“So shall I follow you to the restaurant?” I asked Luke.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” he replied as he pulled on his fingerless gloves.
We didn’t hurry, and surely we should. When we got to my car, I took out my keys. Another car was parked close to mine so Luke couldn’t open the door for me. We stopped for a moment behind my car.
“Okay,” I tried again. “So I’ll just follow you, right? Maybe you should tell me the address in case I lose you.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” asked Luke.
“What?” I feigned ignorance as my stomach turned over.
“Between you and my mother.”
“Nothing happened,” I said studying the keys in my hand. “We talked for a little bit and then I had to go to the bathroom.”
Two women came off the elevator and walked in our direction. The car next to mine was theirs.
“Is everything all right?” one of the women asked us. “Do you need any help?”
“No we’re good,” replied Luke, flashing them one of his charming smiles.
“Okay,” said the other woman as the first one started the car. “Good night!”
“Good night!” Luke returned. As they pulled off Luke said, “We’d better skip dinner tonight.”
I felt a new wave of nausea, and I was suddenly cold too. I clutched the wrap tightly around me.
“Why?” I asked, hating the immediate panic in my voice because he was absolutely right.
Taking the keys from my hand, Luke unlocked my car door and opened it. I didn’t want to get in.
“Luke, what’s wrong?” I asked stupidly.
“We’ll need to talk about that,” he replied.
Betty Sterling was a liar, but lies often worked, because somehow they could seem easier to believe, easier to accept than the truth. Strung together they resulted in elaborate complex structures, but individually each one was deliberately simple and so seductive. For half my life I had been in love with Lucas Sterling while holding fast to the lie that I wasn’t good enough for him. No, he had not been in love with me enough to make me his wife, but it was never because I was unworthy of him. It was simply that I had not been his choice. And Lucas Sterling, whatever Betty Sterling absurdly believed, would always be a man with choices.
“Okay,” I said a little desperately. “Let’s talk.”
“Not here,” he told me. “It’s late. Get in.”
“I don’t understand, Luke,” I protested. “Are you mad at me? What did I do?”
Was my precious this in jeopardy? He was firmly guiding me towards the open car door, pushing me really. But I couldn’t tell him about his mother. It was too terrible. And it wasn’t my business. I couldn’t come between them. When I was in the car, Luke handed me back my keys and then kissed me dryly on the lips.
“Good night,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
SIXTEEN
It was a horrible night. Sleepless. Weepy. Waiting for the telephone to ring after midnight because Luke liked to kid around with me and could possibly call when it was in fact tomorrow. But the phone didn’t ring. It was as silent all night as I was, sitting there in the dark. At least I didn’t have to look at it. Agatha and T-T cuddled up in cozy balls next to me, sleeping At least I had their approval.
Had Betty Sterling really beaten me so easily? Without a fight? Had I just folded again, like last time with Christina, crumbling into an invisible pathetic heap for my pride’s sake?
The slogan Never let’em see you sweat had sold a lot of deodorant by appealing to an American psyche rooted in the British stiff-upper-lip syndrome. Being cool was coveted, although there were breakdowns in decorum, furies of four-letter-words and street brawls now captured on YouTube for the record, so that an aghast public could look on in shock, and awe, and envy. Because rich or poor, people loved to see a fight. Boxing, hockey, football, reality TV, politics, we eagerly paid to see it, violence as a spectator sport.
Bullies counted on victims conspiring with their cruelties. Nobody wanted to be a tattle-tale, a snitch. It’s okay to kill me, but I won’t stoop to your level. Well so what? How could you stoop when you were already on the ground?
Then you got blamed anyway. Arrested for obstructing justice because you refused to testify, or you took the law into your own hands and defended yourself. Blaming the victim. Damned if you did; damned if you didn’t. Nobody could see your side. If it were me I would have (fill in the blank) with any number of heroic hypothetical acts. Except that it was you. The situation was yours. You were the one staying up all night convicting yourself for being your own worst enemy.
When the alarm went off at six o’clock I got up, depressed and exhausted, and shut off the radio because I really couldn’t take the morning DJs and their perky entertainment interspersed with love songs. What a difference a day made? I had finally allowed myself to look forward to last night. Ansel Adams. New shoes. The pretty blouse. Being with Luke. Corrine would be expecting to hear all about it.
Oh God! I couldn’t face her either. I turned on the computer and logging into the office e-mail, I sent a message to Hilda Banks, my supervisor, with a blind copy to Corrine, that said I would not be in today. I only had a couple of client appointments anyway, and we had a back-up system to ensure that they would be seen by somebody if their situations were urgent. I was just too tired. And Corrine could think what she would because I wasn’t taking any calls.
The phone rang startling me. I had already decided not to tell Mommy anything about last night either. She basically hated Betty Sterling, so why fuel the flames? And besides, me as Luke’s pet, his puppy might not be too off-base to Mommy. It was actually what she kind of thought too. It was funny really, neither of our mothers could imagine me with Luke. I picked up the phone and read the caller-ID. Luke was calling.
“Hello,” I said in a voice impacted by sleeplessness and apprehension.
“Did I wake you?” Luke asked.
“No, I’m up.”
“Can you take the morning off?”
“Uh…sure,” I said, striving to sound calm. “What’s up?”
“I owe you dinner,” he replied. “So I was thinking I could pay it with breakfast.”
He could be calm. He was calling all the shots.
“You don’t owe me dinner,” I said.
Dumping me over pancakes? Really? How gallant.
“Well I owe it to myself,” he told me. “So will you meet me? Some place close to your office if you’d like.”
“The Denny’s on Stemmons,” I suggested.
I wasn’t about to risk running into somebody from the office, plus I never wanted to have to go back there again if it turned out to be an awful memory.
“It’s easy to get to,” I added.
“Okay,” Luke agreed. “Eight-thirty?”
“Sure,” I replied.
Doing the best I could with my puffy eyes and applying blush so that at least I looked like I was among the living, I hurried to get out of the house before eight. This time I absolutely was not going to be late, and I made it to the Denny’s in good time. Luke’s car was already parked out front.
The hostess met me with a welcoming Good-Morning-table-for-one.
“I’m meeting someone,” I answered, walking passed her to the table where Luke was waiting.
“Hi!” I said faking cheerfulness when I reached the table.
Luke looked fine, having slept the sleep of the dumper. He was dressed in a casual Friday office outfit: white oxford shirt, burgundy pullover sweater, dark blue khakis. Having forgotten my own wardrobe cover until just this minute, I was dressed in jeans and a black sweater. I wasn’t even wearing earrings. Oh well. So much for style points. I was the dumpee.
“Hey,” replied Luke, his expression unreadable.
I didn’t try to kiss him hello.
“Rough night?” he asked, pouring a cup of coffee for me from the thermal carafe on the table.
What was the use?
“Yes,” I said honestly. “How rude of you to notice.”
Tearing open a Splenda packet he poured half of it into my cup and set the rest aside. Then he added cream to the coffee until it was beige.
“Hope it’s not my fault,” he said stirring my cup.
“You did send me to bed without my supper,” I replied forthrightly.
Luke smiled, sliding the exactly prepared cup of coffee over to me.
“All the more reason to treat you to a good breakfast,” he said.
A little smiled played around his mouth. He didn’t hate me. I drank my coffee, and it had never tasted so good; soothing, satisfying, sweet, settling the butterflies in my stomach. We were still friends. A waitress arrived at the table to take our orders. When she was gone with our requests: egg white omelets and whole wheat toast, Luke refilled his own cup of coffee and took a drink.
“After the accident,” Luke began. “For the first few of days I was pretty much out of it. They pump you so full of drugs in the beginning: painkillers, sedatives, antibiotics. It’s a wonder you don’t spontaneously combust. In the meantime they tell your family how bad it is. When I started coming around I wanted to know for myself, but all I got from everybody was ‘You’re going to be fine.’ It wasn’t true. I knew it. I just needed somebody to confirm it, to say how bad, but no one would. I kept seeing all these worried faces all around me, hanging over me. People crying. Whispering. But all they kept saying was that I was going to be fine. They were lying to me, Rachel. With good intentions, but still lying. And you know what happened, I kept imagining the worst. You see, if you don’t have information you make it up. You will fill in the gaps. So long story short hiding the truth doesn’t help. It just makes things worse.
“You think you’re protecting the other person by hiding it, but you’re not. I had to learn that—really learn it I mean, the hard way. By doing it myself, and then by having it done to me.
“I think what people are really trying to do is protect themselves. A lie gets easier to tell than the truth. There are times when you don’t even have to say anything for the lie to be told. Silence lies too. When I got hurt, I needed my family to be honest with me, Rachel, to help me cope with it. But because they couldn’t face it, we all told the lie. I ended up putting on the good-face too, for their sake,” Luke smiled crookedly. “But the truth won’t go away. Stem cell research, robotics, electrical stimulation. We tried everything. Or they did anyway. I kinda checked-out. Money can’t buy miracles but it can pay for delusion. I guess people do the best they can, but they made it harder. I hate letting people down, Rachel.”
He took another drink of coffee.
“But back to last night,” he went on. “Who were you trying to protect? Me? My mother? Yourself?”
Picturing him alone, frightened, imagining the rest of his changed life, while the people who loved him pretended everything was going to be all right, I couldn’t speak. I took another drink of coffee.
“I know something happened between my mother and you,” Luke continued. “She said something, something pretty bad. I come back, looking for my ‘hot date’, and she’s all triumphant and you’re camped-out in the ladies’ room. So now you can force me to speculate and take a chance on me imagining worse than what really happened, or you can be straight with me. You’re a counselor, Rachel, you know how it works. The Bible says the truth sets you free, right?”
“Did you ask her?” I finally spoke in a husky voice.
“I don’t really trust her perspective, Rachel. Do you?”
“Luke…I don’t want to…to say something…”
“Bad about my mother? Just tell me what happened, and I’ll be judge. For God’s sake, Rachel, at least protect yourself.”
“She said I only want to be with you for your money.”
Luke sighed and then chuckled dryly.
“And that she was going to stop me,” I continued. “Because you wouldn’t. Because you’re willing to settle for me now, because…because—”
“I’m a cripple,” Luke finished for me.
I nodded.
“Is that it?” he asked.
Wasn’t that enough? Yet he seemed unfazed.
“Most of it,” I answered.
“Tell me all of it, Rachel. Let’s get it on the table, before the eggs come. I need to know what I’m dealing with.”
It did seem to help, repeating it out loud instead of chanting it in my head. Words that last night—all night—had sickened me now only made me sad, and I found myself on the verge of feeling sorry for a woman who could think such things about her own child. Luke was right, I was a counselor, and the Bible did say truth was liberating.
“She said I was a mistake,” I told him now, and in a way I was finally uttering the secret I had been keeping to myself. “My being born I mean,” I explained.
“People can’t be mistakes, Rachel,” he replied. “They can only make them.”
“My mother’s mistake then.”
“You’re not a mistake. You do know that, right?”
I nodded. But what kind of life might Mommy have had had I not come before she finished high school? Maybe she would have married first. Or gone to college herself, and had a brilliant career, and a rewarding retirement. And I might have a father.
“Wow,” Luke now said thoughtfully. “She must have rehearsed. That was a lot to cover, and I wasn’t gone that long.”
“I don’t think,” I started. “I mean…she’s just trying to look out for you in her own way. She doesn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Don’t, Rachel,” said Luke, shaking his head, smiling ironically. “Don’t take her side. And don’t ever put her between us again. This,” he added, pointing to me and then to himself. “Is ours. You’re my friend, not hers.”
“I don’t think she would have me,” I said finally able to smile myself.
The waitress set her tray down on a nearby table and proceeded to serve us our meal.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.
“We’ll need some more coffee,” said Luke.
“Sure thing, sweetie,” she replied, darting off to her station.
The food smelled very good and I was ravenous, however, Luke was waiting for me to say Grace. The waitress respectfully waited too before grabbing the carafe to refill it. The first bite of omelet was resting on my tongue when Luke said, “I would have you.”
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“Eat,” he instructed. “You think we can play hooky all day?”
SEVENTEEN
Luke signed the credit card bill and put down the pen.
“Ready?” he asked.
I wasn’t. I didn’t want our time together to end even if it was only until the next time. Driving over here I had been so afraid that it would be ending for forever. Why was it that I must always leap to the worst case scenario? Never ever a happy ending. It wasn’t part of my mental make-up, at least not for myself. In my work it was very thing that I counseled clients not to do. God—I even had the bumper sticker Visualize Peace. When was I ever going to practice what I preached? Luke and I were as we had been, maybe even as we had always been, except for those two decades in between, and here I was, still kind of stunned by it.
“Okay,” I agreed, compliantly folding up my napkin and placing it on the table.
He had to go work even if I didn’t, although I supposed I could now, energized, as it were, by a world now made of marshmallows.
“Busy day?” Luke asked me.
“To be honest with you,” I confessed. “I took the day off.”
“So you are playing hooky all day,” Luke smiled.
“I am.”
“Called in sick, did you?”
“I did.”
“Friday flu?”
“You do not have to look so superior about it, Mr. Sterling. It does happen. People can wake up feeling like crap even on a Friday.”
“Except you ar
en’t sick.”
“I was. You said it yourself—rough night.”
Now Luke laughed. I loved his laugh. Even at my expense.
“They do say breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” he said.
“Among other things,” I quipped and got up from the table.
Outside the day was cool and overcast, but I was feeling all sunny and warm inside. Walking me to my car, Luke asked what I had on tap for the day.
“A nap?” he queried.
“Christmas shopping,” I answered.
“Christmas shopping already?”
“What do you mean already? It’s November, and they’ve been counting down the shopping days until for weeks now. You should come with me. I could use a well-dressed male perspective shopping for my cousins.”
“And be one of those guys carrying his wife’s purse? No thank you.”
With the word wife buzzing around in my brain, I lost focus for an instant.
“I’ll buy you lunch,” I recovered and offered. “In the food court of course,” I said leaning against the back of my car.
“That’s not much of an incentive,” replied Luke.
“Lunch is a bonus. My company is the incentive. And I promise to carry my own purse the whole time.”
“I’ll do it on one condition.”
“Which is?”
“I get to change my clothes.”
“But you’re so adorable in your button-down shirt and sweater,” I smiled. “Totally preppy.”
“Yeah, that’s the look I was going for.”
I followed him to his house in my car, and when we got there Luke had me pull the Corolla into the garage next to his Mercedes.
“It’ll take me a minute,” he said once we were in the house. “Make yourself at home.”
“Okay,” I said plopping down on the leather couch while he went to his bedroom to change.
Luke’s home. I looked around the room, reveling in being here, even as I lamented not being able to return the gesture. A home could speak volumes about its owner, revealing things that even clothes did not. People said that my condo was homey, comfortable, and cheery, with cat toys scattered here and there, lots of books, and an assortment of religious totems. I supposed it was obviously feminine but it wasn’t frilly. I was proud of it, and I wanted Luke to see it. I wanted to cook dinner for him and play my music collection; maybe even digging out the Sony Walkman and cassette. He’d probably get a kick out of that. I wanted him to see the art that I had collected over the years, and tell him the stories about who had given me what or where I had bought it.
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