn’t turn, but his shoulders tensed enough that she knew he was listening. “I just wanted a break and then I was going to come right back. Things have never been bad enough, ever, to leave.” She walked over to stand behind him and watched him spin the dial. Thirty-one right.

“But things changed. I changed. For me, today…” She felt her voice catch, took a breath and went on, “things have to be good enough to stay.”

His hand stilled, then turned twice left to four.

She knew she was running out of time. “I want to eat little cheeses. I like Queen, you know, the band. And I want to try teaching again, in the classroom, not talking about it at some convention. And I don’t want to walk away from my friends in Vancouver. They’re real friends not thirty-day ones, and I want to visit them, and I want to wear butterfly flip flops all summer, every summer.”

Right seventeen.

“Dan, I’m a butterfly. Can you love a butterfly? I know, who doesn’t? But it’s not that easy. The same is easy. Change is scary and hard, and I know that isn’t why you married me. I mean, you’d had an interesting girlfriend, and you know, I was stable Janie, and it’s not fair to you to change the game this far into it, but I have to.”

Dan stood with his hand on the lock, and she plunged on, afraid it might be the last time ever to say honestly what she felt to the man she’d been married to for a decade and a half. “I thought I needed to go away, or be alone, or blow up my life to get there, but I don’t. Remember your grandpa used to say,
wherever you go, there you are
? But he yelled the end part. Wherever you go, there you
are
!”

Dan didn’t move, and she wasn’t sure he was breathing, so she’d better talk fast before he passed out. “It was always in me. The biggest shift happened right here.” She motioned toward the house then tapped her chest. “Right here. It’s my one life. Yours and Logan’s too. It doesn’t have to be
bad
enough to risk change. It has to be
good
enough to be worth another day spent of it. I just didn’t listen to that until I was away. But I can hear it now. I can hear it anywhere, and this morning I heard the curry. Well, I smelled it. And then I painted and gave the furniture to the squirrels and now, now I guess I need to know if you hear it or think you can try to.”

Dan straightened, jerked the lock open, and her heart rate shot up. What if he just shoved her inside like the witch in the oven at the hands of Hansel and Gretel? Would the nightly news tell the sordid tale of a respected principal who rightly abandoned his estranged, strange wife in a storage shed? He could plead guilty to wanting things to stay the same. What sane jury would punish him for that?

The door swung open, and he disappeared inside. She stood with the cushy lawn beneath her feet, unable to follow. Something would be different once she went in. Something would die, and she didn’t want it to be hope.

She took a step, then another, and ducked into total darkness. Not enough carrots as a kid, maybe. Her eyes began to adjust, slowly making out large shapes. She might be too far gone to pop into darkness and expect vision. But she could make out the lawn mower, a canoe, Dan, the barbecue grill, and something white.

He reached for a white sheet and pulled it off like a hesitant magician, unsure if he possessed any magic.

A potter’s wheel.

She walked closer, ran her hand over the rough plate, and felt the bits of dried clay draw lines on the inside of her palm. She smoothed over the worn seat, somehow warm to her touch, and noticed the bucket. She lifted a damp, gauzy cloth and ran her finger along the cool squish of unshaped clay, lifting her face to Dan. Even in the dim, his eyes were glossy with unshed tears.