The Look of Love: A Novel (18 page)

She leans back in her chair, a little relieved but still disturbed. The weight of this love she carries is heavy, and I know she is weary.

Lo’s eyes are fixed on Grant, and when he looks in our direction, he sees her. I notice the way his eyes lock on hers, the long pause on his face, the one that tells me she reaches him as much as he reaches her. His expression is pleading, apologetic, begging her to understand. He whispers something in his wife’s ear and begins walking toward us.

A moment later, he is standing beside Lo’s chair. She looks ahead, unable to make eye contact. “Lo, I—”

“It’s OK,” she says. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me.” Her voice is resolute, strong. But I know she’s broken inside and deeply confused.

I glance across the room and see Grant’s wife watching the scene unfold, watching her husband pander to another woman. If she didn’t know, she knows now. Anyone in the room, even without my gift, could see Grant’s love for Lo. And just before Lo stands up to excuse herself, she looks at Grant, just one tiny glance. And that’s when it happens. My vision clouds, slowly at first, and then with the same intensity I experience when I let my eyes alternate between Josh and Katie, the way their expressions intertwine and ultimately fit, like two puzzle pieces.

“I’m sorry,” Lo says to Katie. “I . . . I’m not feeling well. I need to excuse myself for the night.”

“Oh, honey,” Katie says, placing her hand on Lo’s shoulder. “Don’t worry at all.”

I rub my eyes, after Lo has left and Grant has returned to his wife’s side. Cam, returning to the table with two champagne flutes, immediately recognizes what has happened.

“Sit down, Jane,” he says softly.

“Is she OK?” Katie asks, kneeling beside me.

Cam is squeezing my hand. “Yes, yes,” I say quickly. “I’m fine. I think I’m just getting . . . a migraine.”

“She’ll be fine,” Cam assures her.

Katie shrugs. “My wedding party is dropping like flies.”

I nod as my vision starts to come into focus again. “That man,” I whisper. “Lo is in love with him, and he is with her.”

Katie looks across the room, astounded. “Oh,” she says. “It must have hurt something awful to see him here with his—”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s why she had to leave.” I rub my eyes again. “She’ll get through it.”

“If you need to go home and rest,” Katie says, “I will completely understand.”

I shake my head. “Absolutely not. I’m staying.” I turn to Cam. “I haven’t danced with this fella yet.”

He squeezes my hand under the table as Katie smiles and moves on to the next table. We both look on as Josh joins her a moment later, tucking his arm around her waist.

“They’re an amazing couple,” Cam says. “Obviously they are in love.”

I nod. “Yes, and it’s intense. I couldn’t even look at them during the ceremony, or I’d have toppled over right there in the church.”

Cam smiles as my cell phone buzzes on the table. I see that it’s Elaine and decide to take it, first making an apologetic face at Cam.

“Hi,” I answer. “I’ve been trying to reach you for a few days.”

“Do you have a second to talk?” Elaine asks. Her voice falters, and I can tell she’s been crying.

“Yes,” I reply. “I’m at a wedding reception, but I’ll just step out of the ballroom so I can hear you better.”

In the lobby of the hotel, I find an upholstered chair and sink into it. “OK,” I say. “I’m all yours. What’s going on?”

“Jane,” Elaine says. “I’m a wreck.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m falling in love with someone,” she says. “Charles, from across the street. You met him at Christmas, remember?”

“I do.” I don’t tell her that I’m not surprised. I saw their love, as clear as day.

“Jane, I’ve been carrying this with me for so long now, I had to tell someone.” She pauses, and I can hear her weeping. “I am so ashamed.”

“Time out,” I say. “Don’t be ashamed. Yes, this is not easy for you; yes, it is unexpected; but I don’t think any of us should be ashamed about who we love.” I think about Lo and Grant, and the power love has to be beautiful, or destructive, leaving a path of rubble in its wake. But even then, peel back the layers, disregard the circumstances, and love is love. Some of us just have the good fortunate of finding it under less taxing circumstances. I realize that now. “Elaine, I can’t tell you why, but I’ve been doing some serious thinking on the subject. I’ve come to believe, deep in my veins, that we cannot help who we love. And the identity of our beloved can change over time.”

I think about Matthew and Elaine. Did they ever really love each other? In all the years I’ve known them, I’ve never had an episode in their presence. But does that mean they don’t love in their own way? Or maybe their love has simply changed. After all, love can ebb and flow. Or disappear completely, or hang on, in a quiet place in your heart for a half century, invisible to anyone, maybe even me.

“Yes,” she says, gaining composure. “But, Jane, what am I supposed to do? I’m
married
. I have two kids. And I’m in love with the man across the street.”

“You love him, yes,” I say. “And I’m not telling you that you should do anything about it. I’m not saying anything. I just think you should own that love and not be apologetic about it.”

“Yes,” she says. “I was hardly going out looking for it. He just walked in my kitchen on Christmas morning, and bam. It was that clear.”

“I know,” I say. “I saw it.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

“But you didn’t say anything.”

“It wasn’t my place.”

“Oh, Jane,” she says. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Well,” I reply, “what do you do when you’re unhappy? What cheers you up?”

Elaine thinks for a moment. “Pies. I make pies.”

“Then make a pie,” I say. “Make two pies, and three. Lose yourself in the pies. And then sleep, and when you wake up, you’ll see more clearly.”

“Yes,” she says. “You’re right.”

“How is Matthew? Does he know?”

“No,” she says.

“Give it time. Don’t do anything rash. Not yet.”

As we end the call, I see a familiar figure rounding a corner into a hallway of the hotel. I would recognize that distinctive steel-gray bun anywhere. Could it be Colette? Is she monitoring my progress?

“Sorry,” I say to Cam as I slide back into my chair at the table. “A friend was having a crisis.”

“Love life?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

He smiles. “You could make a business of this. Jane Williams, Love Doctor.”

“Ha,” I say. “Not quite. I’d be about as successful at that as the fortune-teller in the bottom of the market.”

He shrugs. “Well, if you really believe in what you see, you could do some good for people; help steer them in the right direction.”

I shake my head. “I wish I had some other gift. Like a photographic memory, or the ability to predict the weather with an achy elbow or something.”

Cam laughs. “I can assure you that your gift is much cooler than an elbow with meteorologist abilities.”

I smile, then refold my napkin in my lap. “I wish my mom was here. She loved weddings.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sure you miss her so much.”

“I do,” I say. “You’re lucky that your parents are still living.”

He nods. “They’ve been married for forty-five years, but I’m not sure how happy they are. I mean, they’re happy, I guess, but there isn’t any romance left in the equation.” He nods toward Katie and Josh, who have just taken the dance floor. “I know you can see the love that those two have. It would be an interesting experiment to have you look at my parents. I’ll bet your vision would be clear.”

I try to laugh off the idea that Cam is proposing. “Your mom and dad and the state of their union aren’t one of your science projects.”

I think about my parents, and how little I knew of the love they shared, only that it had been love, and it had been true—I’d seen it once, for a brief moment—despite my father’s departure from our lives. “My mom died when I was in high school,” I say a little breathlessly. I so rarely tell people about her death, and it feels intimate to share this information with Cam now.

“I’m so sorry,” he says quickly. “And your father? Are you close to him?”

I shake my head. “No, he’s been MIA since I was tiny. I don’t think I’d recognize him if I passed him on the street, and yet I think about him a lot. I wonder about how and where he’s living his life. Perhaps he has a whole new family, and I have half-siblings I’ve never met. I wonder a lot of things, like why he left my mom, and my brother and me. I know he loved my mother, but somehow his love for her wasn’t enough for him to stay.”

Cam nods, but he looks distracted, and I see that he’s digging into his pocket for his phone. “Sorry,” he says, looking pained. “It’s work.”

I nod. “It’s OK, really. Take it.”

“Thanks,” he says, stepping away from the table. He’s back in a few minutes, just as the song from the speakers changes. He smiles. “Do you know this song?”

I nod. “‘The Look of Love,’ yes. A classic.”

He reaches for my hand. “Dance with me?”

The music is mesmerizing, and so is Cam’s gaze, and I raise myself to my feet and then step onto the dance floor with his arms around my waist.

“I want you to think of me, and this moment, whenever you hear this song,” he whispers into my ear. “I want you to feel me.”

“I will,” I reply, resting my head on his chest.

The look of love. I may not be able to see it in my own life, but tonight, yes, I can feel it.

2201 Hamlin Street

August

E
laine rolls out a sheet of pie dough on the marble countertop in her kitchen. Matthew will be home tomorrow, and the kids picked a bowlful of tart cherries from the backyard tree and painstakingly pitted them at the bar until their fingers were stained red. “Daddy will love our cherry pie,” Ella says, grinning beside her brother.

Yes, Matthew loves cherry pies. Elaine remembers his delight upon discovering the old cherry tree in the backyard. It was the very first tree she’d climbed as a girl. The same tree that produced cherries for dozens of summer pies, lovingly baked by her grandmother.

Elaine combines sugar with the cherries in the bowl, then mixes in a pinch of cinnamon, just as her grandmother did. As she stirs the mixture, she remembers the way she sat on the counter as a girl, watching her grandmother make pies. Her grandfather would come into the kitchen and steal a taste of whatever was in process, only to receive a swift slap on the wrist from her grandmother. Their relationship was playful and loving, and Elaine considered it, as she still does, true love. She thinks of her husband. Matthew. Yes, he loves her. Of course he does. But he doesn’t look at her the way her grandfather looked at her grandmother.

Ella pops a sugarcoated cherry in her mouth, then follows her brother to the backyard, as Elaine rolls the lattice pie crust cutter over the dough and tucks the long strips over the top of the pie. She looks up when she sees Charles’s car pull into his driveway. He looks across the street and sees her through the window, and when their eyes meet, last night comes into focus like a film, replaying in a reel in her mind. Her heart swells.

They took the kids to a circus near Green Lake and spent the day shepherding them, with cotton-candy-coated faces, between the Ferris wheel, roller coaster, and arcade.

At the end of the day, they stopped at a flea market near the parking lot. Everyone was tired, but Ella, being an old soul, tugged at her mother’s hand. “Can we go look, please, Mama?”

Charles smiled. “I love antiques and curiosities,” he said. “Let’s explore.”

So they found themselves weaving from stall to stall, past tables of hand-knitted sweaters and kiln-fired pottery. Then, Ella ran ahead to a booth filled with antique jewelry, mostly gaudy costume baubles fit for girls’ dress-up chests and little else. “Look,” Ella said suddenly, lifting a charm bracelet from a rack at the far end of the table. “Didn’t you have a bracelet like this once, Mama?”

Elaine rushed to her daughter’s side. Her eyes filled with tears when they took in the sight of the charm bracelet—her bracelet, the one she’d lost as a girl of twelve, at a carnival just like the one they’d been at today.

“I can’t believe this,” Elaine said through tears, holding the bracelet in her hand. The charms were all still there: the cake, the spade, the half of the heart. “This is it. It’s my bracelet. The one I lost as a child. I’m certain of it.”

Before she even knew it was happening, Charles had opened his wallet and produced two bills. “Here,” he said, handing them to the middle-aged woman behind the table, with a tattoo of a unicorn on her shoulder.

“It still fits,” Elaine said, clasping it around her wrist.

Still under the spell of the afternoon’s events, Elaine found herself alone that evening. Ella and Jack were at a sleepover with their cousins, and Matthew was out of town on business, so when Charles showed up on her doorstep with a bottle of wine, she didn’t hesitate to invite him in.

It was against her better judgment, of course. But he was a neighbor, a friend, and yet so much more. They’d stood on the sidewalk watching their kids play together, exchanged hellos from opposite sides of the street, and slowly, their mutual attraction had reached a fever pitch, and there he stood, leaning into her doorway, a shadow of stubble across his chin, a look of longing in his eyes.

“Please, can I come in?” he said in a hushed voice.

“Yes,” she responded. Just one word, but it said everything, the way a musician can draw emotion with a single note.

And so she invited him in. They drank. They talked.

“You lost something dear to you. That’s why I bought you the bracelet, because I understand the feeling of searching in vain for what you know in your heart you will never see again.”

“You must miss your wife so much,” she said, with an open gaze.

“I do,” he replied. “Every day. Everything reminds me of her. Music. Things our daughter says. Roses in the garden.” He paused for a long moment, then looked up at Elaine with wide eyes. “You remind me of her.”

“Would she like me?” Elaine asked then.

“Cara would have adored you,” Charles said. His words made her heart swell. “I didn’t think I could believe in romantic love again. And then I walked into your kitchen.”

Their hands found each other first, then their lips, and their bodies. Elaine knew it was bigger than simple attraction, deeper than lust. She had known it when she’d looked into Charles’s eyes that first day, that first moment in her kitchen months ago. Beyond the edges of his retinas, she’d seen life. A big, bold, beautiful life. A house and a garden. The sounds of children’s voices. Christmases and Easters, birthdays and anniversaries. In those eyes, she saw love.

The flames flickered in the fireplace, casting dancing shadows on their naked bodies on the floor. Elaine hadn’t drawn the curtains. Any neighbor could have strolled by—Mrs. Wilkinson with her poodle, or Jonathon and Lisa West walking their colicky baby before bed—and seen them lying together, bodies entwined, eyes locked on each other. It was reckless, Elaine knew. She wasn’t behaving like herself, but like a sixteen-year-old version of herself. And yet, she had to have him, and he had to have her. To each, the other was the treasure they’d been in search of for a lifetime. The flea market find worth a million dollars, sitting in a dusty bargain bin, ripe for the taking.

And they took it, each of them. They lost themselves in it, this found treasure.

Elaine blinks hard and clutches around her wrist the bracelet that Charles purchased for her. He stands in his driveway across the street. She wonders if he’s remembering the way he touched her, not more than twenty-four hours ago. The way she touched
him
. Does he hear her voice in his ear? Because she can hear him. She can still
feel
him.

“Mama, Mama!” Ella shouts from the back door, jarring Elaine out of her stunned state. “Daddy’s home early!”

Elaine turns around and sees Matthew standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She didn’t hear his car. How long has he been standing there?

He walks toward her. “I caught the early flight out of Chicago,” he says, pausing to kiss her forehead.

Elaine reties her apron and wills herself to smile like nothing has changed. She is the woman he married after all. Loving, practical, incapable of betrayal. She turns back to the counter, to her lattice-topped cherry pie. Matthew presses his stomach to her back and wraps his arms around her waist, kissing her cheek from behind. Elaine looks up then. Charles stands at his mailbox. She knows he can see the two of them standing in the kitchen together.

“Think he’ll ever have that house repainted?” Matthew asks, cocking his head to the right.

Their eyes meet again, and Elaine fights back the tears that so desperately want to spill from her eyelids. She wills them to stay inside. “Yeah,” she says. “That blue is an awful color, isn’t it?”

Matthew kisses the top of her head. “Cherry pie, huh? How did I get so lucky?” He pops a cherry into his mouth before walking out of the kitchen.

Elaine stares out the window and clutches the kitchen counter. She feels as if her heart may burst.