by Tracey Drew
Don’t ask.
Seriously. Don’t.
Get the woman started on the subject of the vicar’s pet goose, and you’ll want to flush your ears out via the nearest toilet bowl.
Over the next ten minutes, others arrived in small clusters. Mostly familiar faces, but there were also a few new ones. Slowly but surely, our group was growing, and with the chill of autumn looming, I hoped we would expand even further.
Pamela Martin, who owned the boutique clothing store two doors down, arrived fashionably late. Nothing unusual there: the woman liked to make an entrance. Smelling like she’d just crawled out of a vat of expensive perfume, Pamela flicked her immaculately
styled ash-blonde hair away from her face with one bejeweled hand. Tonight’s carefully selected outfit consisted of loose linen dungarees from her store—with a price tag higher than my annual clothing budget—a striped sailor shirt, and hot-pink felt sandals.
“Mutton dressed as lamb,” Harry muttered from where he sat sandwiched between Edith and Beth, who’d snagged the remaining chair beside him.
Pamela swung around, the lines on her face, so carefully smoothed out with foundation, wrinkling again as she frowned. “Did you say something, Harry?”
My granddad didn’t miss a beat. “I said, lambswool.” He pointed to her sandals. “Are your pretty pink shoes made of lambswool?”
She glowed under his compliment. “Actually, they are. One of my ex-sisters-in-law put me onto them; I’m planning to stock them in Chic Threads.”
After performing a catwalk strut down the room so everyone could admire her shoes, Pamela took a spot at the worktable. She pulled her needles and a super-soft duck-egg-blue merino yarn from her designer tote. “Now then,” she announced as if everyone had been waiting for the group’s VIP to arrive before they began. “I must get cracking, as I simply have to finish this matinee jacket for my darling Archie’s christening.”
As if she hadn’t already gone on about her three-month-old nephew’s christening for the past couple of months. She’d roped most of us into attendance, and while I didn’t generally have a problem saying no to Pamela, she was one of Unraveled’s best customers. And since she’d agreed to sell some of the other members’ beautiful hand-crafted garments in her store…spending a Sunday morning in church didn’t seem such a big ask.
Mum waited for a lull in the conversation and clicking of needles to pounce. “Speaking of keeping flexible”—though no was, and it was classic Maggie Wakefield to randomly change the topic to suit herself—“has anyone tried Shut Up and Stretch’s new yoga class, Move It and Lose It?”
As discussions erupted around the table, Mum set down her latest project—a jersey for one of my nieces, in a bulky yarn far too thick for the pattern. Not that she’d listen to my advice—and raised her voice. “Tessa’s trying it out tomorrow morning, so she can report back to the group.”
I gawked at my mother. Was I? “I am?”
“Yes, sweetie. I’ve signed you up.” Mum wore that expression I recognized from my childhood. All I’d wanted was to be left alone to read and craft outfits for my Barbies, but instead, she’d organized whichever after-school lessons made her feel like she was enriching her oddball daughter’s life. “I paid for five sessions up front.”
Yoga? She had to be kidding. “But I—”
“No excuses.” Mum wagged her finger at me. “You need to get out more. Meet people, make some new friends.” She mouthed at me, “Male friends.”
Oh, great hairy yarn balls.
“Just be grateful she didn’t enroll you in that Yoga Au Naturel class they run in summer,” Harry said, and everyone laughed.
While I had no qualms about saying no to most people, my assertiveness collapsed like a house of cards when it came to my mother. “I’ll give it a go.” I flashed her a smile as genuine as Pamela Martin’s blonde hair. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
When I was a kid, my dad used to say, “Ask a stupid question; get a stupid answer.” Last night, I’d tempted the universe with a stupid question, and this morning, I was about to find out if my dad’s old adage was right.
For starters, how does one even dress for a yoga class when one doesn’t possess a yoga body? And when I thought ‘yoga body,’ my brain conjured up the image of a woman in sleek leggings, a cropped top—which, because the woman had not an ounce of body fat, required no means of boob support—and long blonde hair artfully bundled into a messy-but-chic topknot. I didn’t check a single box of my imagined got-it-together yoga practitioner’s look.
But knowing Mum would insist on a detailed report, I pulled up my big girl control panties and wobble-reducing Lycra leggings and left the apartment twenty minutes before the class started.
One class, I told myself as I hurried along the sidewalk toward the center of town. One class, just to get the gist of what goes on, and then I can semi-confidently bluff about my attendance at the other four.
The recently opened Shut Up and Stretch studio was located on the floor above the real estate agency where my mother worked. I climbed the stairs to find the small foyer empty and the frosted double doors to the studio closed. Apparently, yoga people weren’t early birds. Stuffing one hand into the pocket of my zippered sweatshirt, I sucked on my water bottle and tried to appear as if I was a class regular, totally at home in her environment.
Spoiler alert: I wasn’t.
From the polished hardwood floor and shelves of rolled white towels, topped with a cluster of fat candles and a squat golden Buddha, to a wall of cubbies filled with foam blocks and other equipment I couldn’t identify, this was so far from being my element that I might as well have been on Mars.
Keeping a safe distance away from the equipment—it’d be just my luck to cause an avalanche—I sidled toward a more normal-looking table with a clipboard and pen. After scribbling my details on the sign-in sheet, I perused the nearby glossy leaflets in holders. One was for Grass Roots Health, Cape Discovery’s supplier of vitamins, supplements, organic produce and groceries, and environmentally friendly household products. Another advertised natural beauty products that contained mineral-rich mud from Rotorua, New Zealand’s most active thermal area.
There were also some less-professional flyers: vegan cooking lessons, a sign-up sheet for regular field-to-table foraging walks, and information about boot-camp training sessions on the beach three mornings a week, starting at six.
Come rain or shine, WE WANT YOU! Snoozers are losers, so zero tolerance for excusers!!! it proclaimed. I assumed the additional exclamation points were to ensure you didn’t miss the importance of this statement.
I snorted.
“Something funny?”
I whirled around at the sound of a woman’s voice. Rosie Cooper’s voice, to be precise. I’d have recognized it anywhere, even in Auckland, where I’d spent much of my adult life.
But here in my old hometown, the haughty tones of my former high school nemesis took me straight back to those awkward early teenage years, when I’d been the new girl in town. Although Dad’s family had lived in the area for two generations, my parents had moved to Napier when I was two and hadn’t returned to the fold until ten years later. So by the time I started high school, the cliques were well and truly established.
And well and truly closed to the awkward girl with frizzy hair and braces, no small thanks to the popular girls’ pack leader, Rosie Stanton. As she’d been before snagging her husband and three perfect kids. Rosie was Pamela’s niece, and the apple hadn’t fallen far from that snob tree.
“Snoozers are losers,” I blurted out.
Rosie scrunched up her pixie face. “What?”
As she adjusted the rolled-up mat slung carelessly over one shoulder by a strap, I couldn’t help but check out her outfit—snug-but-not-tight-fitting T-shirt, stretch capri pants, and a thin microfleece jacket tied super-casually around her slim hips—and compare it to my own.
Ouch.
I plucked the wanderi
ng edge of my control panties from high on my butt cheek, then tightly folded my arms. “Boot camp. Snoozers are losers, so zero tolerance for excusers. That’s what’s funny.”
“Excusers? Do they think that’s a real word?” Rosie rolled her eyes so hard they nearly popped out of her skull. “The husband and wife team who run it have IQs only slightly higher than their BMIs.”
“Do you even have a filter?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“Nope. I stopped caring what people think of me years ago.” She tilted her head to one side, looking ever so much like a curious blonde bird. One that would peck out your eyes if you got too close. “You should try it sometime.”
I couldn’t think of a response that didn’t end with ‘you’ and wouldn’t cost me a generous donation to Harry’s swear jar. Something in my expression must’ve communicated my middle-finger thoughts, and she chuckled.
“You think I’m a rude cow? Wait until you meet our instructor, my butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth stepmother.” Rosie paused, her lips thinning. “My latest stepmother, any—”
The double doors flew open and out stalked a woman in her early twenties. Bar her hair color, a rich auburn that you instinctively knew was natural by her porcelain complexion, she was my imaginary yoga guru. Shimmering emerald-green leggings clung to her long, slender limbs like dragon scales, and a matching sports bra peeked out of the folds of her drapey, twisty over-top. And yes, she’d scooped up her eye-catching hair into a faux-messy topknot, complete with chopstick thrust through it.
I mean, how does that even work?
Cool, green eyes stabbed across the foyer and impaled me. “I’m Josephine, and you’re new. You must be Maggie Wakefield’s daughter.”
It wasn’t a question, and somehow, she made the statement sound like disdainful judgment.
Disdain for me? Water off a duck’s behind, baby.
But sneer at my mother?
My spine stiffened into a column of steel—probably counterproductive to the whole yoga philosophy—and I’ll admit to entertaining fantasies of snatching the chopstick from her hair and going all Egyptian mortician on her upturned nose. But since I didn’t want Detective Mana catching me with even a toe on the wrong side of the law again, I reined it in.
“That’s right,” I said.
She responded with a head-to-toe scan, from my ‘just out of bed frizz’ to my sparkly flip-flops, and twisted her cotton candy pink lips. “You look like her.”
“Thank you. What a nice thing to say.” I added a sweet but ‘go on, dis me and see what happens’ smile.
They would have crowned Josephine queen of the mean girls if we’d still been in high school. Once, she’d have intimidated the heck out of me. But having worked as a counselor, I’d developed a thick skin and strategies for dealing with their particular type of venom, and a now-adult mean girl didn’t present too much of a challenge.
Frown lines furrowed Josephine’s mannequin-smooth forehead. I could almost see the hamster wheel in her brain spin as she tried to figure out the subtext of my politeness until, with a slight shrug of her tanned shoulders, she dismissed me as too much effort. “I assume you’re aware that Move It and Lose It is an intermediate to advanced class? You have done Ashtanga yoga before?”
Ashta-what-a yoga? Um…that’d be a giant nope.
“Of course she has.” Rosie rested a companionable forearm on my shoulder. “Tess is as bendy as a pretzel, aren’t you, buddy?”
I slanted a look at my former nemesis, who was most definitely not my buddy. Rosie owned the Daily Grind, a café that unfortunately sold the most amazing array of delicious food and perfect lattes. Unfortunate, as I was trapped firmly between my sweet tooth and my desire to avoid any interaction with her. But now she stared at Josephine the way I imagined she’d stare at a cockroach who’d crawled out from under her coffee machine.
Huh. She must despise this woman if she’d sided with me.
Before I was forced to lie through my teeth about my flexibility, or lack thereof, footsteps echoed up the narrow stairway, and three more Lycra-clad women appeared. With a final cool glance in my direction, Josephine beckoned for the newcomers to enter the studio and disappeared inside with them.
“She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?” Rosie murmured. “But she’s the best yoga instructor I’ve ever met.”
“And she’s your stepmother?”
“Yep. Go figure. My dad must have had a second midlife crisis.”
You couldn’t live in a town as small as Cape Discovery and not get tangled up in the local grapevine. I’d heard that Rosie’s twice-divorced dad had remarried a younger woman—but not that she was at least a decade younger than Rosie. However, I’d paid little attention as, until six months ago, Kurt Stanton and his new wife had resided in one of his Napier residences—roughly an hour’s drive away. Following my first and unpleasant impression of the new Mrs. Stanton, a few things clicked into place.
“She’s Archie’s mother?” I whispered. “Your baby half-brother?” And Pamela’s precious nephew.
Rosie’s mouth thinned, and I could’ve sworn her eyes grew shiny. “She gave birth to Archie, yeah. But she hasn’t done much mothering as far as we can see. Poor kid.”
Then, as if realizing she’d confided too much, she shook her head and headed toward the open studio doors. “C’mon. Stick with me down the back of the room and try to copy what I do.”
Ashta-whatsit yoga? How hard could it be?
* * *
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About the Author
Tracey Drew lives Down Under with her husband—who’s given up complaining about her yarn addiction—and two madcap tabby cats called Kevin and Alfie. The feline brothers constantly battle with her while she’s trying to write her books by demanding lap-time, but they also provide constant inspiration for her fun & quirky cozy mysteries.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to beta readers: Eileen, Hazel, Judy, Julie-Ann, Kelly, Rach, Rhonda, Rose, and Susan.
