The Do-Over (11 page)

“You’re going to become a stunt woman?”

“I’m going to think bigger.” She’d been reading and taking baths and eating pizza, but it was banana pepper time, baby. “I’m gonna live out every movie I’ve ever loved.”

He leaned closer, and she felt aware of the larger male presence of him, less contained, and she didn’t know what to make of it. “You’re not moving to Tuscany. You will not date the president. And no meeting a chain bookstore mogul on the internet.”

“I’m perfectly aware of where to draw the line, Dan, you know that.”

He looked like he would reach out to her, and, for the first time in years, she didn’t know how that would feel. He stepped into the hallway instead. “I don’t know that, Janie, and neither do you.”

He closed the door behind him, and she leaned her forehead against it and listened to his footsteps recede. She knew all about lines. She lived her life not crossing them, coloring only inside them, and never drawing them. Well, she had sent him over the threshold again, but he was wrong about her not knowing where to draw the line. He just didn’t like where she was drawing it. 

She took a deep breath and turned back to her notes for the catalog, the job she’d taken to pay for her month’s vacation into another life. It might make a good movie, a woman making a bath catalog. Maybe she didn’t need to be one of Charlie’s Angels because there was something adventurous, exciting, sexy even, about designing a glossy ad for fizzy balls and creamy soaks. She felt the electric zing of it. She didn’t know everything, like how she was going to get back her drive to warehouse shop for facial tissues and catsup, but she might know how to make a catalog and how to make an adventure out of it.

I’m naked under this cardigan, she thought as she buttoned the happy daisy sweater over the wisp of a camisole Gretchen had given her. She considered popping it off and putting something more substantial under it, like a turtleneck, but Gretchen might see her and think she’d rejected the gift. Plus it was July. Skin to win. And she’d tried a sturdy bra under the camisole under the sweater, but all the straps made her look like an undergarment company’s before photo. Wasn’t it better to sport a suggestion of a nipple than be a candidate for a brassiere intervention?

She put on plaid capris that zipped along her hip bone, her butterfly flip flops, and rhinestone shades. She grabbed a canvas bag she’d fished out of Gretchen’s discount bin for a dollar and headed out the door. It wasn’t every day she scouted locations for a photo shoot. She felt herself bound down the stairs and rush into the orange of the late afternoon sun. The colors when they bled into dusk would be warm and perfect, but first she had to find her way to the park. She pulled a map out of her bag. She knew she could drive or study the scenery, but she couldn’t do both.

She felt a little nervous, but wasn’t public transit supposed to be easy enough for children? Even if the bus didn’t say
Stanley Park
, it couldn’t be hard to figure out which one to get on. From Gastown, Cordova and West Hastings were major streets. They met up on West Pender which blended into West Georgia which clearly turned into the Stanley Park Causeway. Granted, she didn’t know what a causeway was, and the map she was relying on was a freebie from McDonald’s. Even she could see that Chinatown rested on the wrong side of Gastown. And if that topographical error didn’t cause her to question the map’s quality, its largest landmark was a bikini clad girl floating in the Strait of Georgia. She didn’t appear to be drowning but instead licked her lips and invited everyone to Trina’s Cocktail Palace.

“Chinatown’s southeast.” John walked towards her, and she fought the urge to run upstairs for a turtleneck. He pointed to the creamy yellow that marked the boundaries of Chinatown, and she decided she imagined how good he smelled because it wasn’t even human. “The map’s wrong.”

She shook her head enough to think again. “I caught that.” She tried for a casual smile. “But I’m sure there are other flaws I’m completely missing. Is there a cheap mermaid floating offshore from the Vancouver International airport?”

“Not since I was in high school. She settled down and moved inland.” He pointed east. “The B.C. Farm Machinery and Agricultural Museum.”

“Well, I’m sure she’s having a wonderful life.”

“She was happy for a while, but lately…”

Mara narrowed her eyes. John hadn’t stopped giving her that inviting smile, but it felt like floating in the Strait of Georgia danger. “Lately what?”

“You tell me.”

She studied him, the sun behind his head. Just as handsome as he’d been with his green eyes and vat of vanilla bath cream. Mid-thirties, she’d guess. Rested. No children. Flirting. No ring. No wife. He wore a business man’s dress shirt, rich blue but rolled to his elbows like a frat boy, like the best looking, least responsible frat boy everyone hated to love. “For your information, Mrs. Mermaid has taken a brief vacation, a working vacation. She’s taking a bus to Stanley Park to smell the sea and make a bath catalog and will return to her real life at the agricultural museum soon and everything will be fine.”

John flipped a set of keys out of his pocket. “It would be rude to let a mermaid take public transportation.”

She raised an eyebrow, trying to remember the teacher look she’d used on boys acting up, and the next thing she knew, she was admiring the interior of John’s car. All charcoal grey leather, there wasn’t anything red or dangerous about it, but maybe it was conservative respectability that lured grown women in like a Venus fly trap. “How’d I get here?”

John laughed. “She asked the same thing about the B.C. Farm Machinery and Agricultural Museum.”

Mara turned her face toward the window. No need for him to see her smile. It would only encourage his charm, and God knew she didn’t need him to exert any more in her direction.

“Made your daisies smile.”

Mara faced him again, confused, until she glanced down at her sweater. Traitor daisies, they were really giving him the eye. “They are temporarily confused but very responsible and upright and capable of making good choices.” She always had. Years and years of good choices and any shakiness currently was a blip on the screen of her life’s movie. “Consistently.”

“That is exactly why she’s so appealing.” John slowed as he approached a bridge flanked by large cement lions.

Mara remembered to breathe and tried to distract herself by studying the statues. “They’re always so serious.”

He turned briefly toward her in question.

“Lions. You know, in front of libraries or,” she waved back, “bridges. They have such regalness. That’s something to aspire to.”

“I heard one at the zoo once.” John’s voice dipped low as if he were sharing a secret. She felt drawn in, leaned forward, then straightened her seatbelt to cover his effect on her.

“There was this crying. A heartbroken keening.”

“Keening,” Mara repeated.

John nodded.

“Good word.”

He smiled and continued. “I followed the sound, everyone at the zoo did. We made our way toward the lion exhibit and crowded around the glass wall of the enclosure.”

She felt the seatbelt cut into her collar bone and sat back some.

“We could see him on the far right, the end of a man made canyon. He lay in the dust, his head on his paws like a house cat.”

She could see it, the poor, wild animal. “He didn’t want to be in captivity.”

John shook his head as he drove down the narrow road where the wooded hillsides blurred and darkened around them. She focused on him, then, breathless, she guessed. “He’d lost his mate.”

“There were three females in the enclosure.”

“What? What was going on?”

“The zookeeper pointed toward the opening of the canyon, and we all moved to the right to see better. The females were resting in the sun, their backs to him, not even blinking when he cried. They’d trapped him up against the rock wall.” He pulled into a parking spot, shut off the engine.

She stared at him, waiting.

“He was new, and they weren’t sure if they wanted him there. It looks like the male is in charge. A lion is the king of the jungle, isn’t he? But all the flashy mane and posturing he does, it isn’t to
choose
his mate. It’s to be
chosen
.” He smiled. “That lion lost.”

She blinked, felt the pain of the seatbelt as it stretched between the seats towards John. She jerked back, heard the extra belt swoosh back into the holder, and with hands she feared were shaky, she pushed the button. Freed, she reached for the door handle and tried to smoothly get out but stumbled into the light. She stood, looking out but not seeing, trying to think about anything, not feline female power, not a king of the jungle reduced to keening, even if
keening
was a really good word.

She focused to her left, at a forest, dark and not very park-like. But to the right she found an ice cream vendor, public bathrooms, and a five-foot map. That was a park.

She crossed the lot toward the carved wooden sign, brass lettered
Prospect Point Lookout
. She felt John beside her and decided to pretend he wasn’t watching her while she studied a carpet of impatiens spread across the raised beds. There were hot pinks and coral and also something that looked like fuchsia trees. The bare trunks rose four feet and exploded with an umbrella of two-toned pink flowers, each with their own frilly center hanging down like silky fringe.

John pointed toward the end of the lot, and Mara instantly loved the enormous butterfly design there. A low growing green creeper had been pruned to spell
Stanley Park
, and below it the butterfly lay on the grass. Hens and chicks outlined its body, and burgundy succulents gave it shape while clusters of impatiens colored its wings. She walked to the edge of the grass, as close as she could get to the butterfly without knocking over the low slung fencing, and glanced down at her feet, her flip-flop butterflies just as colorful as the large one before her. She imagined they could all fly, and her feet would lift to meet the large butterfly mid-air. She breathed in and caught the lively scent of moving water, turning her head to see which direction it lay.

She felt him take her elbow. He waited for her body to shift, and led her to a path that narrowed and brought them to a length of chain link fencing.

They leaned their forearms on top and looked out together in silence. The water ran dark, tipped with the last of the sun’s heat. A small tugboat, jaunty in gold and green, managed, without any sign of struggle, to pull a matching barge ten times its size. It reminded her of an ant hauling a pretzel from a picnic.

Picnic. She’d been distracted from her photo shoot scouting. “I need to find a picnic spot. Something in the right light. For the catalog.”

John seemed to understand but tipped his head toward their feet.

Mara wondered if her butterflies were smiling up at him with the zest her daisies had. “It’s an idea I had. Well, I should pitch it to everybody.” Location scouting. Pitching. It did all sound very movie-like.

He caught her eye, amused, and tipped his head toward their feet again. She followed his gaze this time and watched a raccoon reach his paw through the fence. He touched the tip of her right butterfly’s wing, and she jumped back, mashing John’s foot. His grunt of discomfort and laughter mixed as he caught her waist and kept them both upright.

The raccoon stared at her, seemingly unaffected by the ruckus. Its shiny eyes, expressive in a calm face, seemed to be more than willing to overlook her rudeness, and despite the bandit black fur and reputation for trouble, he sat calmly, sweetly even, as if he knew he’d get the first handout of the evening. She sighed and felt John smile in her hair. He held her so closely she could feel his heat through her back daisies. It was too long, seconds past the foot mashing, for him to have his arms around her waist. There wasn’t an easy untangling now. And her daisies were really heating up. She’d have to make a clean break, like be actually attacked by the raccoon or sneeze. It would take a really big sneeze. She could readjust her flip-flop, quickly, just one, two, three, and step away.

One, two, three. She stepped and wished almost instantly that she’d considered that John’s foot could be on the back of her flip flop.

She fell forward, the path coming closer to her face, and then her view lurched from the path to John’s legs to the sky as he swung her up. She grabbed for his neck and hung on to get her balance. Her heart raced from the near miss, and in her relief, she might have sniffed his neck or really more breathed in when her face was against his neck, but because his neck smelled so good, maybe the breath in was longer than normal. She felt one rumble of amusement in his chest, tight against her un-bra-ed daisies, then an answering sniff at her throat.

She drew back and pointed in the general region of his neck. “I, uh, have a cold.”

He pointed in the general region of her throat. “Allergies.”

She shook her head, laughed, and decided to go back to paying attention to the raccoon before she gave any more to John. The raccoon seemed to wait for her, and she had to stop herself from crouching down and patting the long elegant grey paws that reached through the links. “Do you have nuts?” She froze the millisecond she realized she’d just said out loud to John, the man whose neck she had sniffed and been sniffed by in return,
do you have nuts?

“Uh… no?”

She eased away, tried for casual by admiring the waiting raccoon as if she hadn’t even spoken, but she heard a crinkling sound behind her just before John placed an unwrapped granola bar in her hand. She smiled at him, shook her head at her own ridiculousness, and broke the bar into small pieces. The raccoon took them one by one into his lean paw and ate while he watched her.

“Thank you for coming.” Mara tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, glad the highlights still glowed. The bun had seemed a good choice for the presentation. She loved that it was a messy one and not the tight perfection she’d worn for big meetings before. She could feel the Abundance family waiting as if she would say something great. She loved her messy bun and their optimism.