The Do-Over (9 page)

“Mom?”

“Logan.” The relief of his everyday voice calmed her down. He was safe without stitches or a clue, and he was on the phone.

“Whatcha doin’?” He was perfecting his cool guy demeanor, but the energy of his boyness still vibrated at times in what he said and did.

“I’m talking to you,” she mirrored his nonchalance.

She felt his hesitation. “Mom, that’s what I say.”

“I know.” She smiled at the surprise in his voice. “Whatcha doin’?”

“You don’t say that either.”

“Don’t I?”

“You say,
what are you doing, Logan, sweetie?
”

Logan’s imitation of her sounded so stiff even the
sweetie
lacked a certain warmth. “Is that what I really sound like?”

“Sure. You never say, like,
goin’
or
doin’
or
like
.”

“But do I sound…” What exactly had she heard in his showing her herself? “Do I sound not fun?”

“Not fun? You’re a mom.”

“And?” She was going to get a big sign that said
AND
with a huge question mark after it, and when Dan or Lois or even Logan made assumptions about her that she had stopped making about herself, she’d flash it at them.

“Well, moms are, you know, moms. They do stuff for kids and take care of kids, but they’re not, well, you know…”

He didn’t seem to want to say it, and she prompted him. “You can tell me.”

“Well, you’re not kids or like some grownups, like before they have kids or dads. Dads do stuff that’s fun.”

Mara pictured her days with Logan. In the shopping and cooking and cleaning and work, was there, somewhere, lightness too? There’d been board games and reading together and the occasional bike ride, but maybe it wasn’t about any of that, but how it was done, what she’d brought or not brought to it. “I’m having fun now.” It surprised her, the truth of it, but she was. Despite her own fears and the guilt and objections of Lois Mulligan and her offspring.

“Cool. Gotta go, Mom. I’m goin’ to the hardware store with Grandpa.”

“Well, you don’t want to miss that. Pick up a couple of power tools. You don’t need all your fingers.”

“What?”

“Just a little joke.”

“Really?” He asked with such confusion, she vowed to never be so serious her own child couldn’t identify her humor.

“And give your grandmother a kiss for me.” Logan wouldn’t get that joke either, but then neither would Lois. Having a sense of humor might just add to her fun.

She dropped in the butter ball, and it dissolved in a swirl of hot water. The vanilla almond thickened it, and she lowered herself into something that fell between a liquid and a solid, a creamy place she could unfold in.

She’d perched the boom box on the back of the toilet, glad she’d remembered to close the lid on the bowl. The headline back home
Middle School Teacher Trainer Electrocuted in Butter Ball Incident
sounded lurid and unnecessary. If she wanted to stay away from sordid, she’d better keep both her head and electrical appliances above water.

She’d chosen old jazz, the kind where longing centered around a kiss, and the word
gravy
popped up surprisingly often. As she waved her fingers through the water, she remembered how beautiful the mix had been in her hands. She looked, really looked at her fingers, noted her wedding ring for the first time, since… since she’d had the prongs checked three months before, on their anniversary. The solitaire had been perfect. It wasn’t so small that Dan hadn’t given it some effort, but not so big that it flashed or called too much attention to itself. It also didn’t catch on anything or get in the way, and over the years, it had become part of her hand.

She’d stopped noticing her hands too, the way the white moons of her nails met the pink beds, the way the whole of it tapered into the fine bones of her wrist. She held her wrist with her other hand, then moved her fingers up her arm, across the sweep of shoulder down the slope of her breast to her belly, the soft hair between her legs, down to her thigh, kneecap, shin, and to the tip of her toe.

She sat back in the hot water and felt the electric awakening in the half of her body she’d touched, so she took her other hand and swept the opposite side. Her nipple rose to meet her touch, her belly tightened, her toes tingled with the tickle of it, and she felt a surge of energy, a restless stirring despite the ease of the bath. She felt desire. She felt desirable, and she didn’t have any idea what to do with it.

She’d slept, but not in the restful way she’d enjoyed after reading all those hours the night before. That night, despite the murder mysteries, she’d not been haunted by chopped up corpses or cats solving crimes. Even the romances hadn’t affected her. At least she hadn’t felt affected by them, but maybe she was just experiencing a delayed reaction.

All she knew was that her night had been filled with men. Not any she knew personally, but ones she’d come to know pretty damn personally by morning. There were men who touched her and whispered in her ear the kind of things she couldn’t believe her unconscious mind was capable of inventing. There were things she didn’t know men could do. Maybe they were things real men couldn’t do, but the secret men in her dark dreams were all kinds of capable, flexible, muscular and excitedly creative. Some of her night was a blur, although still stirring, and hot. It disturbed her even as the rational light of morning poured over the sheets. There’d been handcuffs, public parks, and if she remembered correctly, produce involved. She may never be able to look at a salad bar again without a measure of desire.

But that was all over. It was a new day. She got out of bed, tidied the sheets as if to cover up a crime scene. She’d have a nice cup of tea. That would be good.

She padded to the kitchen and filled the battered kettle she’d inherited with the loft. She waited, sitting on the wooden bar stool with her chin on her folded arms. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was just a couple of weeks to read and eat and take some baths. The new clothes were just for fun. She’d give them up when it was time to go back. And, sure, Dan was mad, but after fifteen years of marriage maybe it was time. Besides, she was mad at him. He was carrying on, not listening to her at all, and tattling to his mother, his mother for christ sake.

The kettle started to rumble, and Mara watched the first wisp of steam escape from the spout. Escape was about leaving something wasn’t it? But she hadn’t considered she’d be escaping
to
something. Somehow the month had been a blank, a non-place, non-time, where she could just be. Instead it was becoming something, something all of its own, with a place and a way of living and looking and feeling.

The teakettle rocked on its uneven bottom, its water boiling with force now. There was danger there. Just like her dreams had force. The night before in the bathtub, the feelings she hadn’t even met before, were working inside her. The smart thing to do, the thing Janie would do…

She rose from the chair, studied the loft all lit up with morning, the books still unread, the baths not yet drawn. She stopped in front of the stove and reached for the worn knob of the burner. The thing Janie would do is shut it down. She turned it until she heard the click.

“I thought of you.” Gretchen greeted her like a neighbor and put her hand on a pair of pants neatly folded on the counter. “I just got these in. They’re seersucker. So cute for summer. They’ve got these deep cuffs, kind of Katherine Hepburn goes to the beach.”

Mara loved the gray and white crinkled stripes and stopped herself from imagining wearing them. Her town didn’t even have a beach. She wanted to beg Gretchen not to torture her because she needed to leave. If she’d figured out anything from her disturbed dreams, it was to go back before anything went wrong. But she didn’t want to give up the chance to shop at Gretchen’s one more time. “I need something, uh, less fun, but still a little fun.” She had to look like Janie again, didn’t she? Conservative, solid, reasonable, ready to forget herself and remember others. “Got a nurse’s uniform?”

“Uh, no.” Gretchen laughed. “But let me get a couple of summer weight sweaters I was tagging in the back. One has embroidered daisies on it. You’ll love it.”

“I know I will.” She watched Gretchen disappear in the back and closed her eyes. She tried to picture slipping back into her old sweat suit, the drapey butt, elastic waist. If seersucker was Katherine Hepburn goes to the beach, the sweats were Janie Mulligan goes to the warehouse store.

“Whatcha doin’?”

Mara jumped, her eyes opening to Dan, shaved, rested, looking like he knew, somehow knew that she was going home. She wished she’d caved from his pressure or by being strong-armed by his mother. She was embarrassed to admit that some almond soap and a couple of erotic dreams scared her straight.

“See?” Gretchen held up a yellow cotton sweater with three quarter sleeves. “Perfect, huh?” The daisies were all white but their centers held smiley faces and bloomed in every shade of the rainbow.

Dan shifted next to her. He probably hated it. Too busy. Too silly. Too somebody else, not Janie.

“I’ll take it.” She’d wear it gardening. It was too white for that. She’d wear it at home when she had a moment alone, no neighbors were coming over, and she didn’t have work to do or any cleaning or errands. Hell, she wasn’t ever going to wear it. She handed Gretchen her credit card. It would be a Vancouver souvenir.

Dan turned away from the counter as if trying to block her purchase. “Janie, I need to tell you something.”

“Yeah. We’ll talk. Let me just finish this.”

Gretchen ran the card through, waited, and zipped it again. “Huh.”

Dan straightened and took a step toward the door. “Janie, I want to talk to you outside.”

When had he gotten so damn bossy? Had he always been like that and she’d been too much a docile sheep to notice? “I’m buying a sweater now.”

“Actually…” Dan looked around the store like he was avoiding any potential eye contact with her or Gretchen.

Gretchen put the credit card on the counter and looked with great empathy at Mara. “The card’s been cancelled.”

Mara’s eyebrows came together. She paid it in full every month, and she only kept one because it was the fiscally responsible way to function. She picked up the card and checked the expiration date. Just as she thought, it was good for nearly a year. “I didn’t cancel the card. I used it yesterday, when I…” she sucked in her breath, turned on Dan. “I bought you lunch.” Sure, they’d been like prisoners eating bread and water on a wheel-less trolley, but she’d helped him out. “You were homeless and your blood sugar was low and I fed you.” She held up the card. “You cancelled me.”

“Two breadsticks do not make a lunch.” He stopped himself, put up both hands and lowered them slowly, the move of a principal controlling a junior high student.

“Don’t you shush me,” she warned him.

“I didn’t.” Dan took a step back.

She imitated his hand calming trick. “You did the quiet-the-kids thing to me. Don’t you do that, Dan Mulligan, I’m not sheep.”

His forehead wrinkled. “I said you fed me two breadsticks. I didn’t say you were sheep.”

She felt her breathing pick up, the rhythm of taking air in and expelling it disrupted. She was being forced, forced to go back. She’d been in voluntary captivity, managed to escape and then Dan corralled her again. Her heart rate increased with the flood of oxygen. She was a sheep. She could see the poor creature wearing a daisy embroidered sweater and cat eye sunglasses. Dan, in loafers and a cowboy hat, slammed gates closed just ahead of the struggling animal until it butted its head uselessly against the last barrier. Mara felt her head begin to swirl and tiny white dots sparkled in her vision. She slid to the floor and struggled to get enough air. She needed to breathe. She couldn’t breathe.

“Janie? What’s…” Dan faced Gretchen as she rounded the counter to crouch down on Mara’s other side. “Call for an ambulance!”

Mara felt Gretchen’s hand on the back of her head pushing her face down between her knees. “Slower. I want you to breathe with me. See? In. Slower. With me. And out.”

The awful dizziness began to leave in the same waves it rode in on. The spots lessened until they too were gone. Mara let out a slow breath and felt, finally, that she had enough oxygen. She knew what hyperventilating was, for heaven’s sake. But how could too much oxygen feel like not enough? Why would reason tell her the solution was to breathe more when that only made it worse? You couldn’t always trust your rational judgment. You never knew when your own brain was screwed up, and you needed to trust something else, something less sensible.

She registered Dan’s grip on her arm, remembered the trapped feeling that had sent her to the floor, and pulled away. She struggled to her feet with Gretchen’s help and leaned against the counter as the last of the dizziness rolled through her.

“I’m taking you to a doctor.” Dan sounded shaky and that made her feel a degree less mad at him, but only a degree.

“Buy me the sweater.”

A burst of laughter escaped from Gretchen as she returned to the register.

Dan’s eyebrows came together so tightly, Mara wanted to tell him if he didn’t quit they’d freeze that way, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t currently translating humor.

“You can’t be serious.”

Mara pointed at the cash register. “Pay the lady.”

Dan reached into his wallet and pulled out a fifty dollar bill, its muted colors as perfectly vintage as the shop. Mara noted that the man on it, while important in Canada, wasn’t anyone she knew, but he had kind eyes beneath bushy, earnest eyebrows, and she felt better. Gretchen rang the sale in and gave her the change, and she tried not to smile as she slipped the cardigan on. The daisies really did cheer her with their joyful silliness.

“Now can we go home?”

“I’m not going anywhere.” She began to button the sweater and noticed the buttons had tiny leaves imprinted on them. She looked up at Gretchen, “this is great.”

Gretchen smiled. “I knew you’d love it.” She reached behind her and took a tiny white camisole off a stack of tank tops. She popped it in a bag and handed it over the counter. Oh, wasn’t that sweet of her? “I don’t have any money.”