* * *
The first one I chose was stacked on a hill, a place of in-betweenness. I hadn’t lived in an apartment since I was twenty-three years old, and I never much liked them even in the old days. This one was a gigantic complex, three and four stories tall. I liked it, though, much prettier than the old boxy places I remembered. There were French doors opening onto little balconies that boasted views of King Soopers, and the mountains beyond.
I was scared to death, sitting in the parking lot. So nervous, my elbows felt weak, and there was no logical reason for it. Not even as much logic as spiders in the basement—just general life terror, the same fear that inflicts you the first day of school or starting a new job.
Some sensible part of my brain said with a slap, Get over it! get out of the car! Stop being such a wimp!
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. This was not 1952. It wasn’t like divorce was uncommon. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have resources and brains. I’d led committees of fifty, headed up fund-raisers, organized the busy lives of my ex and my daughter, planned parties for a hundred. My garden was one of the most envied on the block, and I made perfumes. Beautiful perfumes. I was quite accomplished.
But it didn’t matter. Divorce was making me feel like a worm dug out of the nice, loamy ground and flung out on the sidewalk— I was writhing and wincing and struggling to get back into the earth.
Since I couldn’t, I stepped out of the car, carefully locked the door behind me, and walked across the pavement to the office. In the reception area, which was very modern and clean, with a huge arrangement of flowers that reminded me of a hotel, I waited for a girl to get off the phone.
She waved a finger at me: Just a minute. I turned to read the notices on the bulletin board: hand printed ads for house-sitters and babysitters with individual tear-off flaps with phone numbers; a flyer for a lost cat with the sullen face of a Persian; couches for sale.
There were the predictable empty promises: Make money at home!! Lose 30 lbs in 30 days, Guaranteed!!! Feeling my gut billow out beneath my crossed arms, I thought I ought to give that one a call.
The rest were odds and ends, mostly odds: a drumming circle met on Thursday evenings (women only, please! ). A tarot reader in Building 4 offered her services for $45, call Roxanne. There was Sufi dancing at the Unity church; shaman-ism classes, call White Wolf Woman, 555-4309.
A slight buzzing roar blazed through my head, and I took an airless step backward. I was divorced, not weird. There had to be a better place to rent an apartment.
The girl materialized beside me, her wash of thick, glossy hair swirling over her shoulders. “Sorry. It was my boss.” Sticking out a thin white hand, she added, “I’m Monday. How can I help you?”
“Monday’s child?” The rhyme ran through my head. “Fair of face.”
She looked confused. “No, you know, like the Mamas and the Papas song?”
“Oh. Right. Nicole Carring—I mean, Bridges.” I blinked the embarrassment of my name change away, squeezed her hand too hard.
“Did you want to look at an apartment?”
“Um, well. I …” With a grunt, I glanced back toward the flyers stuck with pins and thumbtacks, blue and yellow, white and red, to the corkboard. “Maybe this isn’t the right spot for me.”
Following my gaze, she waved a hand. “Oh, don’t worry. People just do some different things when they’re free for the first time in ages, you know? There are lots of different kinds of people who live here. Lots around your age, too, which is always nice, right?”
My age. Like a class of children to play with at recess. “Sure. All right.”
She picked through a set of keys on a ring. Her cheeks were that natural blushy rose some fair-skinned girls have. With her dark hair and dark eyes, it made her look like Snow White. “What would you like to see? Two bedroom? Three?”
“Um.” Another choice. “Let me see them both, I guess. I’m not sure.”
“Great.” She gestured toward the parking lot. “We also have an exercise room, a pool in the summer … and, of course, a shopping center right across the street. Grocery store, videos, gas … all right there at your fingertips, and the best views in the city.”
“Mmm.”
She wore pointed black plastic boots on slightly pigeon-toed feet, and even on this cool day, a slice of white skin showed between her blouse and the top of her jeans, which were what we would have called hip-huggers. I had a pair with three tiny snaps in front, long, long ago. Something about her, the sweet awkwardness of her, made me long for my daughter, though Giselle was not at all like this girl.
I tried to imagine Giselle, doing this job. Since she was driven toward medical school with a ferocity that surprised both her father and me, it wouldn’t happen, but I liked the sunniness of Monday. Traitorously, I wondered if Giselle would be easier to deal with if she weren’t so ambitious.
“Let’s look at the three-bedroom first,” Monday said. “Hope you don’t mind a little climb.”
There was a smell of bacon in the air. The stairs twisted upward, solid concrete rimmed with wispy-looking wrought iron. When we stopped on the landing, stupendously high above the street, a tiny wave of vertigo moved over my brow. I clung to the railing, trying to steady myself, and focused on the horizon.
“Wow!” I said, a reflexive response to the view.
The mountains this afternoon were the color of a plain blue Crayola, jagged peaks dusted with snow above timberline. Above them, the sky was softly gray. Pikes Peak, blue and white and burly, spread his shoulders across the horizon, exactly centered—the father mountain stretching his arms to the north and south. The tourist literature called it America’s Mountain, a moniker that irked me. Daniel used to tease me about my possessiveness, but on this I was unmovable: it was not America’s mountain, it was mine.
“It’s great, isn’t it?” Monday said over my shoulder. “You never get used to a view like that, either. How could you?”
“I know.”
A door slammed behind us and the sound of heels clicking against concrete came toward us. A woman said, “Hey, Monday,” in a voice as throaty as Elvira. I turned around to see a thin, leggy woman with dark hair cut in urbane choppy layers head down the stairs.
“Good morning, Madame Mirabou,” Monday said.
The woman laughed. It was a rich sound, knowing. “How did it go Friday night?”
“You were right,” Monday said.
“Excellent.” I watched her descent, her knees showing in tan stockings beneath a green dress. “Maybe I should hang up a shingle.”
“Madame Mirabou’s School of Love.”
“Not bad.” The woman looked up as she made the last turn, and her eyes were bright, bright blue as they met mine. I could see she was my age, more or less. “It’s a good place to live,” she said. “I’d be your neighbor, though. Ask Monday if that’s a good idea.”
“Thanks.”
Monday said, “Come on in and let me show you the apartment.”
The tension in my chest built as we circled the rooms. It was an unoffensive place, with good closets and good views and a certain upscale beigeness that shouldn’t cause so much anxiety. I paused in the windowless kitchen with my hands over my middle, noticing how green my skin looked in the fluorescent light.
It made me think of a spot I loved in the old house, a niche in the kitchen set beneath a leaded glass window. I’d found a battered cherry wood table at a garage sale, and refinished it myself, and put it below the window with a blue glass vase on top. I liked best if there were sunflowers available at the florist, but any yellow flower was fine.
I didn’t love the house, but I’d loved that spot.
Now it was gone.
The hitch in my throat made me cough. Suddenly the idea of going around looking and looking was more than I could bear, especially when I had nothing to put inside any of them anyway, and I could better use the time trying to find a job to see me through until the insurance company
approved my claim. I didn’t love this apartment, but it would do for now.
I reached for my purse. “I’ll take it.”
Monday looked surprised, but she was no dummy. “Come on downstairs and we’ll write up the contract.”
Looking out the window, I said, “Will she be a good neighbor?”
“Who?”
“The one we saw out there. Madame whoever.”
“Oh, Roxanne.” Something flickered in her young eyes, gone before I could pinpoint it. “Yeah. She’s divorced with two kids, a son and a daughter in their teens—but they’re not noisy. I never get complaints or anything.”
“Has she been here long?”
“A year or so.” She waved me toward the door. “Let’s get back downstairs, all right?”
I wrote out the check a little later, my hands were shaking, but I was relieved to have made some kind of decision. The first one.
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BARBARA O'NEAL
Barbara O’Neal is the author of eleven novels of women’s fiction, which have been published in more than 15 countries around the world. She sold her first novel in her twenties, and has since won many awards, including two Colorado Book Awards and seven prestigious RITAs, including one for THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS in 2010 and HOW TO BAKE A PERFECT LIFE in 2012, which was also a Target Book Club pick. Barbara loves peaches, good olive oil, a perfect white wine, and all big dogs. She travels internationally, presenting workshops, hiking hundreds of miles, and of course, eating. She lives with her partner, a British endurance athlete, and their collection of cats and dogs, in Colorado Springs.
Copyright © 2003, 2014 Barbara Samuel
Book Production Sharon Schlicht
Cover by Damonza.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Gacela of the Bitter Root” by Federico García Lorca, translated by Edwin Honig; an excerpt from “In Another Mode” and an excerpt from “Variations” by Federico García Lorca, translated by Lysander Kemp; an excerpt from “Dance of the Moon in Santiago” by Federico García Lorca, translated by Norman di Giovanni; an excerpt from “Gacela of the Dark Death,” an excerpt from “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias,” an excerpt from “Ballad of the Sleepwalker,” an excerpt from “The Lizard Is Crying,” and an excerpt from “Tree, Tree” by Federico García Lorca, translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili; an excerpt from “Casida of the Reclining Woman,” an excerpt from “Gacela of Unforeseen Love,” and an excerpt from “Useless Song” by Federico García Lorca, translated by W. S. Merwin, from The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, copyright © 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Praise for Barbara Samuel
July
Prologue
October
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Thanksgiving
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Christmas
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
January
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
February
47
48
Acknowledgements
More Books
Excerpt: The Scent of Hours
About Barbara
The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel Page 34
