“Oh, it’s no trouble. I speak for everyone here when I say we are delighted to have The Blue Reynolds Show in town. Whatever I can do to make your stay more enjoyable, you just let me know. Anything. I mean it. That’s a promise.”
Blue smiled her public smile, clearly delighting the man, who beamed in return. She said, “Yes, I will, I’ll let you know.”
Outside the terminal a few minutes later, Peter stood at the curb, where a battered, empty Toyota was idling in spite of the No Parking signs. He said, “Do you think the mayor could find out where our limo might be?”
Marcy took out her phone. “I’m sure I stored the number in here … they must just be running late …”
Blue stepped away from the group and leaned against a pole to wait, letting the heat and the salt smell of the air be her real welcome. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and savored the illusion of invisibility she’d once believed in when she was small.
There’d been a lot of waiting during her childhood, mostly waiting for her mother’s return—from a date, from a new-town-scouting trip, from a dead-end job. Melody, passive and untroubled, watched a lot of TV, entertained by Mork and Mindy or Remington Steel or Moonlighting. Blue, anxious, distractible, had better luck with books.
Without the interruption of commercials or the finite images of someone else’s interpretation of a story, she could more easily fit herself into the romance or drama unfolding inside a book’s cover. She filled empty hours, when her homework was done and the paper plates from dinner were cleared from the coffee table, with stories of clever women who won over reluctant bachelors. Women who defied parents or society in order to follow their hearts—inevitably to romance, and often to fame and wealth. Or women who traveled to exotic places in astonishing jets and were greeted by mayors who were glad to do their bidding. What a glamorous life, and so far removed from reality that she never thought to jump the chasm between her vicarious thrills and the methodical plotting that living such a life would require.
No, what she’d planned for was far more predictable and achievable: when she and Melody were both out of school, she would use what she earned working for Lynn Forrester to put herself through college and become a high-school English teacher. She’d assign her students the books she was growing to love under Mr Forrester’s guidance: books about Mark Twain’s river life, Willa Cather’s prairies, and of course the battlefields and savannahs and islands that featured in Hemingway’s troubled imagination. At eighteen she hardly understood the causes of Hemingway’s torments, but she had an instinctive feel for the tragedies in his stories. What is tragedy, though, at eighteen? It’s romance, and it was romance that had been fixed in her mind that fall after she met Mitch. Romance, and a steadfast determination that, whatever she did, she would not allow her life to turn out like her mother’s.
That, at least, had gone as planned.
Mitch sat on a bar stool in his parents’ kitchen, looking at the shopping list his mother, Lynn, had just handed him.
5lb potatoes
5lb shrimp
8 lobster tails
Lemons
Romaine
Tomatoes, onion
Cornmeal
Butter (unsalted)
2 Key Lime pies—Blond Giraffe
“A person could gain ten pounds just reading this list,” he said. “There are only four of us, you know.”
His mother, who’d begun rearranging things in her overstocked freezer, leaned around the door to squint at him critically. “I think you’d better stop at two or three pounds. You’re officially over fifty now, and you know, the older you are, the stickier those pounds get.”
“Tough to stop when I’m around enablers like you,” he said. “You want me to buy two pies and also show restraint?”
“We need two,” she said, going back to her task. “While you all were in the pool, I invited the girls from next door.”
“The girls” would be the new neighbors, Kira and Lori, whom he’d met soon after arriving this morning and who had wasted no time in telling him how they’d met each other (at Fantasy Fest) and, thanks to some very savvy stock sales on Lori’s part, could now afford to call the place home. They’d also wanted to know everything about him. The things his mother hadn’t already told them, that is. Things she said she didn’t know. For example, how serious were he and his traveling companion, Brenda? She looked like such a nice woman, they said, from the glimpse they’d gotten through the flowering hedgerow. Was she really a professor of Victorian literature? “Indeed,” he’d answered. “And she just published a wonderful book on Lewis Carroll—Duke University Press, you should pick it up.” They’d looked at one another with suppressed laughter in their eyes. “No, seriously,” he’d said, “it’s really good.”
“I was wondering,” he asked his mother, “why did you tell them about Brenda?”
“Oh, you know how it goes. We hang out in the kitchen, we make a pot of tea, we chat, things come up. They were curious. We’re all curious.”
“Hmm.” In fact Mitch, too, was curious. He’d known Brenda for sixteen years, but there was no telling what would happen now that they’d gone ahead and dipped their toes into more intimate waters. Well, a little more than their toes, which was going to take some getting used to. The only reason he’d told his parents was as forewarning that Brenda, who they’d known was joining him for this visit, would now also be sharing his room.
Not once, while she was his best friend’s wife, had he coveted Craig’s nights with her. Not once had he mentally undressed her, let alone imagined more—though he had certainly noticed her curves and the appealing play of freckles on her skin, the times he’d seen her in a swimsuit. Taken more notice after he and Angie split, true. He’d noticed every attractive woman at that time, the start of a six-year stretch of single life dotted with oases of relationships with women who were more reluctant to get involved than to get busy, as the saying went. Younger women, mostly, but not all. Call him old fashioned, but he liked to truly know a woman before they took their clothes off together.
He was proud of having made only one embarrassing, clichéd midlife mistake: last year, with a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who was also his teaching assistant; an aspiring writer (they were all aspiring writers) whose quiet demeanor belied the specific and vivid tell-alls she posted on her web log, or rather blog—he was still playing catch-up on the evolving vocabulary. Her good judgment was lacking, true, but at least her writing was skillful: she’d written a post that said he was “sufficiently endowed, and capable with all the tools in his toolkit,” which, revealing as it was, was still nice to know, and he was also “tender, really; a credit to his gender.” His colleagues had enough ammunition with which to ridicule him, they didn’t need purple prose too.
Brenda had not, however, been any kind of prospect until she was suddenly widowed. Their new closeness might owe more to shared grief than shared passion … except, after last night it was clear the passion wasn’t lacking, not in the least. Was she just using him as a stand-in? Was she going to wake up tomorrow morning, or maybe Sunday, or next week, and realize he was only superficially like Craig?
Fine time to worry about that now.
He scooted his stool back and stood up. “So then,” he said, folding the list and putting it into his pants pocket, “the girls are joining us for dinner. Anyone else?”
“No—oh, except they’re bringing the baby, so you