A Little Ray of Sunshine (14 page)

“Hi,” Luke said, waving his bionic hand.

“Um...” the woman said.

“Luke,” I scolded under my breath, then hopped off the car and looked at the lady. “Sorry.”

“What?” Luke looked from me to the woman, then back at me. “This isn’t your car?” He hopped off, buffed the place where his butt had been with his lower arm, then smiled at the woman. “Sorry. She’s in treatment. Very severe psychological issues.”

The woman glanced at me, then shrugged. “Okay.”

She walked over to the driver’s side, and I waited for Luke to catch up to me before I started back toward the hospital. We walked in silence until we got to the elevators. He hit the up button and stepped back.

“He’s in room 405,” he said.

“What? You’re not...?” I motioned toward the elevators. Luke shook his head.

“Dictionary. I’ll be back in a little while.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

He allowed one forced, stretched smile, then turned on his heel, tucked his hands in his pockets, and ambled down the hallway, his head lowered. I watched until he was out of sight, then remembered the box of tissues in my hand, and wandered out to find the redheaded nurse.

***

I made my way up to room 405 to find that Mom and Danny had put away their Scrabble game. Danny laughed and held out his hand to me, making me come in for a kiss on the cheek.

“This is my angel,” he said, smiling. “Saved me from a near-fatal case of indigestion.”

“Danny.” Mom’s eyes were red-rimmed, but she managed a small smile. Danny reached his other hand out to squeeze hers.

“Do I need to bring the doctor back in here to tell you all it was nothing?”

“Oh, yes!” Jess said quickly, then winked at me. “Dr. Cummings was—hoo boy!” She fanned herself.

Digs rolled his eyes, motioned to Mom and Jess. “These two practically fainted when he walked in. You missed out, EJ.”

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard and forcing a smile. “I guess I did.”

A half-hour later, visiting hours were over. Luke hadn’t returned, but I don’t think anyone was really surprised about that. Digs agreed to bring me and Jess to get Danny’s car at the Home Depot, and after some hugs and kisses, we were on our way. Jess kept up the conversation in the front seat with Digs, while I sat in the back and stared out the back window, feeling like I’d been hollowed out, left with nothing but a big whistling cavern inside. Although I had to admit, the whistling cavern beat the maelstrom I’d been through with Luke. At least I could breathe through the whistling cavern.

After we switched cars, Jess kept pretty quiet, not saying anything until we were most of the way back to the house. Even then, she was quiet about it, leaving room for me to pretend I didn’t hear her.

“You okay?”

I paused for a moment, my eyes on the road and my mind in a million places. I didn’t have the energy to lie, but more than that, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to confess, and she was the closest thing to a priest that I had handy, so I started talking.

“About six years ago, Luke’s doctor found a... thing at the base of his neck. I still don’t know what it was, exactly, but the doctors were worried that it might be cancer, and it was close to the spine, and that wasn’t good. He had to have surgery to take it out. He was great through it, of course, because he’s Luke. He joked about how good he’d look bald, never let it get him down. Or if he did, he sure as hell never let me see it.”

I took a deep breath through my nose, exhaled through my mouth, and blinked hard until the road was clear again.

“On the day he was going to go in to get the test results, I was supposed to meet him at the hospital, but I got there early. And as I sat in that waiting room, I just knew. I knew it was cancer, and I saw, in my head, the whole thing. How thin he would become. How much pain he’d be in. How long it would take and how hard it would be. And I knew he would die. I couldn’t deal with it.” I cleared my throat and forced myself to get out the next part, the real source of my powerful shame. “So I left the hospital and went home.”

“Oh,” Jess said, and whether the disappointment I heard in her voice was real or imagined, I couldn’t tell.

“It turned out to be nothing,” I went on. “Luke came home to find me freaked out and packing. And the thing was, he wasn’t even mad. He just got me a glass of wine and sat me down and we talked all night. He said that he understood, and that if the tables were turned, he might have done the same thing. Which was bullshit, but...” I sighed. I’d never told anyone this story before, and I was bad at it. “And then he asked me to marry him.”

“Wow,” Jess breathed.

“Yeah. He’d had the ring for a month, but didn’t want to be unfair to me, so he waited to ask me. I said yes, but...” I swiped at my face. “I mean, how could I love him and still marry him?”

“Well,” Jess said, “that’s what people do when they’re in love.”

“I would have screwed up so much bigger, given the chance,” I said. “I would have made him miserable and legally bound to the source. Luke... God, he just deserves so much better than that, you know? So, I left the next night.”

We fell into silence as I navigated the car into Danny’s driveway. I stopped the car, then turned to Jess.

“This angeling thing,” I said. “You say you can’t fix people, because you can’t interfere with free will or whatever. But what if someone were to come to you, to directly ask you to fix them? Could you do it then? If it was their will?”

I could feel Jess staring at me, and when I glanced her way, her expression was one of dubious concern.

“So,” she said finally, “exactly how are you planning on getting Luke to come to me?”

“Not Luke,” I said. “Me.”

After a long silence, I felt her hand land on mine, and she squeezed my fingers.

“We’ll start in the morning,” she said. “We should have caffeine for a project like this.”

***

It’s hard to just up and change who you are. Not just hard. Damn near impossible. The only other thing you can do is accept yourself for who you are, but what if who you are is unacceptable? What do you do then? You change, I guess. It’s either that or throw yourself off the nearest bridge. I don’t even know where my nearest bridge is, and if I did, I’d be too drunk to get there, anyway.

—Lilly Lorraine, in a letter to Danny Greene, undated

Twelve

“So, what kind of person do you want to be?” Jess angled her head down to meet the cappuccino she held in her hands. This time I opted to go inside Burgundy’s, where we sat in a corner up front, obscured from outside view by the lace curtains in the window, and conveniently to the backs of anyone hopping in for a quick cup to go. The freshness of seeing the real Luke was still with me, and I wanted that feeling to go away before I chanced any interaction with CEO Luke.

“What do you mean?” I asked, picking at my cranberry scone. “Isn’t there only one kind?”

She froze in mid-sip and stared at me. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean, there’s good people and bad people. I want to be a good person.”

She lowered her mug. “You think that if the whole world was divided into two camps, good and bad, you’d be in the bad camp? With the baby killers and the puppy beaters?”

I pondered that for a second, then shrugged. “Hadn’t thought of it that way. But I know I don’t belong with the firefighter heroes and the people who go to Africa to save the tiny, tiny babies.”

She snorted with angelic shock. “What could you possibly have done that was so bad?”

I blinked for a moment, wondering if she was being deliberately obtuse, then leaned forward and started ticking things off on my fingers, hoping I’d have enough for the job.

“I’m a loner. I don’t like people. I’m not particularly nice to people. I’ve lived in this town more than any other place, and I don’t remember anybody from here, and they don’t remember me. I’ve had exactly three real friends in my entire life—Danny, Luke and Digs—and I took off in the middle of the night without leaving so much as a note to let them know why I’d left, or even if I’d be back. I’m horrible to my mother who, despite her mountainous flaws, is just trying really hard to connect with me. I abandoned Luke when he needed me most. I completely flaked out on Danny when...” I lost my patience and dropped my hands. “Should I get maybe a chart?”

She held up her hands and started ticking off points of her own. “You came out to check on me when my car died.”

“Only because that guy from Springfield—”

“Ah ah! I am not done. Do I look done?”

I wasn’t sure if that was rhetorical or not, so I simply broke off a chunk of scone and popped it into my mouth to illustrate my compliance. She continued.

“You helped me when my car died. You didn’t call the cops when I kidnapped you. You took me with you to Colorado Springs, pretty much paying for everything along the way, then you drove me the rest of the way to Fletcher. You’ve been trying really hard with your mother, which is more than a lot of people would have done in your case, and you did it not for yourself, but for Danny. That’s selfless. Which is a good thing.” She sat back and eyed me. “And I think you do like people. I think you just want to disappoint them before they have a chance to disappoint you. You’re just a predisappointer, that’s all. It makes you a little paranoid, but it doesn’t make you a bad person.”

“Doesn’t make me a
good
person,” I muttered.

“Nobody’s all good or all bad. Everybody has positive qualities and faults and...” She leaned forward, a stunned look on her face. “You seriously don’t know this? You are thirty years old, right?”

I leaned forward, too. “Don’t talk down to me, angel. At least I don’t think I’m a mythological creature.”

She laughed, sat back and ticked off another finger. “And you’re funny.”

“That’s a goodness-neutral quality,” I said.

She glanced down at her coffee. “Is it too early to put alcohol in this?”

“I drive people to drink,” I said, ticking off another point for my side.

“Okay,” she said brightly, smoothing the napkin on her lap. “Back to the original question. If you had a completely clean slate and weren’t the horrible, terrible, spouting font of evil you seem to think you are, what kind of person would you want to be? Not good or bad, I want qualities.”

I opened my mouth and she held up her hand, glancing at her watch. Ah, the sixty-seconds-to-think thing again. Fine. So I sat, and I thought, taking only a brief moment out to flash a quick
What are you gonna do?
smile to a woman who shot a quizzical glance at the angel timing my silence.

“Okay,” Jess said, finally lowering her hand. “Go.”

“I want to be kind,” I said. “Forgiving. Thoughtful. Loyal. Honest. I’ll keep funny, but I don’t want to be a mean funny. You know. Not funny at the expense of others. I want to be generous, but not just with money. I don’t want to be goody-goody—I hate those people—but just good enough to squeeze into the Heaven by a hair. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t give up. I want to be a person who has”—I met her eye for the first time since starting the monologue—”courage.”

And then of course there was the part I didn’t say:
I want to be a person who’d be worthy of a guy like Luke.

She watched me for a long time, her eyes narrowing in thought. I knew what she was going to say. That it was impossible. That it was too much to expect. That Rome wasn’t built in a day, that even if she were a real angel with wings and a halo and a direct line to God and all of his divine power, even then she wouldn’t be able to pull off a miracle of this magnitude. The truth hurts, but I’d never known Jess to lie, and so I felt pretty sure I knew what was coming.

So imagine my surprise when she leaned forward, smiled, and said, “We’ll start with kindness.”

***

Getting fixed by an angel is shockingly like boot camp. You think you can handle it, and then you’re in a brand-new kind of hell you could have never imagined if you didn’t have to live it.

Like going shopping.

With your mother.

For bridesmaids’ dresses.

“You must be kind to your mother through the whole trip,” Jess had said when she sprung the news on me about how we were spending the day, “no matter what she says.”

“But—”

“Ah!” She held up her hand. “The whole trip. No matter what. It’s one thing to want to change; it’s another thing entirely to do it. Plus, bonus, this also contributes to your being the kind of person who doesn’t give up when things get hard.” She grinned. “Two birds, one stone. How cool is that?”

I decided not to answer. The answer I had in my head was unkind.

“I’m so excited!” Mom said, clapping her hands together as we headed into The Bridal Boutique. That was the actual name of the store. The owner, an impossibly energetic woman named Patsy Frey, was a lot of things, but creative wasn’t one of them. Patsy gasped and clapped when she saw us coming through the front door. I hoped to all things holy that the display was fake, because if genuine, it was kinda creepy.

Patsy bounded over to us immediately, giving Mom a big smiley hug and then holding her hand with a well-practiced look of sympathy.

“How’s Danny?” she asked, patting my mother’s hand.

Mom sighed. “He’s fine. He came home from the hospital yesterday and rested, and now he’s up and running around like it never happened.”

Patsy rolled her eyes as if to say
men
, then patted Mom on the shoulder. “How frightening that must have been for you.”

“It was,” Mom said. “But it’s a good thing. Now the doctors will be keeping a sharp eye on him, so I can rest easy knowing that if there ever is anything to worry about, it’ll be caught early.”

Patsy threw up her hands, celebrating Danny’s severe indigestion.

“It’s a blessing then!” Her focus shifted to me, her eyes forced into tiny slits by her massive smile. “You must be Lilly’s daughter, Emmy. So nice to meet you. You are just as lovely as Lilly described you!”

I glanced at Jess. I was wearing ripped jeans and a faded, oversized orange t-shirt that read
L’Eggo my Eggo
. I didn’t have a lick of makeup on and my hair was hoisted up into a ponytail I’d thrown on in the car ride over.

Jess raised her eyebrows. Mom cleared her throat. I smiled at Patsy.

“Thank you,” I said.

Jess nodded. Mom beamed with pride and put her arm around Jess’s shoulder.

“And this is Jess, my bridesmaid.” She leaned closer to Patsy. “They’re just friends,” she said in an attempt at a discreet whisper. Jess and I exchanged kind, gracious smiles, hers saying,
See? It’s not so hard
, and mine saying,
My kingdom for a spike I can throw myself on.

“So,” Patsy said, leading us to the big dressing room in the back. “I understand we’re in the market for a bridesmaid dress, and a maid of honor dress, is that right? Have you thought about colors?”

“Whatever the girls want,” Mom said. “I’d just like them to be pretty and comfortable.” She tossed me a smile, then moved over to a rack of dresses Patsy had set up for us and started riffling through them. “Although, I was thinking, maybe something in a pale yellow. Maybe peach. I don’t know. Something classic, sleeveless. A little Jackie O-ish. And—oh!”

She pulled out a bright pink dress with big puffy sleeves and a massive skirt held aloft by enough tulle to make Little Bo Peep’s little sheep-losing ticker give out right there on the spot. I opened my mouth to make a comment to that effect, but Jess put her hand on my arm, so instead, I forced a bright smile.

“So, who gets to try it on first?” I said. “Me or Jess?”

Pick Jess. Pick Jess. Pick Jess
. But instead, Mom just shared a smile with Jess and deftly put it back. I shot a look at the angel, who wouldn’t meet my eye.

So... this was a test. Okay. Fine. I mentally rolled up my sleeves, determined to pass with flying colors. I went to my mother’s side and started going through dresses. I’d show them who could play well with others, damnit. I pulled out an ivory A-line and held it up to myself.

Mom’s smile dropped. Patsy gasped in horror.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “How did that get in there?”

And she took it from me. I looked back and forth among the embarrassed faces.

“What? What did I do? I was trying.” I looked at Jess. “I was really trying.”

“I know,” Jess said, “but you know it’s bad taste to wear white to a wedding, right?”

I blinked. I didn’t know. “Why?”

“Because that’s the bride’s color,” Patsy said. “I’m so sorry, Lilly. I really don’t know how that got in—”

“You’re wearing white, Mom? Seriously? To your eighth wedding? Who do you think you’re kidding?”

And... silence. Mom stared at me, her eyes narrowing, and Jess put her head in her hand and murmured, “Oh, no.” Patsy froze, the dress hanging in the air, and I don’t think anyone breathed for a while.

Oh, hell
, I thought.
Chip, meet block.

“And—and—and—why shouldn’t you wear white?” I sputtered, smiling wider than was either natural or necessary. “This is your day, and white is perfect. It goes so well with your skin tone—and—and—this is the first wedding for you and Danny.”

Jess raised her head and looked hopefully at Mom, whose expression softened a touch. Patsy lowered the dress slowly, like a sniper not sure whether the negotiator would pull it off alone or not.

“So it’s kind of like your first wedding,” I went on. “Which makes white perfect for you and absolutely inappropriate for me.”

“It’s okay,” Mom said, flipping through the dresses. “I’m not wearing white. I’ve got this beautiful little vintage ivory number, and I’m absolutely insane about it.”

I stared at her. “Ivory’s not white?”

“It’s close to white,” Patsy said, staring with disapproval at the dress in her hand.

“So why were you giving me a hard time about that one?” I asked.

“No one gave you a hard time.” Mom pulled a lilac full-length off the rack, but Patsy shook her head. I looked at Jess to provide some sense of sanity. She gave me one look that somehow contained both sympathy and warning.

“Fine,” I breathed, then dove back in and snagged a light blue number off the rack without looking at it. “This will go well with my eyes, don’t you think? I would really like to try this one on.”

Mom’s face lit up, Patsy began to flutter about, and I knelt to untie my sneakers. Jess stepped closer to hold the dress for me and whispered, “Nice save.”

“Thanks.” I stood up and looked at the dress I had chosen. It had this weird wrinkly, see-through fabric over a layer of white satin with, hand to God, huge blue tulips imprinted on it. I looked up at Jess.

“Oh, God help me,” I muttered.

Jess smiled and leaned in. “It could be worse,” she said under her breath. “At least it doesn’t have a bow on the butt.”

***

The dresses we ended up with were actually okay. They were a dusky blue satin, spaghetti-straps, a-lined and knee-length. No butt bows. No tulips. To distinguish me as maid of honor, I got a matching satin drape; I hadn’t felt that girly since prom, and I kinda liked it.

Afterward, we went out for hot chocolate. Mom ordered whipped cream, and drank half her mug, which impressed me quite a bit. We hurried home to make sure Danny was still alive—he was, and none too amused that we’d worried otherwise—and then we had a nice dinner together in which neither Mom nor I said anything too bad. By the time the day ended with me, Jess and Mom enjoying a glass of wine on the back deck, the whole New Me thing seemed... doable. For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful. It was a nice sensation.