by Nancy Thayer
She was surprised the chemistry between them didn’t make the table burst into flames.
Finally Slade spoke. “Bella. Whose shop is this? Yours or your mother’s?”
Bella stood up and began clearing the table, using up her nervous energy. She put the glasses in the sink. “That’s a very good question.” Leaning against the sink, she crossed her arms over her chest, thinking aloud. “I didn’t come back here with the idea of taking over the shop. I came back to help my mother. I guess the idea of changing the shop came to me the moment I walked in after so much time away. I realized the shop is dated.”
Slade said, “You’re a schoolteacher, right?”
“I was. But when I came back to help Mom, I found myself drawn to something about this shop. Not as it is. As it could be. I’m not making much sense, am I?” She nodded to herself, coming to a conclusion. “I need to do some research. I need to run some figures, find out about sales tax, utilities, that sort of thing. I’ll talk to my parents about my grandparents’ furniture. We’ve got more of it in the house, and of course Beat’s got some in her house, and then there’s the storage unit.”
“The storage unit?” Slade shoved his chair back and stood up. “What storage unit?”
“Slade, do you suppose you could stay with Natalie overnight? While I talk to my parents? I mean, I have to be here at the shop all day, and Dad’s teaching, so I can’t talk to them until this evening. Then, tomorrow, perhaps, if things go well with my parents, I could take you to the storage unit.”
“Sorry. I’ve got something going on in Boston tonight.” He approached Bella. He stood right in front of her, tall, muscular, lean, giving off warmth. “I’ll be back soon.”
She had been worrying about talking to her parents, but those worries dissolved in the force field of Slade’s magnetism, replaced by a stunning sense of desire. What was it with this guy?
The bell on the shop’s front door tinkled.
Thank God, Bella thought. “Customer,” she croaked, her mouth suddenly dry. When she slid past Slade, her body brushed his for a moment. She shivered with a touch of desire and a stronger surge of guilt.
After work, Bella decided to visit her older sister, Beatrice, who lived in the terribly named Belchertown, not far from the Barnabys’ house on the lake. It was a rambling split-level built in the sixties, and for Beat and her husband and their three children, its best quality was its spacious backyard. They owned an acre of land surrounded by woods, most of it a smooth sweep of lawn perfect for a swing set, slide, playhouse, sandbox, water table, and all the other paraphernalia of childhood.
Bella parked her car behind her sister’s minivan, walked up the driveway, gathering up fallen towels and lunch buckets as she went. Beat’s theory of raising children was different from her parents’. Louise and Dennis had been organized and disciplined. Beat believed in allowing children to raise themselves so their natural, true personalities would have the freedom to emerge. Bella and her siblings would never have gotten away with such messiness, but Beat, in her own ambling, indolent way, managed to keep a semblance of order.
Bella opened the front door and walked in. “Hello!” she called.
“In the kitchen!” Beat called back.
It was about five-thirty. Beat’s husband, Jeremy, wasn’t home yet from his carpentry job. Her children were in the backyard—Bella could see them through the window. The two little girls were in the playhouse with their dolls, pretending to have tea. Jason was running into the woods with a stick, killing bears.
Beat hugged Bella warmly. On this summer day, she was warm—Beat didn’t believe in air-conditioning. She was the most easygoing person Bella knew. Perhaps that was because she was so completely luscious, like a Renoir, with wavy blond hair, enormous blue eyes, and a buxom figure. Beat was barefoot, which she almost always was, wearing an old, loose, and stained sky-blue sundress, and she could have posed for Botticelli just like this.
“Wine?” Beat asked.
“Something cold, please.” Bella leaned against the counter, which was covered with dirty dishes, half-wrapped foil packets, a clean diaper, a vase of dying flowers, and a pile of coins. “How are you? How are the kids?”
Beat laughed as she poured their Chardonnay. “Today Dawn has decided to be a mermaid when she grows up, Jason will be a knight, and Wendy has declared she intends to be a baby.”
Bella laughed along with her sister as they went out the kitchen door to the back patio and sank down into the lawn glider with its thick flowered pillows. Bella felt something sharp, rose to remove a small dump truck, and resumed her seat.
Beat curled up on the glider, bringing her knees sideways and sliding her feet onto the cushions. Bella noticed for the millionth time that Beat’s feet were dirty, and for the millionth time she slapped herself mentally for noticing. Beat’s house was clean enough, even if the kitchen floor was sometimes sticky, and Beat took a shower once a day, so what was Bella’s obsession about Beat’s dirty feet? It was summer!
“How’s the shop?” Beat asked.
“No one comes in there anymore,” Bella complained.
“I’m not surprised. Mom’s lost interest in it.” All at once, she raised her voice. “JASON! COME BACK! WASPS, REMEMBER?”
Bella watched the little boy race back out of the woods onto the open lawn. He began stabbing his stick into the sandbox.
“Wasps in the woods?” Bella asked.
“I don’t know, maybe. I just don’t like him going so far in I can’t see him. And he’s terrified of wasps.” Beat broke out into one of her long, low, sensual chuckles as she watched her son. “Look at the boy. Could it be more Freudian? Honestly. Stabbing a stick into a hole?” She sipped her wine and stretched luxuriously. “I could watch these little savages all day.” She chuckled again. “Actually, I do watch them all day.”
“They are adorable,” Bella agreed. And they were, a pack of blond angels flitting around the yard.
“When are you having your babies?” Beat asked. “How’s Aaron?”
“A pain in the ass,” Bella replied succinctly.
“Really?” Beat looked shocked. “I think he’s great.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Bella sighed. “But he wants to take a job in San Francisco.”
“And your problem is?” Before Bella could answer, Beat added, “Jeremy wants us to move to the Cape.”
“Move?” Bella almost fell off the glider. “Why?”
“More work for Jeremy, and he loves the ocean.”
“I hope you don’t move, Beat,” Bella said, but her sister didn’t hear, because just at that moment Jason raced up with his squirt gun, aimed at his aunt and his mother, and blasted them with water, laughing maniacally.
Bella got it in the eyes. “Ouch, Jason, don’t aim at faces!”
Beat grabbed her five-year-old son, pulled him onto her lap, and tickled him fiercely. Jason howled with laughter, kicked and thrashed, his foot connecting with Bella’s thigh. For a second time, she got off the glider. She strolled across the lawn and peeked in the window of the playhouse to chat with her nieces. They were engrossed in a complicated ritual with their dolls, so Bella went back into the house and leisurely began to clean up the kitchen. She often did this when she visited Beat, and so had her mother before she broke her leg.
It was peculiar, Bella mused as she filled the trash bag, tied it off, and inserted a new one into the plastic container beneath the sink, how different Beat was from what statistics predicted. As the oldest, Beat should be the achiever, striving, energetic, type A, leaving the nest to travel and change the world. Instead, Beat married her high school boyfriend, worked as a secretary until they could afford to buy this house, then began having children. She was perfectly content to stay home with her kids, and even planned to have more. She was still in love with her husband, too. Clothes didn’t interest her, nor jewelry, nor trips to Paris or even Boston. She could never claim to have decorated her house; it just sort of came together, fu
rniture given to them by her parents or Jeremy’s, or found at yard sales and going-out-of-business sales. The only art on the walls was photos of the children at various ages.
Beat had been a happy, successful child, a cheerleader in high school, and prom queen when Jeremy was captain of the football team and prom king. She seemed to have inherited contentment along with her beauty.
Obviously, Bella thought, Beat couldn’t comprehend Bella’s ambivalence about Aaron and San Francisco, and at the moment Bella herself wasn’t certain she could articulate exactly how she wanted to change the shop. Well, there it was: change the shop. It wasn’t her shop, it was her mother’s. But Bella was fixated on it; she couldn’t not go forward.
“Dad,” Bella said as they were finishing dinner, “could you stay a moment? I want to talk.”
Brady had already left the table, rushing outside for one last ride on his dirt bike before dark fell. It was just the three of them—Bella, her mother, her father—at the table.
“Sure,” Dennis replied. “What’s up?”
Bella took a deep breath. “We had one customer today. Actually, she didn’t want anything for a child, she wanted something for an adult.”
“She must be new to the area,” Louise said.
“There are a lot of people new to the area,” Bella pointed out mildly. “The turnover in population is always large because of the five colleges. Students, instructors …”
Dennis stretched and yawned. School was out, but he still had committee meetings. “Your point is?”
“I think we need to change the shop. Drastically. If it’s going to survive. I think it needs a makeover. I think we should sell to adults. After all, it’s adults who buy Lake Worlds and the other stuff for the children. I think we should change our inventory. Keep it unique, but upscale it.”
“Upscale it,” Louise echoed.
“I’ve looked at the books. Business has been bad—”
“It always is in the winter,” Louise reminded her. “It will pick up this summer.”
Bella shrugged. “I don’t think so. It didn’t pick up last summer.”
“What sorts of things are you thinking of carrying?” Dennis asked.
“I’m still working on that. Art, for one. We’ve got lots of talented artists in the area, starting with Natalie next door. Antiques, for another.” She paused, wanting to be sensitive to her mother. “Slade thinks we’ve got some valuable furniture.”
Louise surprised her. “All that Barnaby stuff. More than we need.” She looked over at her husband.
“If you can sell it, do it,” Dennis told his daughter.
Louise continued, “I can see where you’re coming from. I’m not opposed to your ideas. But, Bella, as I see it, the main question is: How long are you prepared to run the shop?”
What an enormous question. “To be honest, I don’t know.”
Bella’s father weighed in. “Bella. We don’t want you to feel obligated to run the Barn.”
“But what will happen to it if I don’t run it?” Bella asked.
“Louise and I have talked about this,” Dennis told her. “I think we’ll close it. Maybe put the building up for sale.”
Bella gawked. Why did she feel like her father had just run a stake through her heart? “I didn’t know you and Mom were thinking of closing Barnaby’s Barn.”
“Honey, we’ve been thinking about it for months.” Louise smiled affectionately at her husband. “We think it would be nice to have some fun. We’ve worked hard for a long time. You children have all turned out so nicely. We have a feeling that Brady’s going to want to follow in Ben’s tracks. He’s going to science camp this summer, you know.”
“The point is,” Dennis said, because he loved summing things up and making everything perfectly clear, “don’t give the shop a second thought, Bella.”
Louise nodded, agreeing. “Of course, if you want to change the Barn, go for it. Although if you’re going to move somewhere with Aaron, it seems like a waste of time, doing anything to the shop. Sweetheart, why are you looking so worried? Dad and I are telling you that you’re free.”
Bella frowned, struggling to marshal her thoughts. “I don’t want to be free, Mom. I can’t articulate it well, but I love the shop. At least my idea of how that shop could be.” Reaching into her book-bag, she brought out a notebook. “I’ve been running some numbers. You guys own the barn, so you don’t have to pay a monthly mortgage. If you let me run the shop for a few months without paying rent, I think I could make the utility bills, pop for some ads, plus squeeze out a few pennies for myself as a salary. I have enough in savings to pay for paint. I’d like to spruce the place up, and—”
“Bella.” Leaning forward, Louise put her hand on her daughter’s. “Honey, what about Aaron?”
An odd cramp squeezed Bella’s heart. “He’s in San Francisco now, for the interview. But that doesn’t mean he’ll get the job. It doesn’t mean he’ll take the job. I don’t want to put my life on hold.”
“Just for the summer,” her father suggested, “couldn’t you simply enjoy the lake?”
Bella shook her head. “I really want to try to realize my idea of a shop. This seems like the perfect opportunity for me. Come on, a rent-free building near a large, cultured community? Where would I ever find that? I know I don’t have a complete business plan yet. But it excites me. It seems important to me.”
“I know exactly how that feels,” Louise said. “You’re right. This is the time and the place. Go for it!”
7
After much research, Morgan chose Judy’s Gym for Women. Morgan liked the idea of exercising in a male-free area; plus, Judy’s had an excellent children’s room with lots of toys and several certified child caregivers. The showers were sparkling clean, the locker room also, the equipment new and first-class, the towels thick and sweet-smelling. It was a forty-five-minute drive from Morgan’s house, which was a drawback, but it was by far the most expensive gym in the area, which earned Josh’s seal of approval.
She worried a bit when she took Petey into the child-care room, but one look at a pedal tractor just his size and her son waddled away from her without looking back. A few other toddlers were playing there, too, and the attendant was a cozy older woman on her knees with building blocks. She waved at Morgan and mouthed, “He’ll be fine.”
She went down the corridor and into the workout area. Morgan had an athletic body, trim and muscular, and she’d usually gone to a gym, especially in the winter. She preferred the weights, the bikes, the treadmill. Lifting Petey or pushing him in his stroller had kept her in pretty good shape, but Elise, her personal trainer, immediately spotted all sorts of problem areas, especially around Morgan’s abdomen, where pregnancy had loosened the pelvic and abdominal muscles. Also, her blood pressure was on the high side—and it never had been before. Elise scheduled Morgan for thirty minutes a day on the treadmill, and in addition a series of exercises to tighten her torso.
Morgan climbed on the treadmill, plugged the iPod buds in her ears, and kept the volume on Coldplay low. She needed this free time, this quiet, to think.
About her marriage. About Josh.
It would have been so helpful if Natalie or Bella were married! Morgan knew marriages went through phases. She knew that people changed. She knew that she and Josh were still in the new-house-new-job level of stress. Still.
A kind of space had opened up between them. It was as if they couldn’t reach around it to touch or even see each other clearly. Her sweet, darling Josh had become Armani Man, slickly dressed and always in a hurry. When he wasn’t rushing off to work, when he was actually at home, he was down in his study on his computer. Last Friday morning in a fit of pique, Morgan had stormed into his study and sat down at his desk. She’d opened his email and his files to see what the hell he was always doing, and to her relief, it was work, all work.
Except for one file that wouldn’t open without a password.
What?
Why would
Josh have a protected file? She had her own laptop; she never used his, and no one else ever came near his study. She knew Bio-Green was working on some potentially profitable innovations, but that was done, had to be done, at the facility. Although it was possible that Josh was working out a formula or a logarithm too complex to be created in a day or even a month. Perhaps his mind kept going even when he was home. Certainly he acted like it, always staying up late at night, here at the computer. Once, she’d come down in the morning to see him asleep in his desk chair, slumped like a dead man, snoring like a bull elephant.
He was working too hard. She needed to talk to him about that. She worried about him. Their marriage was suffering.
Before they moved here, back in their dinky undecorated apartment, they’d been so close. Both read whenever they could grab even ten minutes. Morgan loved nonfiction, especially involving science. Josh loved science fiction. On weekends, they pushed Petey in his stroller around the nature preserve near the Charles River, talking about books, science, and TV series they loved—they hadn’t had the money to go to movies. Saturday nights they stayed up late, watching Saturday Night Live or DVDs, doing silly voice-overs and eating popcorn. On Sundays they hiked, or if there was snow, went snowshoeing, with Petey snuggled cozily in a BabyBjörn on Josh’s back.
The best had been Sunday mornings—ah, Sunday mornings. With Petey cheerfully playing on the floor, Josh would give Morgan long, luxurious body rubs, starting at her head and working his way down to each and every toe.
Now on weekends, Josh slept till noon, something he never used to do. She had to nag him to get out on the lake with her and Petey.
She knew Josh was under pressure. He was new at this job. He was being paid a hell of a lot and was determined to earn it.
Morgan was trying to do her part. Their evening with the Ruoffs had been successful. Morgan had created canapés that didn’t drip on Eva’s silk dress. Even better, both Eva and Ronald had been impressed by Natalie’s abstract, hanging on the living room wall opposite the window facing the lake. Eva had trailed around the house with Morgan, concluding in her plummiest tones that Morgan had style. The rest of the evening Morgan and Josh listened to the Ruoffs describe their beach house on the Cape and their ski house in Stowe. Eva had asked if they played bridge—they did not—so the Ruoffs suggested they take lessons. She asked Morgan if she’d be willing to do some volunteer work for the Amherst library—it might lead to a position on the board. There were some heavy hitters on several of the boards in the area; Eva was already on the hospital board and the symphony board. Excellent way to meet people. With Josh standing next to her, Morgan smiled her best smile and agreed that absolutely she’d volunteer for the library.
