The All You Can Dream Buffet (22 page)

Place under broiler for five minutes or so, just to brown the top. Let cool for five minutes; serve in generous portions.

It started to pour down buckets of rain around lunchtime. The women huddled in the tiny living room of the cottage, arranged on the deep couches and overstuffed chairs with fading tapestry patterns. Ruby draped her legs over one side of her chair and settled her laptop on her thighs. She refreshed email every so often, but so far there had been nothing from Liam. Maybe he wouldn’t even acknowledge the email.

That would be terrible.

Valerie knitted a sweater from soft wool the colors of a harvest table, her reading glasses perched on her perfectly straight, elegant nose. Hannah, hair simply braided out of the way, slumped in a corner of the couch, reading a Western romance novel with an old-school cover of a bare-chested Native American man with feathers in his hair. He looked, Ruby thought, a bit like Noah. That aggressive nose, the strong shoulders.

Lavender sat at the table shoved up against the wall, going over paperwork of some kind. She fiddled with her pencil, flipping it back and forth.

“I wish it would stop raining!” Hannah growled. “This is so boring!”

“You’re reading,” Valerie said mildly. “There are other books in the trailer.”

“I’m kinda sick of reading, all right?”

“You want to play a game or something?” Ruby asked. “I saw a backgammon board over there.”

“No.” Hannah caught her mother’s sidelong glance and added, “Thanks.”

Ruby was bored, too. Hours of rain were no fun for anyone. She hit the refresh button again, then, tired of herself, typed in “mead.” A long list of websites scrolled open, history and supplies and legends and lore. She clicked on one at random and found a medieval-looking site, dark as an oak barrel.
The drink of Vikings and medieval kings!
it proclaimed. In the back of her mind, a lute played a lively tune, and she had a vision of a woman in a red and gold dress dancing on a stage. “Maybe we should all dress up for the Blue Moon Festival,” she said. “Like in costume or something.”

“
Now
you tell me,” Valerie said. “I have three tutus in various styles in boxes somewhere on the way to San Diego.”

Ruby hooted in delight. “Tutus! That would be so cool, wouldn’t it? We could be barefoot ballerinas.”

Lavender grinned. “You girls would look lovely. I’d look like a silly old bat.”

“No, no, no!” Ruby cried. “You would be the Snow Queen! We could put you in a”—she narrowed her eyes—“a silver tutu, with lavender flowers in your hair.”

“A Snow Queen with flowers in her hair?” Lavender said with a snort.

“Maybe it’s not a Snow Queen, then, but I’m right about the flowers and the dress. And, Hannah, I see you in orange, or maybe red—Persephone.” A shiver ran over her arms at this, seeing it in her mind.

“Who is Persephone?”

Valerie, without ceasing her knitting for a single moment,
said, “She is Demeter’s daughter, who was stolen by Hades and taken to hell. It is a myth about winter and the renewal of spring.”

“Eww. I don’t want to be her.”

Ruby rubbed her hands on her thighs. “Her mother saves her, and she becomes the queen of the underworld, very powerful.”

“Who would you be, Ruby?” Valerie asked, again not skipping a beat. “Demeter?”

“I’m not wise enough. I would wear blue, I think. Who wears blue?”

“Demeter,” Lavender said.

“Who else?”

Hannah tapped into her phone. “How about Ariadne? She is a moon goddess, which we would need, right? And she’s called the high fruitful mother.”

Ruby pointed at Hannah. “There you go. That’s me. Ariadne.”

“Isn’t she also a storyteller?” Valerie said. “The weaver of tales.”

“Whatever. I love the fruitful-mother part.”

Hannah, still scrolling through her phone, added, “And she’s blond.”

“Okay,” Ruby said, wiggling in her chair. “Lavender is the Snow Queen. Hannah is Persephone. I’m Ariadne. Who are you, Valerie?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Her voice was droll and she looked over her glasses. “The queen of something, I expect.”

Ruby laughed. “With rhinestone sparklies, right?”

“And a crown.”

Hannah laughed, too. “And a—what do you call the thingy they hold, with jewels on the end?”

“A staff?” Ruby guessed.

“Scepter,” Valerie said.

The back door slammed and Hannah sat up hurriedly, smoothing her T-shirt. Sure enough, it was Noah, carrying his beauty like a heavy weight, head down. What must that be like, Ruby wondered, to be the man in a room for whom all the women straightened? She wanted to put him at ease. “Noah! We are thinking we should be barefoot goddesses for the Blue Moon Festival. We will need some gods.”

“Come again?”

She gave him her best dimple, raising an eyebrow and a shoulder. “What god would you be if you could be any?”

“Not god material, I’m afraid. Lavender, we have some issues with the ice machine. Can I talk to you about it?”

“Again the ice machine?”

“It’s giving out.”

“Hmm.” Lavender put down the pencil and took her reading glasses off. “Let me think about it.”

“All right.”

She gestured to the last empty chair in the room. “Sit a minute, why don’t you?”

“Nah, I’ve got—”

She pointed at the chair, tapped her finger in the air.
Sit.

He settled gingerly on the very edge. Scratched his temple.

“What god would you be, Noah, my dear?”

He scowled. “I don’t know. I don’t know any gods.”

“Hannah,” Ruby said. “Look up some gods that suit him.” She turned back, smiling. “I’m going to be Ariadne.”

“How about Hades?” Hannah/Persephone piped up. “He’s the god of the underworld.”

Lavender grinned. “Well, that fits, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, whatever. I’ll be Hades. But I’m not dressing up and I’m not going barefoot.”

Ruby laughed, the sound emerging from somewhere deep in her chest. People had always commented on her husky, robust laugh. “No toga, no sandals?”

He looked at her a beat too long, his eyes full of sleepy suggestions. “A sheet, maybe.”

“We vote for that,” Ruby replied evenly. “Just you in a sheet.”

Slowly, he rubbed his hands together. “What are you wearing?”

“I don’t know. We have to find tutus now, don’t we, girls?”

“What’s a tutu?”

“It’s what dancers wear onstage,” Hannah volunteered. “My mom was the first black prima ballerina in Cincinnati.”

“No kidding.” Noah gave Valerie a genuine smile, and Ruby swore the lights in the room started to short out. “That’s cool. That must have been a lot of hard work.”

She gave an elegant shrug. “Dancing is hard work, period. I was lucky to have a lot of support.”

“And she’s going to be a queen of something,” Hannah said.

“How about you, hon?” he asked.

“Oh,” she ducked her head, toed the edge of a rug. “Not quite sure.”

Ruby raised a brow toward Valerie, and Valerie sucked her top lip into her mouth. “Can we actually get tutus somewhere, do you think?” Ruby asked. “Like, rent them? We only have one day.”

Lavender said, “I’m not wearing a tutu. I’m too old.”

“Oh, yes,” Ruby said, “you so are. You’re the birthday girl.”

“What about Ginny? What would she like, do you think?”

“The cake queen? Who would that be?” Ruby pointed to Hannah. “Goddess seeker, find us a cake goddess.”

“Looking.” She punched in a phrase, frowned, tried another. “I’m getting a bunch of blogs and cake shops.”

“Hmm.”

“Artemis,” Lavender said. “Ginny is Artemis.”

Inexplicably, Ruby wanted to cry. “Oh, that’s beautiful.”

“Who is Artemis?” Valerie asked. “I can’t remember all this stuff. It’s been a long time since college.”

“I’ll look it up,” Hannah said.

In her pocket, Ruby’s phone started to play a song. Jason Mraz’s “I Won’t Give Up.”

She slapped her hand over it. “Crap. Crap. Crap! It’s Liam. What do I do?”

“Answer it,” Lavender said firmly. “It’s got to be done.”

With a shard of ice sticking through her heart, Ruby stood and answered the phone, heading for the back porch. “Hello?”

“Hey, Ruby,” he said, as if he were a westerner, not a New Yorker. The sound of his baritone voice, dark and honeyed, flowed down her neck. She hunched her shoulders, using an arm to cover her ribs.

“Hey, Liam. I guess you got my email.”

“Yeah.” Silence rocketed down the line. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t know. I just thought you should hear the news.”

“I thought you couldn’t get pregnant, because of all the chemo and shit.”

“Radiation. It’s chemo and radiation.” She peered through the screens around the porch at the rain obscuring everything with a blurry gray. “I thought it was impossible, too, but I guess it wasn’t.”

“So we had sex for six years and you got pregnant the very last time?” Only now did she catch the hostility in his voice. “Is that right?”

She took a breath. This was the side of him she hated, the cold-bastard side, the inquisitor who could turn off all emotion and make her feel like a foolish, stupid child.

Not this time. “Yep,” she said.

“It sounds like bullshit to me. Like you’re just trying to fuck up my wedding to Minna. Your timing is—”

“Stop.” Ruby took a breath. “I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything from you. I wouldn’t have told you at all, but my friends thought you deserved to know. So—have a nice life, Liam. I don’t need you.”

“Ruby! Don’t hang up!”

She waited, her throat as tight as if she had drunk poison. Hearing his breath through the line made the fine hairs on her neck rise, as if in readiness for his lips. She had a vision, a sudden, shocking, disturbing vision, of his naked penis, red and crooked, as he came toward her on the bed, once upon a time. How she had grown to love it, like his voice, like his hands with their rough calluses!

Where had he gone, her lover? “Liam, it’s like … a miracle.”

“It’s like a lie, Ruby. You can’t really expect me to believe you.”

The words splatted against her face, cold and whole. “Have you ever known me to lie? Ever?”

“No. But you break up pretty bad.”

“Gosh, I can’t imagine why, after we were the couple of the century for six years.”

“It’s over.”

“I know that!” she yelled. “I got it.” A sharp pain burst over her eyebrows, and she put her hand over it. “Speak your mind, Liam. I don’t have all day while you think of a posture—but you know as well as I do that I would not lie about something like this.”

The line hummed. “I know.”

“Look, I’m going to hang up. Talk to me later or don’t. It’s up to you.”

A half beat of silence. “Minna doesn’t want me to talk to you. She’ll be pissed as hell that I called you today.”

“So we don’t have to talk at all. I just wanted to do the right thing.”

“I want to. I want to send you money.”

“You know I don’t need any money, Liam.” It had been such a sore point between them, his alternating jealousy and delight in her father’s extreme fortune. “Don’t worry about any of it. I’m fine.”

“It
is
a miracle, though, isn’t it?” His tone was hushed. “The baby? Like what if I never have another one? What if you don’t?”

This was how he swayed her—not the swagger or the charm. His genuine bewilderment at life sometimes, his desire to find the numinous in things. “I can’t tell Minna. It will destroy her.”

The dagger-shaped icicle in her heart twisted. “Right.”

“I’m really sorry, Ruby. I did love you, you know.”

“Don’t,” she said, and hung up.

After the phone call with Liam, Ruby paced the porch for fifteen minutes, trying to pull herself together, to calm her racing heart and shaking hands, to erase the lingering spill of his voice. In her belly, the baby swooped, but Ruby didn’t feel even slightly nauseous.

Huh. She’d thrown up only once today. Maybe it was getting better.

She needed to cook. Popping her head into the other room, she said, “I’m going to my trailer for a while.”

“Everything all right?” Lavender said, looking up.

“Not really. I just need to cook. I’ll be back later.”

“Take an umbrella from the foyer.”

Noah had settled on the floor on one side of the coffee table. Hannah sat on the other. A backgammon board was open between them. “Your move,” he rumbled to Hannah. She picked up the dice and rolled. Valerie watched the game over her reading glasses, needles clicking along.

“Don’t stay gone forever,” she said. “We have some planning to do.”

Ruby nodded and ducked into the rain. It pattered softly on the umbrella, enveloping her in a soft quiet that eased the back of her neck very slightly. Out in the rain, with no one watching, she could let the tears fall down her cheeks, embarrassing, stupid tears that showed her weakness.

What was this craziness with Liam, anyway? She sliced through the long grass of the meadow, getting the hems of her jeans soaking wet. It wasn’t as if she’d never had a boyfriend before him. She’d had plenty. She’d slept with some of them, too.

Why was she hanging on? It didn’t make any sense. It was making her miserable. She had to find a way to get over it.

As she approached the Airstream kitchen, she heard a little mewp. From the shelter under the trailer, a pair of gold eyes peered out of the darkness. They looked as if they were floating, then her black face disappeared in the shadows. Ruby blinked, once. Mewp.

“Oh, poor baby!” She reached down and scooped the kitten up. Ninja Girl wiggled up to Ruby’s shoulder, her fur wet and cold against her neck. Ruby stroked her, turning her face to kiss the kitten’s soft side. “See,” she said, adding aggrievement to the yeasty brew of her emotions. “This is why humans sometimes need to intervene. Why aren’t you in the barn?”

As soon as the trailer door was open, Ninja Girl jumped inside and delicately ran over to the licked-clean saucer on the floor by the table. “Mewp!” she said, blinking over her shoulder at Ruby.

Ruby allowed a chuckle to break up some of the craziness in her chest. “You’re a hungry thing! Luckily,” she said, opening one of the cupboards, “I stocked up on the yucky stuff you like. How about salmon with greens?” She held up the can. Ninja Girl twirled around her ankles.