Moonlight on Butternut Lake (20 page)

W
e just got those in,” the salesgirl said, sidling over to Mila, who was standing in front of a rack of sundresses at the Butternut Variety Store. “What do you think?”

“I think they're . . . really cute,” Mila said honestly. She had come into the store to buy a pair of flip-flops, but the sundresses, with their colorful floral prints, had caught her eye.

“They
are
really cute,” the salesgirl agreed. She was a young woman who'd been restocking the sunscreen display and looking desperately bored when Mila had walked in, but now that she had some company she'd perked up considerably. “Ordering these dresses was my idea,” she told Mila, in a confidential tone. “We already sold clothes here, if you call things like tube socks and trucker caps clothes. But last spring, I said to the owner, Mr. Rasmussen, ‘Would it kill us to sell something that women actually want to wear?'”

Mila nodded politely and slipped one of the dresses off the rack, wondering if it was the kind of thing she should wear to the party tonight. She held it up to herself, a little self-consciously, and looked around for a mirror.

“Do you want to try that on?” the salesgirl asked.

“Could I?”

“Of course. There's a little dressing room in back. But there's no mirror in it. Go figure, right? There's one right outside it, though.”

Mila followed her to a tiny dressing room and, pulling the canvas curtain closed behind her, wriggled out of her clothes and into the sundress, as the salesgirl—her name was Darla, she told Mila—chattered away outside of it.

“Oh, it fits you perfectly,” she said to Mila when she came out of the dressing room, pointing her in the direction of a full-length mirror.

But as soon as Mila looked in the mirror, she looked away. It was almost as if she didn't recognize herself in this dress. It had been so long since she'd worn something so . . . so feminine. And so pretty. After she'd gotten married to Brandon, she'd stopped wearing clothes like this. Fun, flirty clothes. Because while he might have liked to see her in them, he didn't want
anyone else
to see her in them, and that was a problem if she ever wanted to leave their apartment. Then, when she'd finally left Brandon, she'd packed only the most functional clothing she owned. Functional, of course, meaning boring.

“What do you think?” Darla prompted.

Mila looked back in the mirror. “I think maybe it's a little tight on me,” she said, tugging at one of the sundress's straps.

“No, it's not. It fits you the way it's supposed to. Trust me.”

“Maybe if I went up a size—”

“If you went up a size, it would be too big,” Darla said firmly. “In fact, if I were you, I'd not only wear that dress out of here, but I'd throw away the clothes I wore in here, too.”

“Why?”

Darla shrugged. “You have way too nice a figure to be wearing things that hide it,” she said. And then she looked in the mirror at Mila and sighed. “If I looked like that in a dress,” she said, “my boyfriend would probably have a heart arrhythmia or something.” And then she laughed. “So maybe it's a good thing I
don't
look like that in a dress. Anyway, I have to get back to stocking, but I think you'd be crazy not to buy it.” She left Mila alone to stare uncertainly at her reflection in the mirror. The dress wasn't exactly revealing, she decided, but it showed a little more skin than she was used to showing. She bit her lip then and looked abruptly away. She was acting like a teenager. Staring at herself in the mirror, agonizing over what to wear that night, and impulsively trying on the first article of clothing she'd seen in the store. And that was strange, because even when she'd
been
a teenager, she hadn't acted like one. She hadn't had the luxury of acting like one. She'd been too busy holding their little family together. Which begged the question, really, of why she was acting like a teenager
now
.

She took one more look in the mirror, then frowned impatiently and went back into the dressing room, yanking the curtain closed behind her. But by the time she'd changed and emerged with the sundress a few minutes later, she felt something other than impatience with herself. She felt something she'd been feeling, off and on, all day. Fidgety. Restless. Wound up. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. Not exactly. But it was the reason she'd done something today she'd never done before; after Walker and Reid had left for Reid's doctor's appointment that afternoon; she'd asked Lonnie if she could borrow her car and she'd driven into town. The cabin, she'd decided, was too quiet, and too staid to contain her nervous energy. She needed to be where things were happening, and while there didn't seem to be
a lot
happening in
Butternut, and what
was
happening seemed to be happening at its own leisurely pace, it was something, anyway. It was enough to distract her, and to keep her from thinking too hard about that little pulse of anticipation she felt, even now, as she left the dressing room.

She took the dress up to the register, but not before she picked up a pair of flip-flops, a couple of cotton nightgowns, and a cover-up to wear over her bathing suit. She felt guilty watching Darla ring up her purchases. She'd promised herself she'd save all the money she was paid this summer. But when Darla gave her the total, she felt a little better. It was very reasonable, much more reasonable than it would have been in Minneapolis, and when all was said and done, it would barely put a dent in the money that she'd earned so far.

Mila thanked Darla and left the store, pausing in the doorway to look surreptitiously up and down the block. No sign of Brandon, she thought with relief, and then she immediately chided herself for half expecting there to be a sign of him. As Ms. Thompson had pointed out many times before, the only way Brandon would find her here was if he traced her directly to Butternut. He wouldn't just stumble on her. Minnesota, after all, was a big state. Not
Texas
big, maybe. But still, big enough. Even with this thought in mind, though, she was walking quickly back to the car, keeping her head down, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a sign in the window at Butternut Drugs.
END OF JULY SALE,
it read.
ALL COSMETICS 25% OFF.

She paused. She didn't own any cosmetics. Not anymore. They, too, had been a casualty of her relationship with Brandon. She looked beautiful to him without makeup, he'd told her, so if she wore any makeup, he said, it was obviously for the benefit of other men. She'd known this was ridiculous, and she'd told him
so too. But as was so often the case with Brandon, she'd opted, finally, for the path of least resistance. The only makeup she'd kept was foundation and pressed powder, both of them ideal, it turned out, for covering bruises. Now, though, looking in the store window, she thought about how nice it would be to have a new lipstick, and she went into the drugstore and spent a very pleasant five minutes at the makeup counter choosing a lipstick and, at the last minute, selecting a mascara, too. And as she waited in line at the register, behind two teenage girls, she felt it again, the tiny but undeniable current of electricity that had been humming through her intermittently all day. It was both vaguely pleasant, and vaguely disconcerting at the same time.

“What time's he picking you up tonight?” she heard one of the teenagers ask the other.

“Eight o'clock. And you know what? I can't wait,” her friend said. “He's so hot. I keep thinking about what it's going to be like to see him again. I don't know, maybe it'll be a complete disaster. But maybe not. Something might happen. And knowing that is driving me a little crazy. I mean, remember the night before our chem final? When we drank, like, five cans of Red Bull? That's how I feel right now. Like I'm totally overcaffeinated.”

And Mila, listening to them, started to smile and then stopped. Because she knew
exactly
what that girl was talking about. She knew because she was feeling
exactly
the same way about tonight. She was feeling that same fizzy excitement, that same jittery anticipation. Call it the Red Bull effect. Call it whatever you wanted. It was the sense . . . well, like the girl in front of her in line had said, it was the sense that
something might happen
. And knowing she was feeling that way about Reid, and about the party tonight, and knowing that she was behaving like some infatuated adolescent, instead of the mature adult she had
thought—or at least
hoped
—she was, almost made her groan out loud, right then and there, standing in line at Butternut Drugs.

But she didn't. She paid for her cosmetics and walked out of the store and back out onto Main Street. And then she drifted distractedly down the sidewalk, only tangentially aware of her surroundings.
You like Reid, don't you?
she thought, simultaneously fascinated and appalled by this new knowledge of herself.
You like him
a lot.
And what's more, you're attracted to him, aren't you?
Attracted to a man who, seven weeks ago, she couldn't even stand to be in the same room with.
Yes,
she answered,
yes on both counts
. But how had it happened? So . . . so suddenly? But it hadn't happened suddenly, she realized. It had been happening gradually since the day they'd had the picnic at the beach. And she saw an image of him from that day, an image of him skipping stones, his upper body moving with an easy grace that even his wheelchair couldn't contain, his dark blue eyes focused not on the stones he was skipping so effortlessly over the water, but on her. On Mila.

She flashed on other images, too, from the last month. An image of her running a washcloth over Reid's bare chest on the deck the night of the full moon. Another one of her curled up in the armchair in his room in the middle of the night, knowing that they were both awake, and both sharing a strange, silent intimacy with each other. And an image of her sitting with him at the dinner table last night. His brother had taken him to a barbershop in Butternut late yesterday afternoon, and when they'd come back in the evening, right as she was taking dinner out of the oven, Mila had felt so disoriented by Reid's changed appearance that it was all she could do not to drop the pan of lasagna she was holding. He looked so different. So completely different. For the first time since she'd met him, she could actually see his
face. And he'd looked handsome enough to swoon over. Where the tangle of his too-long hair had been, and the scruffiness of his beard had been, there were now only the clean, smooth, strong lines of his forehead, his cheeks, his jaw, and his chin. He was a little pale, of course, from all the hours he'd spent inside since the accident, and he had a scar, too, that she'd never seen before, running in a faint, jagged line across his forehead. But even so, he'd been a revelation to her. And the best part of that revelation, she'd decided, were his eyes. Because now that his hair was no longer falling into them, she could see them in all their deep, bright, blue glory.

After Walker had left yesterday evening, Mila and Reid had sat down at the kitchen table and had dinner, and then they'd had some kind of conversation, about something, though what it was, Mila couldn't for the life of her remember now. What she could remember were the pauses in the conversation, the spaces between words, the little silences during which tiny currents of . . . of attraction had eddied between them and around them.

Oh, my God
, w
hat was she thinking?
What was she
doing?
She stopped and leaned against a lamppost for support, and its solidity gave her some measure of comfort. Comfort and resolve. She didn't know what she'd been doing, but she knew what she was going to do now. She was going to stop pretending that she and Reid were going on a date tonight. Because they weren't. They were going to a party. That was it. That was all. And whatever was happening between the two of them was going to stop happening.
Now.
She was his employee, for one thing, or his brother's, anyway, but it added up to the same thing. And she wasn't available, for another. Because although she wasn't wearing her wedding ring anymore, she might as well have been. Her little speech to herself at the ring-throwing ceremony the first
night at the cabin aside, she was still technically married. And even in the unlikely event that she could forget that fact, she couldn't ignore the fact that she had no future with Reid. (Even if, as crazy as it seemed now, she thought she might want one with him.) But no, it wouldn't be fair to him to put him in the kind of danger he would be in if Brandon ever found her with him.

Thinking about all this, she felt suddenly dizzy, and, leaning on the lamppost, she wondered for a moment if she was going to faint. But the dizziness passed, and Mila, searching for its source, realized that she'd been too preoccupied to eat lunch today, and too distracted, sitting across the table from Reid, to eat breakfast, either. (She'd pretended, instead, to nibble on a piece of toast.)
No wonder I'm dizzy,
she thought, with relief.
I'm hungry.
And the Red Bull effect? That was probably just low blood sugar. And, holding on to this slender hope, she looked around for a place to eat and almost laughed when she realized that this whole time she'd been standing directly outside of Pearl's. It was well past lunchtime, but, as luck would have it, Pearl's was still open and still catering to a few late afternoon stragglers. So Mila went in and, avoiding the table she'd sat at on that first unpleasant afternoon, selected a booth in the back and slid into it, settling her shopping bag beside her. She took the menu out of the menu holder, ostensibly to study it, but she ended up studying the cook behind the counter instead, the one she'd seen the day she'd come in here to order her and Reid's hamburgers. The man was
enormous
. And there was that same waitress, too, the pretty one with the heart-shaped face and curly hair who seemed sweet but, at the same time, hopelessly confused.