Texas Sunrise

by Fern Michaels

  Now what was she supposed to do? What did she normally do after dinner? Walk on the beach with Rand, hold hands, make love in the sand, play Scrabble, watch television, read. All of the above.

  Maggie turned and yanked at the kitchen drawer. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, ripping at it. She looked around for the MAGGIE cup, but the water in the sink was too hot for her hands. She opened the cabinet door for a clean cup and saw the RAND cup, the mate to hers. Her eyes burning fiercely, she reached for it, hefted it in her hand, then threw it across the kitchen. The shattering sound was deafening. She ran from the kitchen, through the lanai and down to the beach.

  You aren’t perfect, Maggie. Admit that just maybe you’re wrong. Look it square in the face and admit the possibility. “I saw the guilt in his face,” she said aloud, “heard the lie in his voice. I’m not wrong.” What if you are? What if, what if?

  Maggie stomped her way down the beach fighting the tears burning her eyes. “I know! I know!” she shouted, to be heard over the lapping waves.

  She walked for a long time, stumbling and righting herself in the wet sand. When she was exhausted, she turned to see how far she’d come. At least two miles, she estimated. She could barely see the lanterns strung on the lanai.

  She ran back, tripping and falling, stumbling and cursing, until she reached the lanai, where she collapsed, her breathing ragged and uneven. “I know I wasn’t wrong. I know it!” she cried brokenly. “Oh, God, I need you, Mam.”

  The moment her breathing was back to normal, she reached for the portable phone with shaking hands. She was stunned at how normal her voice sounded when Thad’s voice came over the wire. She almost hung up when she realized it was the middle of the night in Vermont. She apologized. “I’m sorry, Thad, I forgot the time difference. I don’t suppose Mam is awake.”

  “No, Maggie, she’s sleeping. I’ll tell her you called when she wakes in the morning. Are you all right?” The question sounded to Maggie as though he didn’t care if she was or not. It was something to say, something polite. Thad was always polite.

  “Fine. Look, don’t even tell her I called. I know she doesn’t want to be bothered . . . right now. Take care of her, Thad,” Maggie whispered.

  “I will, Maggie. Stay well.”

  Maggie’s next call was to her daughter, Sawyer. Adam, his voice groggy answered the phone. “Maggie, is anything wrong?”

  “No. I just wanted to talk to Sawyer. I know it’s late.”

  “She’s dead to the world. The twins have chicken pox, and we haven’t had any sleep for three days. Can she call you first thing in the morning?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll call later in the week. Make an oatmeal paste for the girls. It will stop the itching. Good night, Adam.”

  Susan. Maggie punched out a new set of numbers. She let the phone in the Coleman condo ring eighteen times before she hung up. Where was she? At Cary’s? At Sunbridge? She tried Cary’s apartment and wasn’t surprised when there was no response. Susan once admitted that she never answered the phone after eleven o’clock at night, fearing a disaster of some kind. She had said she could only handle disastrous news in broad daylight. It was all a crock, Maggie thought. Susan couldn’t handle anything. It was a wonder she could brush her teeth on her own.

  Ivy. Ivy would understand what she was going through. She dialed Sunbridge’s private, unlisted number, which only the family knew. She listened to Ivy’s message: “Riley and I have gone to Florida for my mother’s birthday. We’ll be back home on Tuesday. For any of you who are interested, Moss now has his second tooth.”

  Maggie lit a cigarette from the stub of the old one. She counted the filters in the ashtray. Six. She snorted in disgust. Did she dare call Cole? He would be at the office now. She closed her eyes, trying to visualize his office number. The moment it came to her, she called. His secretary said that Cole had gone to Kyoto and wouldn’t be back in the office until tomorrow.

  How unavailable her family was. Each of them had someone running interference for them. As her mother had always been there for her, Maggie had made a point of always being available to the family, no matter what was going on in her personal life. Always. Now who was there for her? Maggie buried her face in her hands. Everyone had someone.

  Because she didn’t know what else to do, she entered the house, snapping on lights as she went along. She walked into the empty bedroom to where the phone and answering machine rested on the floor in the middle of a nest of tangled wires. She dropped to her knees and pressed the message button, then rocked back on her heels as she listened to the calls for Rand from the refinery. Those had been made before . . . before anyone outside the family knew . . . One call from Sawyer, one from Ivy telling her about the trip to Florida. There were no calls from Susan or her mother, but there were six, one after the other, from Valentine Mitchell, and one from Cary, who wanted information, if she had it, on the refinery. The last call was from Cole, saying baby Billie was now a pound heavier.

  Maggie rewound the tape. They had stayed in touch after all. But she didn’t feel any better.

  On her way back to the lanai, she passed the foyer, where mail was stacked neatly. Most of it, she knew, would be for Rand, probably refinery business, household bills, charge accounts, insurance bills, tons of magazines, and sale flyers. Nothing really personal or directed to her. Someday she’d look at it.

  Someday.

  Back on the lanai, Maggie toyed with the idea of calling Valentine Mitchell and waking her from a sound sleep.

  She was wired now, there was no doubt about it. Wired and angry. That was good, the anger part, she thought. “Up till now I’ve been in a stupor,” she muttered.

  Should I call Valentine Mitchell or shouldn’t I? To what end? she asked herself. Call her, ask her again, beg her to tell you the truth. “No!” The word exploded from Maggie’s mouth.

  Maggie got up and paced. Should she make coffee? Should she light another cigarette? Already her mouth tasted like a pair of old sneakers. Should she brush her teeth? She moaned. God, she couldn’t even make a simple decision.

  She had to do something physical. Work of some kind. She slid her feet into a pair of zoris and marched around to the garage at the side of the house. The sensor lights came on as soon as she stepped on the walkway, bathing her in six hundred watts of light. She opened the door and put on the inside light. Like all garages, this one was a mess, so messy that she couldn’t park a car inside. She looked around. Which one of us was the messy one? she wondered. She remembered her intention to walk on the treadmill. It was in here somewhere, along with a stationary bicycle and a stair machine. Rand said they needed the machines, along with his Nautilus equipment. To her knowledge, he’d never used any of them. Swimming had been their major exercise, that and walking miles up and down the beach.

  Maggie worked through the night, clearing away a section of the oversize garage she planned to use as a work space. Once the canvas beach chairs, picnic coolers, bags, boxes of shells, and junk they’d collected over the years was stored on the far side of the room, she realized she might not have to buy folding tables at all. The workbench, once it was scrubbed, would serve nicely as a work surface. The shelves above it, which now held jars and cans of rusty screws, nails, nuts, and bolts, would be perfect for her jars of paint. If she left the garage door open, cleaned the windows, and painted the concrete floor white, she’d have more than enough light to work by. She could bang nails into the walls to hang up her sketches, and stretch a line to hang the wet, painted fabrics that would later be dyed. Who needed five thousand bucks a month overhead? Clients wouldn’t be coming here. She’d go to them, the way her mother had.

  She did need more paints, though. She ran back to the lanai for her mother’s case. Inside was a catalog from which Billie ordered paints. Federal Express could have them to her in twenty-four hours. The swatches too. She looked around to see if there was a phone in the garage. She found the jack but no phone. A simple matter to rectify. A bu
siness phone she would answer, the house phone—no.

  It was almost full light when Maggie set the scrub bucket on the driveway. Her half of the garage literally sparkled. Not only had she scrubbed the workbench, she’d painted it too, along with the shelves. She’d wet-vacuumed the garage floor and slapped a thick coat of paint on it. By evening it would be dry.

  “You do good work, Maggie Coleman,” she muttered.

  By eight o’clock she’d showered, washed her hair, braided it, and donned a pair of clean chinos and a polo shirt. She washed the dishes, made coffee and breakfast, washed dishes again, smoked four cigarettes, and was ready for her trip to the Ala Moana shopping center.

  Before she left the house, she wrote a note to Addie and left her check on the kitchen table. She blew her horn when she passed Addie in her open Jeep on Kam Highway.

  She’d never come to the center this early in the morning. Usually, she had to fight for a parking space. This morning she sailed into one with no cars on either side of her.

  Maggie used up an hour buying the first two bedroom sets she set her eyes on. Both were white bamboo, the headboards intricately carved. From there she meandered down the outdoor concourse to a linen shop where she ordered sheets and new towels, telling the clerk she’d pick them up at the delivery door later. At a stationery store, she stopped long enough to fill a shopping bag full of pencils, pens, markers, notepads, colored chalks, and construction paper. She was about to pay for her purchases when she saw a decorator phone with numbers so huge, she blinked. “I’ll take that too,” she said.

  Her next stop was a coffee shop, where she ordered a mahi-mahi sandwich, a glass of root beer, and a slice of coconut custard pie. She then walked over to Liberty House, where she bought herself a bottle of Ysatis perfume and talcum powder. From there she went to Liz Claiborne and bought one of everything in the designer’s spring collection. She asked to have it sent to Sawyer.

  Out on the concourse again, she stopped at a phone center and made arrangements for the telephone company to install a new number for her in the garage the following day. From there she retrieved her car, picked up her linens, and drove to the market, where she bought everything in sight, completely loading down the trunk of the car.

  She was back home at three o‘clock. The kitchen smelled wonderful. She was sniffing in appreciation when the phone rang. She stared at it and muttered, “Where were you when I needed you?” She sniffed again when she opened the oven to reveal a plump oven roaster that would provide many lunches, decorated with baby carrots and small red-skinned potatoes. A salad waiting for dressing was covered with Saran Wrap in the refrigerator. The note on the table from Addie said the chicken would be done at five o’clock. The P.S. said all the office boxes were stored in the attic over the garage.

  Maggie stocked her cupboard shelves and refrigerator before she carried the shopping bags with the sheets and towels into the empty bedroom.

  In the bathroom off the kitchen, she stripped down and donned a tangerine one-piece bathing suit. She carried the shopping bag with her supplies out to the garage. The floor was dry, but she didn’t walk on it. Back on the lanai, she opened the catalog to the pages she wanted, dialed the eight hundred number and placed her order. She was promised delivery by ten o’clock the following morning.

  She walked the same distance she’d walked the night before, swam for an hour, and returned to the house at exactly five o’clock. She turned off the oven before she curled up on the lounge chair on the lanai. She slept until midnight, when she got up, ate, did the dishes, and slept again until morning.

  Her life, Maggie told herself, was under control. For now.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Maggie stirred, then stretched, flexing her legs beneath the new blue-and-white-striped sheets. Should she go back to sleep or get up? The realization that she was now a working woman with a real job made her swing her legs over the side of the bed.

  Her morning ritual was different these days. She took a five-minute shower instead of one that lasted until the hot water heater ran cold, tied a rubber band around a ponytail instead of wrestling with a braid, and dressed in shorts and T-shirt instead of donning a bathing suit.

  Bedmaking, at best, took a minute, unless her pillow was wet, which it usually was from crying in her sleep. In that case, she stripped the pillowcase and put on a new one. Today it was wet. After she had stuffed the pillowcase in the wicker hamper in the bathroom, her watch told her she’d used up eight and one half minutes.

  Time for breakfast. Three cups of coffee, a corn muffin with mango jelly, and a glass of orange juice. Two superduper vitamins for women who were fifty or over were next to her orange juice. She swallowed them knowing they made her ravenously hungry during the day. In the last five weeks, since the day she’d cleaned and painted the garage floor, she’d put on seven of the ten pounds she’d lost.

  She wasn’t swimming as much, and most of ner tan was gone. In the scheme of things, she didn’t think it mattered. The only thing that made sense to her was her daily schedule. She went around to the garage and sat down to work from seven o’clock to twelve, then ate a huge lunch, and returned to work until three, when she took a break and a fifteen-minute swim. Refreshed, she worked until six, ate a dinner that Addie had prepared in advance, and was back at her workbench by seven-fifteen. With a new Mr. Coffee machine and the MAGGIE cup at her elbow, she worked until she felt her eyes cross with weariness. A mile walk on the beach with an apple in one hand and a banana in the other, followed by a quick shower, allowed her to sleep soundly, if not dreamlessly.

  Maggie looked around the garage. It had become a nest. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. It seemed as if an artist had gone berserk. Colored swatches, sheets of plain white paper with colored streaks and splashes, were clipped with colorful clothespins to a length of dental floss tied to nails on the wall. There were more swatches, more sheets of paper, on a pegboard that was at eye level with her workbench. The workbench she’d painted white was now a rainbow of color, spills, streaks, and dots of mind-boggling hues.

  Maggie felt anxious, nervous, when she took her place at the table. Today was a test of sorts. The Baby Ben clock she wound each morning stared at her. Next to the clock was an Amalfi shoe box with three jars of paint, a sheaf of fabric, and a stack of white papers. At exactly ten o’clock she had to run to the beach and stare out across the water to try and match the colors she was working on.

  There was nothing on paper, no formulae, no idea of how, if she succeeded, she was going to present her lines to the people in Hong Kong who would eventually make up the material she needed. In her head she was calling one set of colors Pacific Jewels, the second Egyptian Lights.

  Her goal, the same as her mother’s, was to set the fashion world on fire with her 1993 line of colors. She’d talked with many of her mother’s suppliers, who promised to wait until June for it. Not the end of June, the first of June. She had less than five weeks now till the deadline.

  Today she was striving for the electric-blue of the Pacific, the color that appeared where the sky merged with the ocean, a color so vibrant, so alive, she’d so far been unable to capture it on fabric or paper. She’d captured the green of the ocean by staring out at the ocean for endless hours, waiting for that one moment when the water changed color right in front of her eyes. Nile Green was the result.

  Egyptian Lights now had two perfect colors: Nile Green and Egyptian White. Cleopatra Gold was giving her as much trouble as Pacific Blue, and she knew she was going to have to go back to Sunbridge, to the hill, to study the sun, then somehow combine that color with the hues of the sun here in Hawaii.

  Maggie squeezed her eyes shut. It wasn’t the manufacturers’ and suppliers’ timetables that were really bothering her, it was her mother’s timetable, and of course her own timetable for success. Subconsciously, she knew she was putting unbearable pressure on herself, but she was unable to ease the mounting tension that was increasing steadily each day. />
  Today was momentous in more ways than one, Maggie thought as she stared at the Baby Ben. Late this afternoon she was expecting an overnight delivery from Hong Kong of raw silk, chiffon, and pure silk swatches. And she’d promised herself to go through the three Liberty House shopping bags full of first-class mail. Time permitting, she’d also promised to call the family members and Valentine Mitchell. Half of the mail in the Liberty House bags was from Valentine. What she really wanted to do was carry the bags down to the beach and set fire to them.

  The Baby Ben ticked on, the hands moving so slowly Maggie wanted to scream. She lit a cigarette and fingered the swatch she called Firecracker Red. She wasn’t sure what she should do with it, as it didn’t fit either end of her color spectrum. Could it stand alone? She doubted it, but the color was so stunningly beautiful, she knew she had to do something with it.

  The Baby Ben continued to tick. She smoked, drank coffee, rinsed the pot with the garden hose, made more. She drank more, smoked the last cigarette in the pack, ripped open a new carton.

  Both hands on the Baby Ben settled on the ten.

  Maggie grabbed the Amalfi shoe box and sprinted down to the beach, where she settled herself with the open jars of paint. She flexed her fingers before she laid out the swatches and papers and said a silent thank you for a windless morning. Her fingers were feverishly poised over the pots of paint, her eyes glued to the marriage of sky and water taking place in front of her eyes. She worked frantically, smearing, blending, dotting, streaking the colors on both paper and material. She had only five minutes until the colors changed.

  Maggie’s breath exploded in a loud exhalation. Until this moment she hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. She blinked as a cotton-ball cloud drifted downward toward the marriage taking place. She dabbed again, smeared, blended, stroked. Blueberry. Dresden Blue. Hyacinth. Cerulean. Cornflower and, God Almighty, Pacific Blue!

  She had it! But would it look the same when it was dry? By mid-afternoon, when the swatches had dried, she’d know for certain. Wet paint and dry paint were totally different, but she knew, felt, that she’d captured a true marriage of color. When made into dye it would be perfect. The same way you knew, felt, that your husband was unfaithful? an inner voice niggled.