Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans (4 page)

Twelve years have passed. He’d been twenty-four years old with his whole life ahead of him with that kiss. Neil’s life was nearly over.

He slips her card into his shirt pocket and returns the business card holder back to the laptop case, taking it all out to his SUV. As he drives to Stony Point, he calls a number on his cell phone. “Eva, hey it’s Jason. Listen, is Maris Carrington in town by any chance?”

Sometimes before sketching a new design, Maris draws a silhouette shape first. It clears the details away and lets her visually see the idea of her garment, and the pose that will best depict it. In later sketches, detail, light and shadow will come into play. But a pure black silhouette helps her design eye begin.

So when someone knocks at her door and she steps onto the front porch to answer it, still in her sketching frame of mind, she sees a silhouette. He stands in shadow and all that’s apparent is the shape of him, the stance he holds, the idea of his life. But as she opens the screen door and goes outside, light and shadow bring out physical details. If she were to sketch him, quick charcoal strokes would depict his hair, and strong, fluid lines would depict a lean frame dressed carefully but casually in khakis and a button down shirt, slight curves across the arm showing sleeves turned up at the cuff. There is more shadow than light in this sketch. More darkness than light in the stance and expression. But facial proportions are key in recognizing a person, and even after twelve years, she knows with one look at his that it is Jason Barlow.

And she wonders if he can see her life on her face, see the clothes she creates for others in her hands, see her insecurities and loves. She feels suddenly self-conscious and tucks her hair behind an ear.

“Maris,” he says, like he can’t really believe he is saying her name again.

And in the greeting that follows, the hug, the smiles, in his bending and retrieving her laptop case, in her relief at its return, not because of the diamond ring inside it, but more for her recent denim designs on the software using the blues of the sea, in the way Madison noses her way out the door and the way Jason’s hands scratch the scruff of her neck, in his refusal of a cup of coffee, in his explanation that he is late getting to Eva’s, in her asking if he is the architect designing their renovation, in his words asking if life’s been good to her, in her glance at his leg, knowing about the accident he faced years ago, in the scar on his face that says so much about him, in the way he picks up her right hand and cups it in his hands as he backs away, saying “It’s really good to see you again,” and making vague plans to get together, in the way Maris watches him walk away, she has enough.

Yes. In the next two hours, sitting in her kitchen beneath baskets and bunches of dried flowers and herbs hanging from white ceiling beams, in the opened arched sash windows and the sunlight breaking through clouds, shining on the antique tins and small china plates lining pine shelves, and shining on a large sketch pad before her on the breakfast bar, Maris has enough detail, enough visual, to turn a silhouette of Jason Barlow into a detailed sketch, starting with graphite pencils and finishing with the smudged effects of soft pastels to create form with light and shadow, leaving off some actual lines of the sketch when she feels there is more there than he actually let her see.

.

Chapter Four

L
auren kneels in her front yard beside the hydrangea bush. She turns over the rich soil near the roots and tugs at weeds and prunes around the new blossoms. But no matter how busy she keeps herself, she cannot get the rowboat out of her mind. Ever since seeing it this morning on Eva’s front porch, when her hands touched the smooth driftwood, it’s been in her thoughts.

It seems so long ago now, the summer she painted that rowboat. It was the first of her collection of driftwood paintings, of rowboats and seagulls and beach umbrellas and tall masts at sunset seas. She had gathered the paints and sketch pad she’d received for her sixteenth birthday and walked a wooded path winding through a patch of pine forest until turning a sharp corner where you always expected more woods, not a little beach laying open like a book. Little Beach. It was small and ragged, with pieces of silver mica shimmering along the shore.

Lauren had walked the beach and collected pieces of driftwood, plain and lifeless, but with a story to tell … of the ocean, its salty caress, its surrendering tides. All around her were seaweed and salt, snails and barnacles. Finally she pulled herself onto the back of a flat boulder and spread her paints to one side, the driftwood pieces to the other. A rowboat lay abandoned in sea-grass among the small rocks. Its aged wood showed through the fading white paint and brick red bottom.

She touched a brush into her white paint and began painting on the driftwood. At that moment, summer opened to her in a new way. Her light touch let the natural grain of the driftwood show through the colors. Her dabs of green and yellow and brown filled in blades of sea-grasses and the stones that moored the lost boat.

“Hey you,” Kyle says now, coming up behind her. His hair lies flat on his head, wilted in the humidity, and his shirt is soiled from cooking all morning. “I’ll get the rest of those weeds when I mow.” He reaches out his hand and helps her to her feet, giving her a bottled water.

Lauren twists open the water and sits on the front step with Kyle. Keeping her gaze directed across the street at the row of small, sturdy ranches and capes, their yards filled in with tall maple trees shading the lawns, her voice matches the quiet of the old street. “I saw Eva today. She found a cottage for us.”

“Really. For when?”

She swallows a mouthful of water, then turns to Kyle and sees his fatigue. His eyes are tired. “Last three weeks of July. The kids will love it.”

“Three weeks? Out of the question. We can barely afford one.”

Lauren lifts the bottle, then lowers it without drinking. “It’s a late cancellation, so the first renters lost their deposit. That’s one week’s rent covered. And the owners decided they’d let the other two weeks go for half price, a thousand dollars instead of two, rather than lose the whole rental.”

“A thousand dollars? That’s all I need to know. You’re wiping us out.”

“Three weeks at the beach is all
I
need to know. I have to get away from here. So do the kids. I’ll temp to pay for it if I have to.” After a moment, she adds, “Besides, you and I can use the break from each other.”

“So I’m not going on this vacation with you and the kids? Is that how it works now?” A bead of perspiration drips down his face.

Lauren wants to turn away, to not feel so suddenly sad. “I just need some time alone. We don’t know where things are headed. You’re looking down south for work and won’t even consider changing jobs so we can stay here.”

“Change jobs? To what? Cooking isn’t going to support this family, and you damn well know it. Even with you working, it won’t.”

“What about culinary school?”

“What? Get real. I’m going to have to work two jobs just to catch up from this bout. If you want to stay home with the kids, you have to stay home somewhere cheaper to live.”

“What’s the point?” Lauren asks.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s the point? The sub base is restructuring, manufacturing is all done here. Your shipbuilding skills are useless. You’re thirty-six and really, what’s the point of chasing fitter jobs all over the country? More layoffs? You have to do something else.” She finishes her water. “But how can you find anything else if you’re at The Dockside every day?”

“Well I’m caught between a rock and a hard place, then. Steel work’s all I know. And as long as I’m in Jerry’s kitchen, money’s coming in. If I tell Jerry to forget it, the well is dry. The diner and your temping are barely getting us by. They were, anyway, until you went and broke the bank with that lousy cottage. And I’ll move south before I deal cards part-time at the casino just to make a living. Got it?” He waits for her to answer, and when she doesn’t, when she closes her eyes against the stinging tears, he stands and goes inside the house.

Where did it go, that feeling of sitting at the edge of summer? She had hoped that she could gather enough driftwood at the beach to begin painting again once the kids went back to school in September. Just a little, here and there. Instead, the way things are going, her paints will sit untouched on the closet shelf, collecting dust.

Her children come around the corner to the front yard. They step lightly and bicker under their breaths, treading on that taut line strung between Kyle and herself. Lauren gives them a leaf bag she’d found in the garage.

“Hey guys, how about stuffing those weeds into the bag?”

Hailey’s four-year-old hands gingerly pick up the leaves, while Evan dives into the pile with open arms, as only a six-year-old boy would.

Kyle opens the front door and calls out. “You doing laundry?”

She looks up, shielding her eyes from the bright sun.

“It’ll be the last load for a while. Water’s all over the laundry room floor.” He closes the door and disappears back inside the house.

Lauren stares at the closed door as though it has the last laugh, pulling her to the edge of something much different than summer. She thinks of Eva living the beach life now in that big cottage. It is old and needs work, but it is grand and within walking distance of the beach. Oh if she could just find that little abandoned rowboat again, she just might paddle far, far away.

“What do you think, guy?”

Jason steps back from his cottage and looks at the windowsill. After scraping off the pale gray, he had spread three different shades of trim paint on the wood. It is the end of the day, he feels tired and hasn’t moved around enough, and his leg shooting whispers of pain warns him to take a walk, at least. Or else remove the prosthesis and use his crutches.

He stands and scrutinizes the paint samples.

“The beiges are good. White’s too bright.”

It doesn’t matter if the words are imagined or if they are pieces of old conversation from when he and his brother worked side by side, their hands and minds finding aesthetic beauty in restoring the cottages by the sea. He still hears them clearly.

“Maybe the beiges are too bland though,” Jason says.

“No way,” his brother answers. “Listen. Pack it up. I want to show you something.”

An offshore wind scatters clouds from west to east. Is that all he hears, sounds carried on the wind? The murmur of the sea? He presses the tops onto the paint cans and washes his brushes in the sink in the barn. Shadows grow long now, giving the barn a perception of life, as though the old tools spread on the worktables were suspended overnight, not over years. As though someone will return early, beneath morning’s clear light, and sand and score and cut and hammer. A short board is clamped in a vice and he wonders if Neil’s hands had touched it last.

“What?” Jason asks. “Talk to me, guy.” The barn is silent, the silence erasing the memory of the hands and words and minds once at work here. He looks up at the vaulted ceilings, picturing new skylights letting in natural light, the space housing his drafting tables and computers, with lots of shelves on the walls to hold his archives of books on old cottage designs. The wide interior walls have space enough to showcase his photographic display of completed cottage restorations. As an architect, he knows that the best designed buildings outlast their original use. The barn has. Can he pull off working right here?

He closes the big double doors and walks down to the beach.

“You can do it.” He hears the voice when he steps off the boardwalk onto the sand. “You’ll never go wrong here.”

Jason looks at the beach, at the glow of the sunset casting its hue on the sand.

“It’s the sea’s palette. These colors always work with what we do. Can’t you picture them?”

Twilight spreads violet across the eastern sky; the salt water deepens to evening gray. An old white rowboat dips just offshore, the waves lapping at its reddened bottom. Someone anchored it just within swim’s reach, to take it out for a paddle, maybe through the creek to the lagoon. But the sand, holding onto the deep gold of the sunset, is what strikes him. It is the same color as the deep beige paint sample on the window trim at the cottage.

Jason walks down to the water’s edge. The firmness of that packed sand feels good beneath his legs as he walks the length of the shore. Neil had walked it, too. Contemplated it, read about it and felt it. He’d even kept a journal of his beach observations, filled with notes and sketches and photographs. They defined his carpentry as he’d work elements of the sea and sands right into Jason’s cottage designs with color, texture, essence.

Tomorrow he’ll buy enough of the sandy beige paint to trim the windows, doors and eaves.

“The barn, too,” he hears. “Start on the barn.”

He stops at the water’s edge. Seven years have passed since the wreck and he feels stronger now. He stretches his left leg straight and looks at the prosthetic limb attached below his knee. “Okay, Neil. You win.”

I have light freckles and green eyes.

Eva scrolls down the screen. Maris just emailed her the detailed itinerary for their Fourth of July reunion barbecue. Leave it to Maris to design the perfect columns of their beach friends’ names, phone numbers and RSVP check-box, then bullet the food menu, the yard games, drinks and even a schedule of tasks for the days before the event.

Eva saves the email and quickly returns to the other screen she has opened. Her fingers rise to her hair, stroking the auburn strands as she reads along. This is the reason she stopped lightening it. She needs to see its real color, to recognize herself and, okay, maybe her mother in her reflection. All her life she’s wondered and looked for her, being quietly alert and open to possibilities of her true identity. Since she couldn’t find her birth mother anywhere else, maybe she has to look no further than her own face. Women say that spark of recognition jolts them when they recognize their mother in their reflection. Who will she see when her features take their natural form? Whose eyes are hers? She desperately wants to see her mother in the mirror. And on the computer screen, each trait belongs to a different adoptee on the very same search.

I have light freckles and green eyes
or

Birth Name Baby Girl Deborah
or

My grandparents wear eyeglasses
or

Adopted one month after birth.