My Way Home (St.Gabriel Series Book 1) (St. Gabriel Series) (6 page)

“I should have waited. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

He was really hurting. I could hear it in his voice. I wanted him to care for our children, but I wanted him to care for me too. The hurt he was feeling was for Janie. I’m the mother—she’s the child. It’s funny how you sometimes have to remind yourself of something so obvious when you’re a parent. I wasn’t going to kick him when he was down, but comfort him? I couldn’t do it.

Janie and Paul called me daily the following week. Every time I hung up the phone, I was exhausted. Acting is hard work. Answering the phone became a full-time job. I couldn’t ignore it anymore in case it was the kids. If they couldn’t reach me, they would worry.

Loretta went home and we made a deal that she would only call me on Sundays to check in. But there were lots of other callers. Some were genuinely concerned while others were looking for juicy details. I knew who was who. I eventually broke down and resorted to technology, which I avoid whenever possible—I got Caller ID.

I forced myself out of bed every morning and tried to focus on what I needed to do. I had been
thoughtfully
relieved of most of my volunteer commitments, but I still had the plants to take care of at the food bank and the animal shelter.

Plants, as it turns out, don’t have much of an opinion about divorce and they don’t take sides—two of the many things I love about them. Also, when you take care of them well, they always look so happy to see you.

Minnie said I could come back to work at the garden center whenever I was ready. I wasn’t ready. Financially I was okay. Race had let me know he would keep his paycheck going directly into the checking account, and we would settle our finances later. He would make sure I had what I needed. All of that was in the note. Remember the note with the key?

I stuck to the Rivers plan, did yoga with Kathy, and got up early every morning to ride five miles on my Schwinn. It was the same bike I’d had since high school and the one I had taken to college.

I may not have had control over my husband, my life, not even my own mind, but my body was something I was able to get a handle on. Planning and preparing my meals and sticking to an exercise routine gave me a sense of order in my spinning-out-of-control life.

I wrote to Beverly Rivers to tell her how she had changed my life. The truth was that Race, Paul, and Janie had been the only people who had ever changed my life. Race changed it the first day I sat in his classroom. Paul and Janie changed it the first time I held them and looked into their perfect little newborn faces. Again Race changed it, the day he told me I would live the rest of my life as a divorced woman. Even if I remarried someday, which I truly could not imagine ever doing, I would always be a divorced woman. And the day he told me he thought he was in love with Sarah Burns, he changed me.

Janie came home at the end of May,
and I encouraged her to follow through with her commitment of an internship with the local paper. It kept her busy and gave me time alone. Alone to lock myself in the bedroom and crawl into the dark tunnel of isolation and try not to think, about anything. I would set the alarm, get up, shower and dress again, make a fabulous,
clean
meal and be all smiles when Janie walked in the door. What a fraud.

I was flat on my back on the bed, staring up at the soft-gold-colored ceiling of the master bedroom, one of my favorite rooms in the house. Actually, I loved all the rooms in my house. Each one had really good bones—arched doorways, deep window sills, heavy moldings, and built-in china hutches. It was my dream house and finding it was one of the most memorable days of my life.

After Race and I moved from California and were married, I had taken a job working in a little dress shop. I did sales, window dressing, and some ordering. It was a pretty good job for a twenty-three year old with a liberal arts degree in a small town in Texas.

I was out exploring on the Schwinn one day after work when I saw it, our house. The moment it came into view, I almost wrecked my bike.

The house was white with lots of high and low-pitched rooflines. An arched opening led into a covered entry that protected the arched front door. Under the windows that were big and multi-paned, river rock planters were filled with peony shrubs that were drooping from the weight of their blooms.

There were two huge oak trees on either side of the walkway that curved up to the front of the house, the way any self-respecting front walk does, a friendly, welcoming walk. Not like a straight walk, which says, “Don’t just stop by, please call first. Oh, and by the way, when you do come in, take off your shoes and don’t touch anything.”

The best part was that it was a mess. The paint was peeling, the roof was missing shingles, the grass hadn’t been mowed for seasons, and the garden was out of control. There were old roses, magnolias, bluebonnets, and spent tulips and daffodils, all misbehaving themselves and crying out for boundaries.

A fixer-upper, just what we could afford, someday. With $737.48 in our checkbook and no savings, even that lovely wreck was out of our price range. But I did find out who owned it and they weren’t interested in selling anyway.

I rode by the house every chance I got. In my mind, I redid the gardens and redecorated every room. I hadn’t seen the rooms, but I used my imagination. When it came up for sale two years later, Race wasn’t excited, not at all. He wasn’t the handyman type.

“It’s too big, Cammy, and it will take thousands of hours and money we don’t have to fix it up,” Race said without looking up from the papers he was grading.

“We’ll do what we can as we can afford it. The expensive part is the labor, and I’ll do all the work I can myself. We’ll only hire what I can’t do.”

Race looked up, raised his eyebrows, and tilted his head at my four-and-a-half-month-pregnant belly and asked, “Cammy, why can’t we find something turnkey? You know the kind—you turn the key and move in. I don’t want to spend every evening and weekend working on a house.”

I spun his chair around and climbed into his lap. “I told you, I’ll do it. You won’t have to lift a finger.”

“I happen to love my wife and would like to spend time with her occasionally. I would like you not to be working on a house every evening and weekend either. And how are you going to be contractor and mommy at the same time?”

“Naps,” I answered with a grin. That got Race to smile, and I knew there was hope. I extolled the virtues of the neighborhood and told him that it, being the shabbiest house on the block, was a great investment. “Location, location, location,” I reminded him.

The winning ticket was Race’s parents. His mother was on my side the moment I described the house to her on the telephone. Anna Coleman is a fellow dreamer and lover of all things old. And his father, well, Raceter Coleman Sr. loves a good bargain and any possibility of a potential profit.

I lived up to my promise, not letting the remodel consume our life and doing everything I could myself. Race’s parents gave me a table saw for Christmas, and I became a whiz with a hammer and a drill, a proficient painter and, not to sound braggadocios, a master at demolition.

Two weeks before Paul was born, Race did help me hang wallpaper in the nursery and there were a few last-minute painting marathons, usually to put the house back together for a holiday or family get-together. But most of the time, the renovation happened when he was teaching as if little elves did the work while hiding from the literature professor.

Room by room it took nine years to finish the project and then we had an open house—better late than never. The gardens were stunning and the house? It was perfect.

It was a beautiful September day and we had set buffet tables inside and out, a string quartet from the college was playing in the garden, and Race was beaming. As our guests wandered and mingled, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist, the way I loved, and he whispered in my ear, “You, Cammy Coleman, amaze me. I am so proud of you.” That was a great day.

After our guests had left that evening, and Paul and Janie were in bed asleep, Race and I tried to make love in the hammock in the backyard, muffling our laughter at the impossibility of achieving any kind of workable position. If anyone ever tells you they’ve had sex in a hammock, question everything they say from that moment forward.

When we eventually achieved our objective, it was upstairs in the master suite on the bed I was lying on, under the same soft-gold-colored ceiling I was looking up at.

On the ceiling was Tuscan Love, a paint color I had custom mixed and named myself. One of forty-seven custom colors that are still on file at Hollister’s Paint and Supply, forty-seven colors I created and named for our home and the homes of our family and friends—Yee Haw Red, Washed Denim, Tea and Roses. What a great job, naming colors.

Maybe I can get a job creating names for colors. Just sit in a room and come up with names that I think will cause a line of nail polish to fly off the shelf—Scarlet Rendezvous, Honey Cream, Pinky Passion. Yes, that could be my future.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon on a Wednesday when the call came in. Initially, when the phone rang, I ignored it. It rang again. I picked it up and looked at the I.D. screen.

Loretta? It’s not Sunday.

I set the phone back on the nightstand and reached under the pillow with both arms, pressing it to my ears until the muffled ringing quit.

When the phone rang again, I read the I.D. screen and then I shouted at the ceiling, “Loretta, we have a deal!”

I couldn’t turn it off. The base to the phone was in the kitchen. I missed the days when the phone stayed with the mother ship, and you could easily turn off the ringer or just rip the cord out of the wall. Not that I’d ever done that, but the option was there.

What if it’s an emergency?
But I didn’t really care at that moment. The ringing quit and then began again. I snatched the phone and answered it, “This better be an emergency.”

“Hey, friend, are you sitting down?”

“This is an emergency?”

“No, no emergency, are you sitting down?”

“No, lying down. Why?”

“I’ve got great news.”

Great news, what could possibly be great news?
I felt as if my emotions had checked out of my brain and my heart. It was as though they’d been turned off. My insides were heavy, pulling me into the bed.

“Cam, you still there?”

“I’m here. What’s the great news?”

“Sandi, Dawn, and I are taking you and Marni to St. Gabriel Island. We leave on the twenty-fourth, so get packed.”

I didn’t want to go anywhere. Not even to St. Gabriel Island, a destination I had dreamt about since I had clipped an article and pictures from an issue of Cottage Country magazine over twenty years before. A place that had sent a thrill and a peace through me the first time I had seen pictures of the island and read of its history and traditions. I was captivated by the photos of the charming old buildings that lined its main street and the grand homes, cottages, gardens, and woods that covered the rest. And the best part, no cars, just horses, bikes, and snowmobiles in the winter.

I added to my vacation file any new information of St. Gabe that came my way over the years. That file grew with pictures and articles about the island and other destinations I yearned to see. Occasionally, I opened it and sorted through the stack of dreams, but those destinations had not been visited.

Our family vacations were of the variety afforded on Race’s small-town college professor’s salary—national parks, camping trips, backpacking, a couple visits to my parents’ in Northern California, and one trip to Disneyland when Paul and Janie were fourteen and twelve.

Our vacation memories, however, are ones that we have recounted over and over to each other and anyone else who would listen. They fill more than a dozen thick photo albums, and I wouldn’t trade those sojourns for yacht cruises down the Riviera or skiing in the Alps. But frilly vacations—garden tours, shopping in little boutiques, moonlit walks on the beach—had been someday dreams.

“Cam, is there a problem with this connection? Did you hear what I said? Did you hear where I said?”

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“You know, the place you’ve been filing away information about for the last twenty years, the place you have pictures of pinned to the bulletin board in your studio, St. Gabriel Island?”

“Yes, I know, St. Gabriel Island.”

“Well?”

“It’s really thoughtful, generous, but it’s too generous, and it’s not a good time.”

“Really and why not?”

“I’m trying to figure things out, and Janie’s home. I can’t leave her.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying for three months. And I’ve already talked to Janie. She’s going to help you pack.”

“And, I have to be at the divorce mediation on the twenty-fourth.”

“I know you do. Then you’re taking a shuttle to the airport and meeting us in Detroit. We’ll rent a car and drive like wild women to catch the last ferry of the day.”

“I wouldn’t be any fun, Lo. You guys go. Besides, if I ever go there, I want to feel… human. It’d be a waste.”

“Come on, Cam. This is something you’ve wanted to do for such a long time.”

We went back and forth until I didn’t have the energy to argue with her anymore. Also, the alarm went off, and I needed to get out of bed and prepare to put on the “Everything’s Fine Show” for Janie.