The front door opened and a gust of spring’s pollen-laden breeze entered the store. Kate looked up to see Susan Neal walk through the front door. “Mornin’, Kate.”
Susan was dressed as if she were headed to a photo shoot, lovely and crisp in her grey silk Helmut Lang dress with a trench coat cinched at her waist. Susan had been Kate’s employee, mentor, and friend in that exact order. Even at fifty years old, Susan looked younger than Kate’s own thirty-five years. That’s what Kate thought, anyway.
“What a nice surprise.” Kate walked out from behind the counter and hugged Susan. “When did you get in town?”
The Neal family lived in Atlanta, but owned a house twenty minutes away on Hilton Head Island. “This morning. We’re only here for a day, so I didn’t think I’d stop by, but of course I couldn’t resist. I’m trying to take care of some maintenance issues on the house, and I decided to come hug you.”
“You looking for anything?”
“Nope, but I wanted to tell you about these two boutiques I saw. One in Atlanta. One in Birmingham. They’re similar to ours, but they’re doing business hand over fist.”
“Hand over fist?” Kate asked, grinning with a teasing smile.
“Bad cliché, sorry.” Susan said with a laugh, shooing her hand through the air. “I thought about our store when I visited there. They are doing some innovative things and…” She handed two cards to Kate. “You might want to check them out.”
“Okay,” Kate said. “But more importantly, how is my Mimsy?”
Susan grinned. “You forget, she’s mine and she’s a mess.”
Before opening the boutique, Kate had been a nanny for Susan’s oldest child, Mimsy. Kate had then named the store after the little girl who had brought Kate back to feeling the goodness of life. Led by a small child’s laughter and her pure curiosity about life’s most mundane moments, Kate had begun to heal while taking care of Mimsy. Kate laughed deeply. “Yes, I imagine. Tell her to come in here and I’ll put her back on the straight and narrow.”
“Even if Jesus came to visit her with the Holy Mother, I don’t think Mimsy would be on the straight and narrow.” Susan rolled her eyes, but they both knew she was exaggerating. Mimsy was not only the joy of the family, but also very far away from a mess, at least as far away as any fifteen-year-old girl could be.
They hugged good-bye as Susan reminded Kate to send her any and all new arrivals she thought Susan might like. Her Mimsy partner wanted to be the first to see the best of everything.
The door swished shut and Kate stood in the middle of the boutique, dazed. Although she’d heard every word Susan had said, only one word had stood out.
Birmingham.
A million times Kate had thought about Birmingham, about the city and the name and the ivy-covered house on a hill. But hearing the city’s name in Susan’s voice—an echo of Kate’s innermost memories—caused her to sit in the lounge chair meant for tired husbands waiting on their wives.
Lida blew through the front door of the store the same way the incoming storm would arrive any minute. She carried two coffee cups, and a large tote dangled precariously off her wrist. Her dreadlocks were pulled into a ponytail and the wrist tattoo of a small sacred heart with a sword slashed through its red center was hidden under a cuff bracelet. Her smile, the most beautiful and hard-won aspect of self, was radiant.
“Wow,” Lida said, handing Kate the coffee. “You look like you haven’t slept all night. What is up with that?”
“So I look that good?” Kate rubbed her forefingers under her eyes.
“You always look good, boss. I’m just sayin’, you look tired.”
“I am.”
“How did the dinner with the parents go last night?”
“Really well,” Kate said. “I didn’t sleep much, though.” She paused. “Listen, can you take over for a bit; I’m running upstairs to try and look more presentable. I’ll be right back.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Lida said with no evidence of any bug whatsoever, the kind that came inside a liquor bottle or a virus.
Kate rode the elevator to her loft. Since seeing the ring in Rowan’s drawer she’d been gripped with a headache that seemed to dissipate only when she thought of something else, anything else but getting engaged.
“Focus,” she told herself out loud. “Think about something else: clothes.” She needed to decide what to wear that night for a party at Larson’s house. Outfits preoccupied her the way she believed painting or writing occupied others. She could fill her mind with the nuances of color and style, mixing and matching, making something new of something used.
Larson was the one friend left over from her high school days who was also friends with Rowan. His annual St. Patrick’s Day party had been cancelled for thunderstorms that shut down the town’s electricity. That night, although it was the twenty-first, they would all pretend it was the seventeenth, dressing up in green and listening to too-loud Irish music.
Kate pulled out a bright green Vince sundress and held it up to the light, finally finding her mind somewhere else other than an engagement ring or even worse, a certain man in Birmingham.
* * *
The party was too much. Everything about it was amped up to a level that made Kate slink back to the corner of the room. The music’s base was cranked too high. The crowd sang along to “Danny Boy” in perfect disharmony. Bodies were slammed between couches and chairs, the food flowed off overcrowded plates, and wine, beer, and liquor bottles were lined up on a bar at the far end of the room, seeming to push each other off the tabletop. And the heat, relentless and grasping, filled whatever space was left.
Why was she the only one bothered by all this too-much? Kate squeezed her eyes shut and took a long soothing swallow of the drink Rowan had brought her, some concoction made of lemonade, vodka, and ginger. Sweat trickled down her back and into the small space where she’d once threatened to get a tattoo. She never could decide what image was worth being on her skin forever.
“You okay, baby?” Rowan’s voice came from far away, and yet when Kate opened her eyes, he was standing right next to her.
“It’s ten thousand degrees in here.”
“When the rain quits, everyone’ll go back out.”
Kate nodded. “Can we leave?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I don’t think I am.”
Rowan backed away two steps and wiped his damp hair off his forehead. “Just hang a bit longer, okay?” His green Tommy Bahama shirt clung to his chest. His khaki shorts were secured with a canvas belt decorated with tiny red crabs. This boy from Philadelphia had turned into a South Carolina boy.
These were mostly Rowan’s friends, and Kate knew that he desperately wanted them to be “their” friends, combining lives slowly, friend by friend, day by day, then house by house. She knew what he wanted and damn, she wanted to give it to him. She stepped closer to him. “It’s not the people; it’s how loud and crowded it is.”
“When the rain…”
“I know. I know.” Kate dropped her head back and exhaled. “We’ll stay.”
Larson and Jimmy came full bore across the room, high-fiving Rowan and greeting Kate. “Hey, y’all. Sucks the rain killed the oyster roast,” Larson said.
“It’ll stop,” Kate said.
Thunder echoed nearby. “Sure it will,” Larson said, lifting his grossly green beer high. “And Santa will get me a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas.”
Kate laughed. “You crack me up,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s a gift.” Larson walked away, waving across the room to someone else.
“See, this is fun, right?” Rowan asked.
Kate looked to him and his smile cracked her heart. Why couldn’t she find the generosity to show him that she wanted to be a part of all he was a part of? Just being present couldn’t be good enough. It was easy to fake it, right? Then why did she find that so-easy thing so-hard to do? She took Rowan’s hand and squeezed.
Nor
ah showed up exactly when Kate thought she’d hit her last minute of party time. Together they stood on the covered back porch. But at least they weren’t in the stifling boiler room full of partiers.
“I hate this,” Kate said.
“I know.” Norah held her hand out from the porch, allowing rain to dance across her palm and drip down her arm. “Good thing you’re dating the party boy of Bluffton. I’d bet within a year he could be the mayor.”
“You’re crazy,” Kate said. “A Philly-boy mayor?”
“He’s best friends with everyone in town. He’s like a hurricane of friend-making.”
Kate laughed. “He’s charming. People like him.”
“Of course they do.” Norah shook the rain from her hand. “Everyone loves Rowan.”
“I know.”
They stood in the silence that best friends stand in; comfortable and knowing that whatever words rested beneath “I know” would be discussed another day and time. They talked about the store and a late shipment, about Charlie’s possible job promotion and the never-ending rain, until Rowan burst through the back screen door.
“Ladies, what are you doing? The party is inside.” He swept his hand toward the house.
“We’re catching up,” Kate said.
“Oh, because you don’t see each other every day all day?” He smiled and took Kate’s hand. “Come on, girl. Becky pulled out Brian’s Cotton-Eyed Joe CD and you know what that does for Larson.”
Kate groaned. “I’m really not sure I can see his version of clogging tonight.”
Rowan took her hand to lead her inside as the back door opened and a man walked outside, barely missing Kate with the swinging door. “Whoa,” he said. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Kate said, taking a step back. “You missed me.”
“Katie? Katie Vaughn?” he asked.
“Hayes?”
“Yep, in the flesh.” The guy smiled.
Kate hugged him. “I thought you’d moved out West. Montana, right?”
Hayes nodded. He was tall, a shadow of beard on his chin. “Yep. I’m home for Mama’s birthday, and Larson dragged me to his party.”
“It’s really good to see you,” Kate said, and then introduced him to Rowan.
“Nice to meet you. I’ve heard lots about you,” Hayes said. “Welcome to town.”
Rowan laughed. “Been here a few years.”
“Well, welcome anyway. Guess I’d follow cute Katie anywhere too.” Hayes turned to Kate then. “You see much of the old gang?”
“Not really,” she said. “Just Larson and Norah.”
Hayes turned and saw Norah, laughing. “Hey, you,” he said, and hugged Norah, picking her up and putting her gently down. “How you doing?”
“Great.”
“Hey,” Hayes said, holding his cold beer against his forehead. “Either of you ever see Jack Adams? I thought about him the other day and couldn’t find him on Facebook or anywhere else. No one seems to know what happened to him.”
Norah looked to Kate and then broke the silence, “Last I heard he was in Alabama somewhere.”
“Guess he stayed there after he moved.” Hayes took a long swallow of beer.
Rowan pulled at Kate’s hand and she took the hint. “Nice seeing you, Hayes, she said.”
“You too, darling.”
Rowan and Kate entered the living room the same way Kate imagined one might enter a furnace: eyes closed, breath held. The evening passed in a heat-haze. They finally left, hugging friends and then walking outside along the cracked sidewalk. Before they reached Rowan’s car a block away, he stopped.
The rain had quit, but the leaves dripped onto Kate’s hair and arms, a welcome coolness. A gas streetlight a few feet away cast a glow, causing the Spanish moss to appear as downward curling smoke.
“Gorgeous night. Finally,” she said.
“It is,” Rowan said. “Did you have fun?”
“Sure. It was nice seeing a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while.”
“I wasn’t too fond of your high school buddy, Hayes.”
Kate laughed. “Why? He’s totally harmless.”
“Calling you Cute Katie and implying I followed you, and then asking about your high school boyfriend. Kinda weird, I thought.”
Kate started walking again, making sure Rowan could hear her voice without seeing her face. “That’s silly.”
“I knew that’s what you’d say.”
Kate stopped and turned on the sidewalk, wanting to wipe the conversation clean, remove it from the air as surely as the rain had cleared the pollen. “Did you see Jimmy asleep on the hammock?” She laughed and took Rowan’s hand, squeezing it. “I almost wish I could see Larson’s face in the morning when he finds him out there in the back yard.”
Rowan laughed, and leftover rain dripped off the water-drenched leaves into his hair. His quick slip into laughter made her heart unfold toward him, and she pulled him into a kiss. “Take me home,” she said. And he did.
He walked her inside, and asked again—as he did almost every night—if she would come home with him because he couldn’t stay with her, leaving Dixie home alone to chew through the couch in the middle of the night. And she—as she did almost every night—told him about her early morning. They said goodnight, yawns stifled behind kisses.
* * *
She had dismissed the idea as frivolous, yet as Kate stood at her window, staring out over the river and watching the water move, going exactly where it meant to go, its destination already known, she knew too what her destination was.
The idea to visit Jack Adams in Birmingham had crept into her mind and heart. It didn’t make any sense, but she was beyond sense now. Life, she believed from living in the wilderness, was tied together by hints, whispers, and unseen fabric-makers. She imagined someone far more knowing than she, sewing together a fragile web that she wouldn’t see it until time was done. She could ignore the whispers and threads, everyone could, and she often did, but this time she wouldn’t.
If she didn’t go then, she wouldn’t go at all, and seeing Jack seemed the only cure for What is wrong with you?
She understood the dangling corner thread of what was wrong: The first day of spring still possessed mystery not only for the myths, sacraments, and goddesses; not merely for the promise made at thirteen years old under a willow tree; but also because Kate and Jack’s lost daughter, Luna, had been born on that day thirteen years before.
She had tried everything to outrun the pain of losing both Jack and her daughter: moving away; coming home; no dating; too much dating: anything to keep her mind away from the memory. People talked about heartbreak, but in Kate’s opinion, hearts don’t break, they merely ache and throb until you learn to ignore that same heart all together.
She still hadn’t read the letter. The one on the side table. The one in the unopened envelope. The one from Jack Adams. She lifted it, staring at the handwriting and the return address, which hadn’t changed in the thirteen years the letters had been arriving. Her routine—to read the letter at sunset on the first day of spring—was purposefully broken the night before. She wanted something new. She wanted to really be with Rowan without intrusion or memory.
Jack’s yearly letters, which were sent on their daughter’s birthday, allowed Kate to know Jack in his adult years. And yet, despite these thousands of words, they hadn’t spoken. Not once.
Kate settled into her favorite oversized chair in the corner where the side table held not only Jack’s letter, but also a small lamp and her bowl of favorite collected feathers. It was still raining, slanted waterfalls hitting the wide panes of glass. A South Carolina spring came this way sometimes: damp with fury and chaos and then just as suddenly quiet. Kate turned the lamp on and slipped her finger under the envelope flap, ripping through the paper to withdraw the letter.
Dear Katie,
Happy Birthday to Luna.
He always started the letter that way, that exact same way, with a happy birthday wish
that neither of them could say directly—to their daughter or each other.
This will be a short letter. I’m sorry, but if I don’t mail it today, it won’t make it to you by Luna’s birthday, so I’m keeping my promise and writing. There’s not much to say. Not much has changed. I want to tell you all the exciting things I’m doing—but they will sound repetitive and dull, as they aren’t much different than the year before or even the year before that.
My work: same. The one new thing: I have opened an art studio. Not for my work of course, because I don’t have any, but for Alabama artists. It’s a small studio in the arts district of Southside. This is my excuse to indulge in my own addiction without buying everything I see.
There’s a woman running the studio—Mimi Ann—and she is doing a brilliant job. I show up for the bigger events and sneak in when I need a fix. It’s worked out well so far. The studio is called LUNA.
Maybe I should have asked you first or at least told you that I have a studio named after our daughter, but something held me back. I don’t know what really. Either way, it exists now and I hope one day you get to see it.
Hope all is well with you.
Jack
Usually the birthday letters were full of information, overflowing with his year. But this letter was as empty as the one he’d written six years before to tell of his divorce, which had left him bereft and sharing custody of their two-year-old, Caleb.
Kate understood that most people would think it strange that she and Jack hadn’t talked since the day they’d said good-bye to their daughter, and yet through yearly letters they both knew the facts about one another’s lives. No blueprint existed for this kind of relationship—the one between a man and woman who had once been in love and then placed their child out into the world with a hand-chosen family.
Katie was thirteen when she fell in love with Jack, the day she made a vow under a willow tree, and yet now she knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about her own daughter, who was thirteen years old. Did she have copper hair or green eyes? Where did she live? Did she have a best friend? Was she into sports? Did she love her parents?
And Then I Found You Page 4
