The Wildwater Walking Club (5 page)

I STARED UP AT THE CRACK IN MY CEILING, THEN TURNED
my head just long enough to watch 8:00
A.M
. come and go in slime green on my alarm clock. My entire body ached, as if a Mack truck had driven through my bedroom in the middle of the night and flattened me into my mattress.

I barely remembered the drive home from O’Malley’s. While everybody talked about Sherry and Michael, I’d just sat there, feeling numb right down to my toes. I’d forced myself to wait until they’d moved on to another subject. Then I told everyone I had to get up early the next day, said my good-byes, and got the hell out of there.

I should have been relieved they’d never caught on to Michael and me. I should have been worried about Sherry, too, and whether Michael was going to manipulate her into taking a VRIF she didn’t really know if she wanted. Maybe it was even in his Olympus job description:
Eliminate overpaid female senior employees by seducing them and then nudging them out to pasture before they know what hit them.

I could have been quietly making plans to warn Sherry myself. Or I could have brought a rumor to the table for the group to feed on for dessert. Said something cryptic about Sherry not being the first, that I’d heard Michael was Olympus’s secret weapon, that somebody really should do something about him. They would have
swarmed like vultures, with Carol stepping up immediately to spearhead the Save Sherry/Kill Michael project.

But I didn’t. As they picked up their forks and dug into the juicy gossip on the table before us, I just sat there like a lump and never said a word. Because the embarrassing truth was that the only thing that pierced the numbness was a blinding flash of jealousy. I couldn’t believe Michael liked Sherry better than me.

My doorbell rang at 8:07
A.M
. I ignored it, rolled over, pulled the covers up over my head.

At 8:10
A.M
., it rang again.

“Shit,” I said out loud. I kicked off the covers, yanked the hem of my T-shirt down until I was relatively decent, and stumbled to my front door. I opened the door a crack but kept the chain lock fastened.

Rosie and Tess smiled up at me from my doorstep.

“Not feeling well,” I said. I orchestrated a pathetic cough and started to shut the door again.

Tess grabbed the door handle from the other side. “Fever?” she asked.

I had the feeling that if I said yes, she’d whip a thermometer out of her back pocket just to be sure.

I shook my head.

“Any sign of infection?” she asked. “You know, swelling on one side of your neck or green mucus or anything?”

I shook my head again.

Tess smiled. “Okay, you’re good to go. Throw your shoes on—whatever it is, the endorphins will help.” She looked at her watch. “You’ve got three minutes.”

My eyes teared up. “I just can’t do it,” I said. And then I slammed the door.

I SPENT MOST
of the day in bed. I didn’t want to think. I wanted to bury myself in sleep, remain unconscious, oblivious, pain-free. And it worked pretty well, at least for a while.

At 3:22
P.M
., I had to pee so badly I finally got up. I took a shower, because it was such a great place to cry. The water washed my tears away almost as soon as they appeared, which somehow gave the whole thing an element of control, as if shower crying was slightly less tragic than stand-alone sobs would have been.

I was eating a bowl of cereal when the doorbell rang. “Geez,” I said out loud. “Not again.” I took another quick bite, then dumped the rest of my cereal down the garbage disposal.

Tess and Rosie were standing on my doorstep like they’d been there all day.

“Haven’t we done this once already?” I asked.

Tess pulled a piece of white rope out from the round beige pulley she was holding. “Don’t make me use this on you,” she said.

I smiled. Behind them I could see a wheelbarrow filled with a bunch of small plants and three shovels. I pushed my door open. “Come on in,” I said. “I just have to put some shoes on.”

I probably should have looked for an old pair of sneakers, but it’s not like I didn’t have backups. I sat on the couch to tie my Walk On Bys.

“Have a seat,” I said. “Thanks,” I added. Not to get goopy, but I couldn’t believe they’d cared enough to come back.

Tess and Rosie stayed by the door. “No problem,” Tess said. “I wasn’t sure if it was serious enough to bring wine.”

“Or chocolate,” Rosie said. “I could run home for some.”

“Wine over chocolate,” Tess said. “Any day.”

“Not me,” Rosie said. “I’m a total chocoholic in a crisis.”

“Okay, we need a tie breaker,” Tess said. “Come on, Noreen, wine wins hands down, doesn’t it?”

“Tough call,” I said. “If you two hadn’t shown up, I’d probably be dipping chocolate
in
my wine right about now.”

I stood up. “Thanks,” I said again.

Tess opened my front door. A flash of white cut in front of me and made a beeline for my kitchen. Three smaller blurs of brown were right behind it.

I screamed. “Are those chickens?”

“Rod Stewart!” Rosie yelled. “Sorry,” she said to me in a quieter voice. “Do you have a box of cereal handy?”

I pointed to my kitchen. My hand was trembling, I noticed, and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

Rosie came out of my kitchen, shaking the box of Special K I’d left on my counter. The creatures followed her like the Pied Piper across my living room and out the front door. “I’ll just run them home,” she yelled. “I’ll be back in a second.”

Tess was checking out my living room. “Great window treatments,” she said.

“Were those chickens?” I asked again.

“Yup,” Tess said. “The brown ones were hens, but I think Rod Stewart’s probably a rooster.”

“Why is he called Rod Stewart?”

Tess shrugged. “You think he looks more like Barry Manilow?”

I followed Tess out to my backyard. A ladder I’d never seen before was tilted up against the back of my house. Maybe it was all that sleeping, or maybe it was the chickens, but I was feeling a little bit like Alice after she’d fallen through the rabbit hole. Not that I would have recognized a rabbit hole if I fell through it.

“We’re going to go with a retractable,” Tess was saying. “That way you can get it out of the way fast if you have to. We’ve got sixty feet of clothesline to work with, so I think we’ll put the mounting bracket right outside your kitchen window, and the hook on that tree over
there. The line will run north to south, which will give your clothes maximum sunlight, so it’s the perfect setup. Electric dryers account for ten percent of home energy use. It’s crazy. That
is
your kitchen window, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.”

“A deal for me,” Tess said. “It only cost nineteen ninety-five, plus tax.”

“Don’t forget labor,” I said.

“Speaking of which,” Tess said. She adjusted the angle of the ladder. “Hold this for me, okay? Unless you want to go up.”

“No thanks,” I said.

I was so focused on holding the ladder tight I didn’t see Rosie come back with the wheelbarrow. Behind me, a shovel hit the ground with a thud.

I jumped.

“Whoa,” Tess said. “I’d like to live through this clothesline installation.”

Rosie put her hands next to mine on the ladder to help me hold it steady. We tilted our heads up to watch Tess juggle a screwdriver, some screws, and a mounting bracket above us.

“Sorry about that,” Rosie said. “I don’t think they liked their manure leaving the yard without them. But now that they know where you keep your cereal, just be careful when you leave your door open. You know, when you’re bringing in groceries, that sort of thing.”

“Are you serious?”

Rosie shrugged. “They’ll do anything for breakfast cereal. If it happens again, just shake a box, and they’ll follow you anywhere.”

Like I didn’t have enough to worry about without adding fear of chicken invasions to the list. Maybe I’d just put my house on the market.

“Do they have a brand preference?” It seemed like something I should know.

“Well, Rod’s not too fussy, but the hens prefer Kashi Good Friends, though they just did a number on your Special K, so maybe it’s a new favorite. By the way, the hens kind of stick together, so we call them the Supremes.”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” I said. “They’re so cute.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I thought I’d try it on for size.

“Sometimes they’re cute,” Rosie said. “As long as nobody messes with them. They had a bad rooster before Rod, and they ganged up on him and killed him.”

“What did he do?” I whispered. I was back in my house-on-the-market zone again.

Rosie shifted her hands on the ladder. “Besides fertilizing the eggs, a rooster’s job is to scout for danger, to keep the hens safe from predators, even to lay his own life on the line to protect them if he has to. The last rooster just didn’t really give a shit about them. And hens don’t take disloyalty lightly.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s so impressive.”

“Yeah,” Rosie said. “You can learn a lot from chickens.”

Tess started making her way down the ladder, pulling a lengthening white cord with her.

“Okay,” she said. “Now we just attach a screw hook to the tree, loop this doohickey at the end of the clothesline over the hook, and you’ll be officially breaking the law. If you need to get it down in a hurry, just unhook it from the tree, and it will retract automatically. You’ll have to reach out from your kitchen window to feed the line down to someone on the ground, or borrow my ladder, to set it up again, but there’s really no way around that.”

As soon as the clothesline was attached to the tree, we carried the ladder back to Tess’s house and moved on to the garden.

Rosie pushed my box of Special K out of the way and picked up a shovel. “So,” she said. “I’m envisioning an informal lavender patch. I brought starter plants in three varieties—Grosso, Hidcote, and
Munstead—to give you a good mix of color, form, and height. You can add to it once we see which kinds do best in your yard, and also which ones you like the most. Sound okay to you?”

“Sure, whatever you think,” I said.

Tess picked up a shovel, so I did, too. We started turning over the soil in an area in front of some bushes that Rosie said would give the plants winter protection from the wind as well as good southern exposure. I’d never once thought of my house in terms of direction, and suddenly I had both a clothesline and a garden facing south.

Rosie stopped digging and leaned on her shovel. “The trick to taking care of lavender is not to overlove it.”

“The trick to taking care of anything is not to overlove it,” Tess said.

I had a sudden urge to write that down.

“So true,” Rosie said. “Anyway, lavender doesn’t like a rich soil, so we’re going to go really easy on the chicken manure. Drainage is key, which means we’ll build up the bed and add sand, plus throw in some time-released lime to make the soil more alkaline.”

“How do you know so much?” I asked.

“How do you know so much about shoes?” Rosie asked.

I dug my shovel in, and it barely made a dent in the packed soil. “Occupational hazard, I guess.”

Rosie jumped on her shovel with both feet. “Well, mine is more an accident of birth. You grow up on a lavender farm, you learn more than you ever want to.”

“Wait,” Tess said. “I don’t get it. I thought you were the new owner.”

“I am. Well, I guess I’m the new old owner. My mother died, my father couldn’t keep up with things, so I was the dutiful daughter who stepped up. And dragged my family kicking and screaming with me.”

I wondered what I would have done if my mother had wanted me to move in after my father died. I wondered what it meant that she hadn’t.

Rosie stopped shoveling long enough to push some red curls out of her face. “It’s the last place I would have pictured myself at this point in my life, but what could I do?”

Tess and I nodded sympathetically.

“My husband is a contractor, and I do his landscape design, plus my own jobs, and the kids didn’t have to switch schools, so it was all doable, but…”

“But that doesn’t make it easy,” Tess said.

Rosie dug the shovel in again. “My parents were inseparable, and even when my mother started slipping into dementia, it was all about lavender for her. She stopped cleaning the house, and one day when my husband and I brought the kids to visit, we found she’d painted everything purple so the dirt wouldn’t show. The walls and the refrigerator, inside and out. Even the toilet seat. The paint wasn’t quite dry on that, and we all had purple rings around our butts for the next two weeks.”

“Oh, your poor father,” Tess said. “How’s he doing now?”

The garden was taking on a nice shape, kind of like a paisley at the edge of my yard. Tess started pulling clumps of grass and weeds out and shaking the dirt off them.

“He’s doing okay,” Rosie said. “We moved him downstairs to the family room and put in a bathroom just for him. We had a family party to celebrate, and he spent the whole time giving bathroom tours.”

“Well, that’s good,” Tess said.

Rosie nodded. “It’s tough though. We had to think ahead. So we had them put a grab bar next to the toilet. We told him it’s a towel rack, so he wouldn’t get upset. They put in a thirty-six-inch doorway, big enough for a wheelchair, and he said,
What in tarnation is
that barn door for?
So my husband said it was because they were out of small doors.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

Rosie leaned on the handle of her shovel again. “We put in a double shower, too. We told him it’s in case he has company.” She smiled. “I think he liked that one.”

After Tess and Rosie left, for the first time in a long time, I picked up the phone and called my mother, instead of waiting for her to call me on Sunday.

ROSIE AND TESS WERE STANDING IN MY DRIVEWAY WHEN I
pushed my front door open.

“Wait,” I said. I unlocked my car with a click and grabbed the shoes I’d exchanged for Rosie, plus the two purple pedometers. I’d completely forgotten about them yesterday.

“Genius,” Tess said. “Pedometers are all a little bit different, so this way we’ll be on the same page with our mileage. Let me run back to my house and grab my reading glasses so I can set it. Unless one of you still has decent eyes?”

Rosie and I shook our heads. The thing I minded the most about getting older was that I no longer had twenty-twenty vision. It had hit me like a ton of bricks one night right after I turned forty. I was sitting in a restaurant with a date, and suddenly I couldn’t quite read the menu.
What’s good?
I remembered asking the waiter.

Rosie was holding her pedometer in one hand, stretching her arm as far away from her as it would go and squinting.

“Do you want me to go inside and grab some reading glasses for you?” I asked.

“No, I think I’ve got it,” she said. She pushed a button and hooked the pedometer onto the waistband of her shorts. “I’ll just do the step mode for now and figure out the mile mode later.” She sat down on
my driveway and began taking off her old sneakers. “Boyohboy, could I use some new sneakers.”

I opened the shoe box, handed one sneaker to Rosie, and started lacing up the other one for her.

“Great, they’re just like yours and Tess’s,” Rosie said. “We’ll look like triplets. Oh, this feels amazing.”

“State-of-the-art technology scientifically activates your posture,” I said. “Excellent flexibility plus a good measure of stability makes for a stellar heel-to-toe transition. Double-patented gel pad in heel, as well as a triple-patented air-cushioned arch support.”

“Wow,” Rosie said.

“The Walk On By,” I finished, “the shoe every woman needs to walk herself away from the things that are holding her back and toward the next exciting phase of her life.”

I took a bow and handed Rosie the shoe I’d finished lacing.

“Thanks. I know it’s spin, but I still like it. Did you make it up yourself?”

“Some of it, I think,” I said. “It’s hard to even remember anymore.”

Tess’s screen door slammed. We heard it click as she opened it again. “Well, try getting home at a decent hour and you’d be awake by now!” she yelled. She slammed the door again and jogged over to us.

“Your husband?” Rosie asked.

“Funny,” Tess said. “Okay, where the hell did I put my glasses?”

I pointed. They were hooked on the front of her T-shirt.

“Thanks,” she said. She tucked the rolled-up chart she was carrying under her arm and put on a pair of black reading glasses edged in pink. “Ohmigod, I just remembered,” she said. “At the last primary, my husband and I both forgot our reading glasses when we went in to vote. I kept thinking we could be voting for anybody.”

There was a beat of silence, and then Rosie said, “How can they
clone sheep and not have an operation to do away with reading glasses?”

I breathed a little sigh of relief. For a minute there, I’d thought we were going to talk politics. There’s nothing worse than thinking you have so much in common with someone, and suddenly she opens her mouth and you find out she’s on the board of directors of a religious cult, or still smokes cigarettes, or vomits after every meal. I didn’t care what Tess and Rosie believed in, politically, spiritually, or nutritionally. I wanted to like them. I wanted to walk.

“There’s some new kind of lens implant,” Tess said. “But I’m going to wait till they work out the kinks first.” She unrolled the chart. “Okay, this is one of the mileage maps we use at school. Continental United States, with a decent map scale. There are also a couple of Web sites we can use to track mileage online, but I think we should hang this up somewhere for visual impact—and motivation.”

I pointed to my garage. “Plenty of room,” I said. “I only have one car, so we can take over half of it and make it Command Central. Or we can use a room in the house if you’d rather.”

“No, the garage is perfect.” Tess looked up. Her glasses made her look like some kind of tropical bird. “Okay, let’s synchronize our pedometers, set the ground rules, and start today.”

A thought came over me with such force that I was surprised my head didn’t light up like a bulb. “Oh, oh,” I said. “I think I’ve got the perfect idea to get our mileage up where we need it to be so we can go someplace good.”

“Great,” Tess said. “But come on, I’d kind of like to walk today.”

“Here, give me that,” I said. I took the map and tucked it inside my garage door.

Tess held up her pedometer. “Ready,” she said. “One, two, three, and push.” We all pushed the reset buttons on our purple pedometers at the exact same instant.

I waited till we were out on Wildwater Way before I sprang it on
them. “Okay,” I said. “Get this. We’re allowed to use our frequent flier miles.”

“What do you mean?” Rosie asked.

“What I mean,” I said, “is that we can add our frequent flier miles to the miles we actually walk to bring up the total miles we can travel.”

Rosie and Tess stopped walking. “That’s brilliant,” Tess said. “Absolutely brilliant. I’ve racked up tons of frequent flier miles with my airline credit card. It’s such a pain in the neck to use them, I never get around to it.”

“I have a bunch stockpiled, too,” Rosie said. “We can go anywhere we want to go.”

I hadn’t felt this good in ages. I turned right at the corner and started race-walking ahead of them.

“Hurry up,” I said. “The sky’s the limit.”

I WAS LATE
getting to the Fresh Horizons South small-group meeting. After we’d finished walking, I’d jumped in the shower, put on a nice pair of jeans and a crisp white blouse, and spent some time doing my hair and makeup before I lost those skills, too. I wanted to look more casual than I had at the last meeting, but I also wanted to look good in case one of the more-shabby-than-chic guys started to grow on me. You never know.

I couldn’t resist hanging up my wet towels on my new clothesline before I left. Later, I’d wash a load of laundry, maybe the first one I’d looked forward to in my entire life. Tess had been kind enough to throw in a little basket of wooden clothespins that hooked right over the line.

After clothesline duty, I headed over to check on my lavender patch. I ran back into the house and grabbed a coffee cup and used
the outdoor spigot to fill it with water. I gave the plants, each neatly labeled by Rosie with a little metal sign that poked into the ground, just a touch of water down by their roots. I made sure I didn’t get water on their foliage, because Rosie said it might cause mold.

Her further instructions had been to keep them damp for the first few days while they adjusted to their new home, but after that, to let them dry out completely between waterings. They liked lots of sunshine but didn’t need much in terms of food or water. It sounded like a great way to live.

So far my favorite lavender was Grosso. When I stroked its foliage to release its fragrance the way Rosie had shown me, it didn’t have quite the sweet smell of the shorter, feistier Munstead. Grosso’s scent was stronger, with almost a hint of camphor. I liked its long, brave, pointy stems and the way the whole plant stretched gracefully and unapologetically, not afraid to take its full space in the world.

I parked my car in front of the former elementary school and half-ran, half-skipped down the hallway between the rows of kiddie-size lockers. Since we’d decided all our extra pedometer mileage would count, too, maybe I’d stay after the meeting and do some laps around the school. It was incredible how just having a reason to put one foot in front of the other had lifted my mood. I could almost imagine that someday I’d have a full life again.

“Time management is one of the first things to slide,” Brock, the cute little career coach, was saying as I tiptoed into the room.

“Case in point,” one of the guys said. Everybody looked up at me, and he patted the chair next to him.

“Wardrobe’s next to go,” another guy said. Unless all his T-shirts were gray and had holes in the armpits, he was wearing the same one as last time. “One week you’re in a suit, and the next thing you know…” He looked me up and down, then shook his head.

It felt amazingly like being in high school. The cute, or at least
the scruffily cute, guys were finally talking to me, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I grabbed an empty chair at one end of the semicircle and sat down.

I must have been really late, since Brock had the video camera set up already. I tried to take up as little space as possible on my chair, so he wouldn’t call on me.

He looked right at me. “We’ll start with you.”

“But…,” I said.

“Come on, what’s your story, morning glory?” one of the guys said.

Brock gave his hands a little clap. “That’s it. Exactly. Tell us your story, Gloria.”

The class started to snicker. It was kind of hard to know where to go from there. Should I start by giving my real name, and if so, should I go for Nora, or just resign myself to Noreen? Or maybe we only had to start with an introduction the first time we embarrassed ourselves in front of the camera.

“Come on, we don’t have all day here,” a woman with blond hair and graying roots a mile long said. “Oh wait, we do.”

Everybody cracked up. I waited, hoping they’d forget about me and go on to someone else.

“Laugh if you will,” Brock said. “But your ability to tell the world who you are is the first step to figuring out what you want your life to be.”

He pushed a button on the video camera. He lifted one hand over his head and brought it down like the clapper on a movie set. “Go,” he said.

“Me?” I said.

“Good try,” one of the guys said.

I looked at the camera and tried to smile. “Okay, I’m Noreen Kelly, but I think I’d like to be Nora. I have absolutely no idea who I am since I stopped working, or how I got to be my age knowing as
little about the world outside the office as I do, but I’d really like to think there’s still hope for me.”

“Cut,” Brock said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Did I do it wrong?”

Brock was too busy attaching the camera to a monitor with a cord to answer.

“If you’re going to play that or anything, would it be okay if I left the room?” I asked.

Brock pushed a button on the monitor, and suddenly there I was, looking like a Looney Tunes character who wanted to run but couldn’t, since her knees had turned to jelly and she’d just found out her feet were nailed to the floor. For a long moment nothing happened, then one side of my mouth turned up in a sickly smile.

“Oh, God,” I said. I buried my face in my hands and peeked out between my fingers.

On the screen, I started flapping my hands around like an idiot and talking really fast. I seemed to be saying something about
havingabsolutelynoideawhoIam
.

It was so bad, nobody even made a crack. We all just sat there in silence while Brock disconnected the cable from the camera.

“So,” Brock said. “Tell us what you’re thinking.”

I scrunched my eyes closed. “Who the hell was that?”

“Exactly,” Brock said. “So think about it for next time and we’ll try again. In the meantime, if you don’t have a video camera at home, you might try putting your one-page story in writing. A first step on the way to creating a life script, if you will.”

I faded in and out while the rest of the class took their turns, but I saw enough to know I was definitely the worst.

As soon as the session was over, I made a beeline for the door.

“Yo, Gloria,” a male voice said behind me.

I kept walking.

An arm came around my shoulder, and I tried to shrug it off. It stuck, so I stopped walking and ducked out from under it.

“Hey, nice move,” another male voice said. “Maybe you should consider a career in the martial arts.”

There was an unemployed guy in front of me and an unemployed guy behind me, so I wasn’t quite sure which way to turn. I decided to hold my ground. I crossed my arms over my chest and just stood there.

The woman with the messy hair I’d sat next to last time walked up beside me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “what they’re lacking in maturity they make up for in age.”

“Okay, truce, Janie,” one of the guys said. He turned to me. He had dark hair and stubble and deep-set dark eyes, and up close he smelled really good. “She’s just upset because she wanted to go out with me, and I said I didn’t want a casual fling—I was saving myself for someone special. By the way, my name is Mark.”

“Ignore him,” the other guy said. He held out his hand. He had cat green eyes and lighter hair and stubble, and he smelled pretty damn good, too. “I don’t think we’ve officially met. My name is Rick.”

“But he’s thinking about changing it to Dick,” the other guy said.

I let go and started walking away again. Fast.

Janie caught up to me first. She matched her stride to mine. “Don’t let them get to you,” she said. “Call yourself whatever you want. It’s actually a great time to make a name change.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Hey, where are you going?” one of the guys yelled behind us. “We need two more players for a Wii doubles tennis match. We played singles last week and it was way too strenuous.”

Janie and I walked out to the parking lot together, completely ignoring the scruffy guys.

WHEN I PULLED
into my driveway, Tess’s daughter was sitting cross-legged at the edge of her lawn. I stopped my car down by the road and got out.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Noreen. I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

“Hannah,” she said. Even sullen, she was pretty. She had blond hair and pale blue eyes, plus that long-limbed, effortless teenage beauty you only appreciate decades later when you look back at it in old photos.

“Aren’t you getting eaten alive out here? I mean, do you want to come in or something?”

“Can’t. I’m not allowed to leave the property.”

I sat down next to her and crossed my legs, too. “How come?”