Page 8 of Something Borrowed

Cal pulled his wallet from his back pocket and withdrew a business card. “Email me a list of what you want done.”

A small gust of wind kicked up as he went to pass the card to her, stealing it from his hand and sending it fluttering toward the ground.

Vic bent in a flash to save the card from landing in a mud puddle. That was another thing that should be done around here, Cal observed. The potholes in the gravel driveway hollered for attention. As she stooped, something square and orange threw itself out of her pocket and landed by her feet.

Cal reached out and rescued the package. It was a bar of soap—really good-smelling soap. He was fully intending to hand it back to her, of course, but Vic, suddenly pale-faced and frantic, snatched it from him like he was stealing it or like it might burst into flame or something. She shoved it deep into her pocket again, along with his business card. What the heck?

He didn’t get a chance to ask what the deal was with the soap because she’d turned on her high heels and bolted back to her house.

Weird. Cal lingered by his van for a moment. Should he go after her to see if she was all right? Or confirm that she still wanted him to work for her after all this, whatever “this” was? No, he decided. She’d email him or she wouldn’t. He honestly couldn’t decide which option he was hoping for more. No, that was a lie. He wanted her to contact him. Of course, he did. But what was with him and his attraction to women with issues? Okay, scratch that. He kind of knew now. Still, he hated that the more problems a woman seemed to have, the more drawn he was to them. And with a mother like hers, plus whatever the thing with the soap was, Vic seemed like she might have, well, at least a problem or two.

Chapter 6

Instead of time dragging the way Vic often felt it did, the weekend sped by too quickly. And with every passing hour, the knot in her stomach grew. For once, though, she couldn’t blame her stress on Audra. It was all on her. Stupid, stupid her.

She spent as much time as possible out in their yard under the pretense of “winterizing” and did indeed put away the hoses, rake some leaves, and cut back a few shrubs, including two deep green, waxy-leaved holly bushes that framed the mostly neglected garden shed. It should be a shame that it was neglected, but she couldn’t help thinking it was prettier this way—slightly ramshackle with the paint on its antique multipaned windows flaking and almost non-existent, and a fading red wooden door still bright against its cedar shake siding. The door was a vivid contrast to the now-leafless grapevines climbing the building. Every detail was so . . . textured.

In her mind’s eye, she clicked several pictures, wanting to capture the memories for—well, just to have, that’s all.

She welcomed the random thoughts with almost obsessive delight. Anything to keep her from dwelling on the soap bar stashed in her closet and her dilemma about rapidly approaching Monday morning. Was Madeline even serious? How could she be?

And then there was how she’d reacted to the stupid bar of soap falling out of her pocket in front of Cal. He probably thought she was a complete headcase for grabbing it and running off the way she had. Ah, well, his potentially low opinion of her was the least of her worries. She just hoped her money would still be good in his eyes. She needed someone for the work around the place. They didn’t have to like her.

There was one small grace note in all the bleakness of her incessant worrying and self-flagellation. Michael texted her, not once, not twice, but three times! Apparently, he was in Italy for a couple of weeks. The life her boy lived! It sometimes made her happy, though just as often made her sad. He was too much a chip off the old block—the block being her—for Vic’s liking. Would he never settle down, find his true place in life? His true people?

They were only little messages. Very casual. One about a restaurant where he’d been served five courses of anchovies, each prepared a different way. He sent photos with that one, each plate more delectable looking than the last. She practically drooled seeing them, which is exactly what she told him, restraining herself to one emoji in her chipper message.

The second one was a selfie taken in front of a huge fountain, captioned “Celia joined me,” and showed Michael with a stunningly beautiful blonde with large, liquid brown eyes. She was almost, in fact, as beautiful as Michael himself. It disappeared a second later, and a little balloon appeared with the words “Michael deleted a message.” So apparently that one wasn’t meant for Mom. The third and final one was though.

“Hope you’re doing OK, Mama.”

Mama. What he’d called her when he was little and still did from time to time. Her incredibly sweet boy. People often talked about their children being “the one thing they’d done right.” Vic didn’t flatter or delude herself. She hadn’t done anything right by her son, whom she’d had so young. She’d been a shitshow teenage parent and not much better as she aged. But she had loved him. Did love him. So much. She just wished she’d had more to offer him in terms of how to build a life that might be remotely satisfying. Instead, she’d paraded a series of baby daddies through his young life, always naively sure they were the one. And Michael had always thought so too. At least, in his case, it was understandable. He really was a child. At first.

By the time he was thirteen or so, though, he was smarter than her and refused to buy into any fantasies about creating a family other than her and him. And as he grew older, he was jaded and flippant about romantic love in general. The irony that she’d created circumstances that made her beautiful, kind, once-upon-a-time-so-open-and-trusting boy into exactly the kind of callous, player man that had caused her so much pain over and over again sickened her. She had tried to talk about the trauma she’d inadvertently caused him, but he made it very clear that was a no-go. He didn’t want heart-to-hearts with his mom. He was fine. He was better than fine. He was great.

The rules were clear now. No pressure. No expectations. If Vic was careful to abide by these rules, Michael inevitably reached out to her. A little, at least.

“All good,” she wrote, inserting a smiley face. The tiny message zipped through the ether. And then Vic let herself send him a heart too.

Sunday evening after dinner, feeling guilty for avoiding Audra for most of the day, she filled Audra’s ensuite’s large bathtub, added a generous amount of Epsom salts and liberal dashes of pure lavender essential oil. For once, Audra found nothing to complain about and soaked for a solid hour.

She even muttered a sleepy, “That felt good,” when Vic got her settled into bed.

And now, suddenly, it was Sunday night, late, and Vic was alone, pacing in her bedroom, the same bedroom she’d grown up in. The four-poster bed had the same princessy white bedroom furniture with a puffy pink comforter, matching bed skirt, and ruffled pillow shams that Audra had purchased for Vic when she was five or six. (The sheets were new, and only because the original pink ones had worn right through. Vic had chosen a plain light gray.)

All the pictures and art on the walls were the same incongruous hangings, added to at various ages, but never pared down. Two curly-haired white poodles with pink ceramic bows danced in white ceramic frames. And then there were the ballerinas. Three different waif-like forms in pink leotards and tutus on black velvet backgrounds. Creamy ivory ceramic pointe shoes tied with real silk ribbons hung nearby. In retrospect, all the nods to ballet were very strange. Vic had never taken dance. The back of the bedroom door was a collage of teen heart throbs from magazines like Tiger Beat and Teen.

There were other pieces too, and taking them all in, Vic marveled. How, when coming back to visit over the years, had she never thought to redecorate or, at the very least, box up some of this stuff? If she was going to stay in Greenridge and remain as caregiver for Audra—but wait? Was she really going to do that? Long-term? She had told Audra she would, and she meant to keep her word, yet with how it was going so far, her heart pounded at the idea, the way a deer’s might when it smelled a predator—

She shook her head. She couldn’t face that right now. And regardless of how long she’d be in Greenridge this time, she should redecorate, make her room her own for her adult self. She used to tell herself that the dreck hardly registered. That she’d grown blind to it years ago. Nowadays, she wondered if it was more that too big a part of herself had been hijacked by her childhood, had never really grown up. And not in a good way.

Thanks for that happy thought, brain.

She also still had less than no idea what she was going to do in the morning. Should she humiliate herself by showing up at the Second Chance Shop? If she did, would Madeline laugh at her for thinking she was serious and send her away? The woman couldn’t really want her to stay and work, could she? And what was with telling her that she had to come up with a dollar amount to work off? It was ridiculous, but be that as it may, Vic found herself kneeling in her closet, feeling around behind decades of abandoned footwear for the box she kept safely out of range of prying eyes.

The box. For something that was literally a simple cardboard box—an old apple box, in fact—it held some very complex emotions. She didn’t want it to be, yet it was kind of a source of pleasure and pride or something. Less convolutedly, it was also a source of cringing shame.

Vic carried the box, half-reverently, half-disgustedly, to the bed and lifted off the top. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t keep her from seeing the contents in vivid detail. She could list each item with detail worthy of an insurance evaluator, could feel the heft of each piece in her hand even when she wasn’t physically holding them, and knew the scented items by heart too.