The Do-Over (36 page)

Stella made a little O with her mouth, but it left so quickly Mara nearly missed it. Then Stella met her eyes, measured her. She knew the look. She’d given it to Logan when she had to consider what he could handle at a particular stage in life. The stage she was in, she didn’t want to handle anything. She shook her head, but Stella had made a mother’s decision. “It was the sixties.”

The women nodded in some kind of agreement, except Velma who wore the expression of lying.

“There’s a reason Betty Ford opened her clinic in the states. Couple like it here too. There was a need. There were diet pills, of course. You didn’t eat a damn thing when you took them, but you couldn’t sit still either. Peed like a race horse. They came along with sleep pills and the ones for,” Stella rolled her eyes, “nervous lady troubles.”

Sadie shook her head. “My neighbor took the diet pills for her daytime and sleep ones for night. Kept her figure for years, but I found her little ones running down the sidewalk in their night clothes at two o’clock in the afternoon. Momma hadn’t come-to all the way yet.”

Stella sighed. “Couldn’t blame a woman back then. We didn’t know, and they gave them to us like candy.”

Mara tried to erase the picture of her mother’s bedside table, the prescriptions gathered on the embroidered dresser scarf. Daisies. There’d been yellow thread daisies beside her bed.

“Sick of changing diapers, cooking, cleaning?” The anger in Stella’s voice surprised her. “Something’s wrong with
you
. These are the best years of a woman’s life. Course they were some of the best years and some of the worst.”

Mara didn’t want to hear anymore, hadn’t wanted to hear anything at all. “But my mother didn’t…” She wasn’t sure what she thought she could say that would make everything Stella said untrue.

“Maybe this has nothing to do with your mother. But there were drugs given to help…” Stella’s face looked older in an instant, “caused heart damage in some.” She shrugged. “Lost my sister.”

Lost. Mara needed it to be more logical than that. She wanted to pull information out of her memory and assure herself it had all been filed correctly. She
had
to lose her mother. It was an accident of fate, a bad heart no one could see or do anything about. Through all the years, she hadn’t beat her head against the wall because it would have still been a wall. Stella showed her the window and loss was just a fucking loss.

“Water.” John stood by the table, glass in hand. She opened her mouth to say something, but a wave of a thousand emotions reduced her to the teenage girl who, for the first time, understood her mother didn’t have to be gone but was.

John’s face blurred in the wash of tears, and she blurted out, “I need to cry in the bathroom.”

He hesitated but put the glass on the table as if he would take her there himself, but the the shipping crew rose and grabbed their purses. Jennie pulled a linen hanky out, and Mara felt Stella’s hand at her elbow. “Wouldn’t be a decent dance if a girl wasn’t crying in the john.” The support helped her rise from the table, and they swept her toward the ladies’ room.

She could hear the trembling sigh of Sadie. “In nineteen-fifty-one I cried for an hour at the summer cotillion. Oh, it was a lovely restroom.”

She’d sat on a toilet lid until her legs were numb, all the hankies used, and the toilet paper dispenser emptied.

She’d heard only her own heart breaking for a woman’s life shortened, the years with her mother ripped from her, and the ignorance or arrogance or both of her own father, whose sharp signature lay at the bottom of every prescription that had weakened a heart.

Then other sounds penetrated her fog of grief. Sadie’s voice chirped along, answered by Stella’s deeper wisdom. Jennie soothed over the top of Velma’s arguing mayonnaise versus Miracle Whip with the Marthas.

She stood to join them, the pin pricks along the bottom of her feet, an odd confirmation of life. She emerged and, like synchronized swimmers, the women snapped open their handbags to repair her face.

She stepped back into the swirl of the party, heard Celia’s voice wind through Renny’s and breathed in the beauty of it. She felt Stella pat her arm. “Gonna get you a good, strong drink.” And watched her head for the bar with the Marthas following like ducks to gin.

A well-dressed man approached and asked Jennie to dance, and she smiled like a woman solid in her attractiveness.

And Sadie lit out after a twenty-something waiter. If anybody could get him to drop his tray, it would be a sweet granny goosing him.

Velma remained, and she felt the woman’s dissatisfied exhales against her right shoulder but spoke to her anyway. “Thank you. The Abundance crew Code Blue saves me again.”

Velma gave a long suffering sigh. “Not that we’ll have Abundance much longer.”

She waited, but Velma remained silent, like an Edgar Allen Poe bird prone to giving ominous but unclear warnings. Mara turned to ask for clarification, but Velma wasn’t beside her, and when she looked the other way, she jumped. Velma’s face was near her own, too near her own.

“John’s selling Abundance.”

The woman really was raven-like and not a little scary. Maybe she just needed a drink. Mara reached out for a passing tray of champagne and lifted off two glasses, handing one to Velma. “I hope the catalog helps John sell even more Abundance.”

Velma took the drink but managed to make it look like she was doing the world a favor. “He’s selling the company. We’re all out of work.” She sniffed. “Not that you were ever legally employed.”

She turned her full attention on Velma, who raised her eyebrows in response. “Oh, like you didn’t know you were lacking your work visa, young lady.”

“What makes you think John’s selling Abundance?”

Velma waved her hand as if Mara were simply too dense to continue a conversation with and zeroed in on Renny in the spotlight. “That girl needs to pull her dress up. People did not come to a nice event to see cleavage.”

Mara was pretty sure all the males and quite a few of the females did come to a nice event to see cleavage, but she needed to concentrate on John selling Abundance. It was an alarming thought, but a relief to focus on something more easily tackled than Logan returning home early, her call to return home early, or, for that matter, her mother’s return home early. She’d had all those ideas crash into her head in one evening. Business was so much tidier.

She watched Velma stalk off to give Renny a talking to and snagged another champagne, wandering around, not making eye contact with anyone, just moving and trying to think. And drink.

Of course she’d known John wouldn’t stay forever. Hadn’t she wondered about something like a sale? His gypsy quality made it safe for her to be attracted to him. It couldn’t go anywhere no matter what. He’d move on, of course. But sell Abundance to some stranger? What about the shipping crew? What about Dylan, Celia, John’s own mother? What about all the empty baths ahead for her? Abundance meant so much to so many people.

Had her work with the catalog been about increasing the company’s worth just to get a better price? And what about the party? Was the potential buyer there? The polished businessman at the buffet wouldn’t keep on the shipping crew. He’d bring in beefy guys, union guys, the Beefy Union Bubble Bath Packers of District Four-Oh-Nine. Her breath hitched, quickened, the pending panic of the evening fueled by a new anger.

She reconsidered the night she’d gone into Abundance. John claimed he’d been doing inventory, then almost her, if the soap hadn’t gotten in her eyes, but really he’d been preparing the sale. How could he do it? He’d leave eventually, sure, but not hand Abundance over to Stella? That was low even for him. 

She concentrated on her outrage, but pictures of the two of them that night flashed. The kiss, the liquid bath cream between them, the feel of it down the length of her body, the slick against her breasts, down her legs, between her toes. Outrage. He’d had her help him. Help him betray everyone at Abundance.

She slammed down the rest of the champagne, the bubbles not tickling so much as burning. She’d find John, and he’d be sorry.

“I’m gonna what?” John sipped his own champagne, elegant and calm like James Bond only on the wrong side of the good guy/bad guy casting.

“Rue the day.” Mara waved a full glass at him, a couple of drops splashing over the rim. “And be really sorry too.”

“How much,” John smiled and leaned in closer, “have you had, love?”

“I’ve had plenty.” Who did he think he was questioning her state of mind?

He took her arm, steered her towards the buffet, murmuring quiet things used for sweet children or feisty cats up trees. The champagne charged through her system and seemed to function a bit like alcohol ear plugs, but she almost caught phrases. Worry about her son, the crying. Her crying she thought. And food. Getting her food came up several times. She heard lobster, lobster, lobster, and pasta. She stopped walking. Past-a? “Did you say past-a? It’s paust-a. How much have you had to drink?” She snorted, stopped herself.

John kissed her on the forehead. “It’s Canadian, darlin’.”

Mara found herself leaning into the kiss, forgetting temporarily that he was a rat bastard. “Don’t go all charming Canadian on me.”

Before she registered it, they were moving across the room again. She dug her heels into the carpet. “Don’t think I don’t know, Slick Slickerman.”

John looked confused. “You know?”

“Yep. Can’t pull one over on me. I’m up on your game.” Wait. That wasn’t right. I’m wise to your game? Onto the game? It was like tutoring a student in English as a second language only she used to be the tutor.

John faced her, toe to toe, head tilted to the side in a
we share a secret
moment
 
she also wasn’t falling for. No amount of alcohol could make her a part of the demise of Abundance, the unemployment of all the lovely women. The shipping crew probably couldn’t even stand in the unemployment lines. Velma had a previously broken hip.

“So, you’ll stay?” John whispered it, and she felt, or imagined she felt, his breath along her neck, warm and promising.

“Stay?”

“I want you to stay at Abundance.” He shook his head, laughed. “I want you to stay. Abundance or not.”

“You mean you want me…” she tried to figure out just what kind of offer a man selling a company could make.

“Yes.”

She felt the tremor run from the center of her body down her arms, the trail a bolt of lightning might take. It shook her champagne glass, and the spill made a fizzy puddle. “But Abundance…”

“Sure. If you want to keep working for the company, that’s great. You can do the next catalog or, well, whatever you want.”

“You’re selling it.”

“Well, I really want you to stay. I’ll convince you anyway I can.”

“No, not
selling
it. I mean you’re selling Abundance.”

His eyebrows came together in confusion. “Why would I sell the company?”

“I…” For money. For freedom. Because he wasn’t a good guy. He was a charming, handsome bad guy and no danger to her because he wasn’t going to stick around. He was the kind of person who would abandon his family and friends… She felt her stomach drop, her heart speed in the adrenaline-fueled panic that had brought her there in the first place. “I’m the bad one.”

He put his hand around her waist as if to hold her up, and she heard the shush of her gown and tried to feel the warmth of his touch. Only the cool of the satin registered. “You’re not the bad guy. I am.”

The man in the suit appeared, his posture, his face, all business, and it steadied her. “John?”

She waved him toward John. She could hold it together for the second he was a witness. “Go ahead, I’ll just—”

“Have a drink.” Stella put one in her hand, and she took a sip that would have burned on a normal day.

Stella linked arms with her, and moved her across the room as John hesitated, then headed toward the stage.

When they stopped, Mara took another sip and felt more of the fire. “I have to go home.”

“Course you do. Go home. Settle things. No one thought you were leaving him.”

“Dan?”

“Logan.” Stella shook her head, slowly, as if her thoughts felt heavy. “Sometimes when you’re fishing, the line gets all knotted up. It’ll get twisted time and again, takes some effort is all to make it right. But sometimes it’s too much to figure, and the best thing to do is just cut it and start over.” She shrugged. “No one to blame, just too far gone.”

Mara heard the pop of the microphone and turned to see John tap it. “I know I promised Abundance news this evening.”

“Damn straight.” Stella grinned at the accompanying laughter.

“Apparently my mother is done waiting, so here goes. Abundance bubble bath, our first product, and our best selling one, has brought us great things.” He searched the crowd, and Mara felt a surge of emotion when he found her. Bubble bath had brought her to Vancouver, to John, to the Abundance family, and once to a strip joint and a nude beach. It had also given her a job, a loft, butterfly flip flops, real friends, and more confusion than she’d imagined possible.

“And it’s part of a new future.”

Mara heard Velma’s “I told you so,” and ignored it.

“Abundance will continue on as it always has, with handmade batches and personal testing…” His pause felt like an intimate secret between them, remembering the rough cement beneath her feet, the cool slick of cream. “All packaged by the finest shipping crew in British Columbia.” A couple of ladies gave a shout out.

“But we’re stepping up production of the one product not ever made by hand. In association with Tragen Global, I’d like to introduce you to Bill Tragen.” John motioned to the man who had pulled him away. “Bill has a track record of running good, fair businesses. He’s taking Abundance bubble bath to, well, to the world. It’ll be distributed throughout the States and in a fair number of European countries as well. It’s Bill’s job to figure that out. He’ll, no doubt, be handicapped by shippers two quarts low on gin, but I think he’ll manage…”