Blue Moon Bay

by Lisa Wingate

  Blaine crossed his arms, rubbing his chin appraisingly. “They’ve got . . . attitude.”

  I rolled a look at him, then leaned over to observe the boots.

  “You’d be the only one in Seattle with a pair,” he urged. “You could start a whole new trend.”

  “Yeah . . . tempting. But maybe something a little less . . . silver.” It occurred to me that he’d mentioned Seattle. How would he know that, unless he and Clay had been talking about me?

  The thought was strange. I wasn’t sure whether to embrace it or be afraid of it.

  He pulled out a pair of tall mud boots, the black rubber kind the Mennonites used in the mucky corrals around their dairy farms and in the Proxica poultry barns over in Gnadenfeld. I remembered borrowing similar boots when Clay and I went home with Ruth and visited her family’s dairy. We did that occasionally when Aunt Esther was planning social events at Harmony House and didn’t want us in the way. “Tempting . . . but . . . no. I remember those things from my short stint as a cow milker.”

  “You were a milkmaid?” Blaine’s look of interest followed me as he leaned against the shelf.

  I sat down on the bench to release the silver Dolly boots into the wild again and told him the story of my one and only attempt at helping the Mennonite kids with milking chores. Ruth and her husband lived a few miles away on a Proxica poultry farm, but they maintained an interest in the dairy, and Clay loved to visit there. My ill-fated milking career had ended when I sucked cow parts and my own ponytail into the vacuum end of a milking machine. The cow kicked, I panicked, and things went downhill from there. I was saved by a brawny Mennonite boy who was somehow related to Ruth. It was embarrassing. He was only seven.

  Blaine laughed goodnaturedly at the end of the story, and we continued perusing the footwear. Finally, I selected a pair of hiking boots, along with some warm wool socks, two pairs of jeans, and a couple of fleecy Moses Lake sweatshirts from the stack near the counter. The only thing I didn’t score was a new electric heater. They were out.

  As Blaine wrote up my charges, I caught myself thinking it really was too bad that he was potentially in a position to ruin my family financially. He was kind of likable, otherwise. Fun.

  But you don’t get to the senior manager stage by being drifty-minded. I knew how to stay focused on a goal, how to tune out distractions like Facebook, office chatter, funny email videos of dogs who could dance the cha-cha while wearing ruffled skirts and sunglasses . . . cute guys who want to lure you in, so you won’t wonder why they’re cultivating your family’s good graces.

  He offered to walk me back to the cottage after we finished shopping. I told him I was fine. I knew the trail well enough. I used to walk it all the time, back in the day.

  On the way back to Uncle Herbert’s, my feet warm inside the new hiking boots, the bedraggled fashion footwear and a sack of new clothing swinging at my side, I tried to keep my mind out of the past. I thought, instead, of the silver boots. Maybe I’d go back and buy them tomorrow—well, not tomorrow, because, come to think of it, the hardware store was always closed on Mondays. Trish would think the boots were a riot. I could keep them in my apartment as a conversation piece. A memento from my unplanned detour to Moses Lake.

  Then again, I wouldn’t be around when the hardware store opened on Tuesday. I wasn’t supposed to be, anyway. Somehow, I had to wrap up this mess and get back to work before Mel went postal and my best chance at leading a design project slipped through my fingers. I couldn’t let myself forget everything I had to lose if this project fell apart.

  I returned to Uncle Herbert’s house with that thought in mind, determined to get the whole family into one room so we could get to the bottom of this mess and hash it out. Surely, with enough injections of reason, everyone would have to wake up to reality. A nice, quiet Sunday morning would be the perfect time to do that.

  But the house was anything but quiet when I went in. Mom was in Uncle Herbert’s kitchen, cleaning up from breakfast and, oddly enough, wearing a dress, which my mother rarely did. The rest of the family was bustling around upstairs. I heard doors opening and closing, feet moving, pipes rattling. Mom quickly informed me that I’d better hurry up, if I wanted to ride to church with the family.

  She made the suggestion without missing a beat, and after I reeled my chin off the floor, I said, “Since when do you get up on Sunday morning and go to church?” That was rude, of course, but I couldn’t help feeling that they were all playing some sort of game, with me as the patsy. Maybe they thought that by putting on a show they could confuse me into giving up and going home.

  Aside from the fact that my mother getting dressed for church on Sunday morning was about as believable as a hippo in toe shoes, I found it slightly offensive that she would choose this particular means of creating shock value. I’d always prided myself on the fact that my occasional church attendance—holidays mostly, with Trish at a historic downtown church, where the architecture of the building was in equal parts inspiring and distracting—was to some degree better than my mother’s flavor-of-the-month spiritual existentialism. At least I knew what I believed, in the official sense. Most of the time, Sunday morning found me heading for the office to either meet Mel and prep for a presentation, or get in a little extra time, shoveling at a workload that piled on as fast as I could dig it out.

  Mom had the nerve to give me a you’re crazy look and say, “Well, both of the uncs are deacons, and now Clay and I are going into business here. How would it look if we sat home on Sunday mornings?”

  I was speechless again. Twice in one conversation. The fun, relaxed feeling that had bloomed during my footwear safari quickly faded.

  “Besides,” she added, and I sensed that she was coming in for the kill—putting my battered and bleeding sanity out of its misery. “I feel close to your father there.”

  The blood drained from my cheeks, flowing downward through my body, abandoning me to a hollow numbness. My mother had been through more boyfriends and live-ins over the years than I could count. How dare she stand there, acting like she’d been pining for my father all that time, particularly considering what I’d seen her doing right before he died. I opened my mouth to say something venomous, then closed it, opened it again.

  Mother took advantage of the conversational lull. “And this afternoon, we’re driving over to Gnadenfeld. It’s Ruth’s birthday, and they’re having a little get-together for her at the dairy. She lives with one of her nieces now. You know that her husband passed away several years ago, and she’s been diagnosed with cancer, right? She can’t live on her own anymore.”

  My head swirled. I leaned against the door frame, my vision of Ruth shifting. All this time, I’d been imagining her still dividing her time between the Proxica poultry farm she ran with her husband, and the family dairy. I knew she’d quit working for Uncle Herbert shortly after I went away to college. She’d told me about it in one of the letters my freshman year of college. Her husband was experiencing some health problems, and she was needed at home. “Ruth has cancer? Is it bad?”

  Mom nodded, the first honest look of the morning passing between us. “Yes, it is. Which is reason enough to go get ready for church, right?”

  “I don’t have anything to wear.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I was still stunned, just babbling out words with no real meaning.

  “Oh, anything will do,” Mom insisted. “Just go get ready. Ruth will want to see you, especially considering the shape she’s in.”

  I quit the kitchen and left her there. Grabbing my things in the utility room, I went out the back door and walked down the hill.The bracing air pulled tears from my eyes until I found myself inside the cottage, looking at my carry-on bag, my new clothes, my laundry pile. I had the urge to throw everything into the suitcase, force the zipper around it, and leave for the airport, to return to a world that was only big enough for one. A world where nothing else, especially anything that happened in Moses Lake, could affect me.

  I
dressed for church instead, and we headed off in one of the funeral sedans, Mom driving, Uncle Herbert in the passenger seat, and me sandwiched between Clay and Uncle Charley in the back. Clay and Uncle Charley talked about fishing. I thought about Ruth.

  Amy was waiting on the small porch outside the church when we arrived. She walked in with us, and I heard whispers around the room. Blaine Underhill’s stepmother stiffened in her seat, pretending not to see us sliding into the row across the aisle. I noticed Blaine at the far end of the Underhill pew. A blonde was whispering in his ear, tapping him on the shoulder. I couldn’t decide, from this angle, if I remembered her from high school or not.

  Reverend Hay took the pulpit and began the announcements by pointing out his new fiancée, Bonnie, in the front. The congregation twittered approvingly. I was glad to have their attention diverted from us, but it quickly returned in the form of covert looks, whispers, little notes jotted in the corners of bulletins, a nudge here or there.

  What are they doing here? The question was like smoke in the room, making it difficult to breathe. Sun streamed through the squares of colored glass in the arched windows, choking the air, stirring the voices of the church ladies in my mind. Sit up straight, hon. Don’t slouch like that, you’ll get a hump in your back. . . .

  I thought of my father’s funeral. I’d overheard Blaine Underhill’s stepmother and my aunt Esther whispering about the fact that my mother hadn’t made me wear a dress. Aunt Esther had snorted irritably, then pointed out that my mother was impossible to deal with and if it weren’t for the fact that there was no way we could continue to live at the farm with my mother completely dysfunctional in her grief, Aunt Esther would never have allowed us to move into the gardener’s cottage at Harmony Shores.

  Now, glancing across the room, I saw Blaine’s stepmother eyeing me coolly from the Underhill pew.

  I wanted to get up and leave before the choir even made it to the choir loft.

  You don’t drown by falling in the water;

  You drown by staying there.

  —Edwin Louis Cole

  (Left by Jim, teaching grandkids to swim.)

  Chapter 9

  The sermon wasn’t bad, actually. Reverend Hay was a low-key sort of guy, and being newly engaged, he spoke from the heart when he talked about love and the nature of it. “In modern culture, we tend to think of love as something soft, frilly, and lacy, like the edging on a valentine,” he said, smiling at his future bride in the front row. “And love is beautiful like that, intricate in the ways it changes you, grows you, makes you want to be more than you were before. Love sees in you the best possible version of yourself, and makes you believe it. . . .” I tuned out for a moment, only vaguely conscious of the sermon continuing. I caught myself looking across the room, watching the blonde watch Blaine. She flashed smiles and eye-commentary at him as the sermon went on.

  I studied his responses, cataloging them without really meaning to. He laughed when she made cross-eyes at him during some reference to teenagers bouncing in and out of love at the drop of a hat. He returned a couple of smiles, and she winked at him. I still couldn’t decide who she was, but her face was familiar—undoubtedly from high school. She flashed a couple glances my way, thinking the same thing about me, I supposed. Each time, I pretended to be studying the colored glass in the windows behind her head.

  Farther down the Underhill pew, Mama B swiveled a narrow glance over her shoulder, and caught the blonde flirting with Blaine. Mama B’s silent message to the blonde seemed clear enough. Mind your business.

  Hmm . . .

  The blonde turned her attention to the sermon again, and I did, as well.

  “ . . . and so much of that is true about love. It’s the best feeling in the world. It’s glorious, but Hollywood teaches us that love is weak and fickle, that evil doesn’t have a very tough time overtaking it. If you watch enough movies, you’ll end up believing that sooner or later all love is doomed to fail, that a broken, wicked, sinful, hate-filled world is just more than love can stand up against. That when a marriage fails, we shouldn’t be surprised. That when a family falls apart, or a neighbor hates a neighbor, or a kid bullies another kid in school, or a church body divides into factions, we should accept that as part of life, because the world is imperfect—so imperfect, in fact, that it’s more than love can combat. But what we don’t realize—what the writers of the Bible knew that we’ve lost track of—is that love is the very essence of God, and God is powerful. In fact, He is all-powerful.”

  Pausing to let the point sink in, Reverend Hay moved from behind the pulpit, stood at the edge of the steps and held up his long, thin hands. “Brothers and sisters, don’t let anyone convince you that love isn’t strong enough to combat temptation or hate or prejudice or past hurts or misunderstandings or drugs or alcohol or culture clashes or self-loathing or any other form of evil that may afflict your life or the lives of those around you. Love doesn’t need us to protect it from those things. Love is our protection. Great, big, crazy, extravagant, confident love, like the love God has for every one of us. Love that accepts us just as we are.

  “If we only love people who are exactly like us, why, we’re really just loving ourselves, aren’t we?” He paused, gathering murmurs from the audience and a disinterested look or two from the casserole ladies. I glanced sideways at my mother and my brother, thought about all the ways I’d been frustrated with them over the years, all the decisions I’d criticized. Was I really just pointing at the mirror and saying, If you’ll be more like me, I’ll love you more?

  A thorn poked somewhere inside me as Reverend Hay went on, the audience now hanging on his hook, ready to be reeled in. “But when we put on that great, big, godly love and go out into the world, we’re ready to do battle with evil, with prejudice . . . yes, and sometimes even with ourselves. Sometimes the armor of love is heavy. Sometimes it’s cumbersome, uncomfortable, and unwieldy. Sometimes it’ll make you sweat, or keep you from having the knee-jerk reaction that’d be satisfying in the moment but would leave blood on the battlefield.

  “Divine love is the key to churches that cleave together, to marriages that last and families that overcome, to friendships that forgive insult, and hands that reach out to those who are different from us. We’ve got to love each other more than we love our own reflections in the mirror. When we can do that, love is both a sword and a shield. No matter where we go, or what kind of battle we’re facing, it’s all the armor we need.”

  Reverend Hay moved to the head of the aisle then, and the pianist played an invitation song. A man and wife came forward to join the church—retirees, from the look of it. Reverend Hay introduced them to the members.

  As the service wound down, my attention moved to a survey of the exits and who was sitting near them. I tried to gauge the quickest path out, the one that would allow me to vacate the premises without being stopped by curious church ladies, trying to ferret out information on our family’s plans and my mother’s reasons for suddenly taking up residence in Moses Lake. If the ladies’ drop-by visit to Uncle Herbert’s house the other day hadn’t clued me in to the fact that we were the current topic of small-town speculation, the plethora of whispers and glances in church would have.

  I felt like I was suffocating on a combination of the curiosity in the air and random memories of my dad. He was everywhere in this building, frozen in time. During our visits to Moses Lake, we’d come to church for Christmas pageants, Easter egg hunts, potluck suppers, a wedding or two. Every time we entered this place, people gathered around my dad as if he were visiting royalty, and I could see how much he missed Moses Lake. I always wondered if he resented my mother for putting him in a tug-of-war between his hometown and her.

  Just as Reverend Hay was about to end the service, a little boy popped out of his seat and walked the aisle, loudly declaring that he wanted to be baptized. I thought about my dad. The day I was baptized along with a group of friends in our mega-church back home, he’d told me the story ab
out getting up and walking down the aisle all by himself here in this little church. Now, looking at that little boy, I saw Dad. I wondered if, up in heaven, he was looking down and remembering. My dad, I realized now, showed us the kind of love Reverend Hay was talking about. He accepted people the way they were, even my mother, even when her inconsistencies caused him embarrassment, or inconvenience, or pain. If only I had inherited that trait from him, along with his hair and eye color. I wanted to be less like the casserole ladies and more like my dad; I just didn’t know where to start.

  When everyone stood up to go forward and hug and congratulate the newest members of the church, I whispered to Uncle Charley that I was going to walk home, and I ducked through an exit door into the parking lot. The air outside was brisk, but it felt good. Moses Lake glistening in the midday sun brought memories of my dad, and the thoughts were good thoughts, not painful spears with which I tormented myself. I felt as if my father were walking the path through the woods beside me, glad to see me in the place that he loved.

  How would he feel about the land sale? Would he be pleased to know that something was happening that would provide jobs and much-needed income for Moses Lake, or would he be unhappy that the farmland would be developed? I wished I knew.

  The family was already back at Harmony Shores by the time I made it there on foot. As we gathered food to take to Ruth’s house, I began mentally preparing to start up a discussion in the car, where I would have a captive audience. While I understood this strange, nostalgic idea of Moses Lake as the idyllic family homeplace, in which Mom and Clay would happily settle while seeing the older generation through their senior years, I still knew it was impractical. Mom would never survive without her university dinners, her meditation classes, and the throng of graduate students, smitten by her knowledge of everything from Chaucer to Pope. And Clay couldn’t even look after his poor dog properly. Case in point, I’d found the dog dishes empty on the back deck when I arrived at Harmony House after my walk through the woods. Roger was on his hind legs, trying to claw the lid off a metal trash can filled with dog food. I scooped out a helping and put it in the bowl, and Roger ate as if he hadn’t seen kibble in a week. No wonder he’d felt the need to commandeer my FedEx package. If he got hungry enough, at least he could use my iPhone to call for a pizza. A twenty-seven-year-old man who couldn’t feed his own dog regularly had no business taking on the care of two old men and a restaurant.