Bad Heiress Day (17 page)

G
lynnis wrapped her in a big hug. “I’ve missed you. How does it feel to have made it through the holidays?”

“Some good, some bad.” Darcy added sugar to her ice tea. “I lost it a few times, but I sort of expected that to happen.”

Glynnis sighed. “The first holidays—all of them, for the first year—are hard. But then you make new memories, find new ways to do the things you can’t do anymore and it gets better.” She lifted her ice tea glass in a toast. “You make new friends, who give you splendid new gifts, so you can do your favorite things in new ways.”

Darcy laughed. “Oh, so you like the sun tea jar, huh? I wasn’t sure you’d give up your kettle so easily. I actually found a chicken teakettle, Glynnis, and came—” she put her fingers up together “—
this
close to getting it for you, but the salesman said it made the most awful noise.”

Glynnis burst out laughing as she stood up and went to a corner cabinet. She opened the door with a “Ta da!”
and exposed the exact kettle Darcy had been discussing. Someone had beat her to the punch.

“Oh, he’s right,” Glynnis chuckled. “It does. Ed thought I was
butchering
chickens in here the first time it went off, not making tea. I like your gift much better. Wherever did you find one with hens on it?”

Darcy smiled. This gift had been one of her better inspirations. She was glad Glynnis was enjoying it so much. “Actually, I had it made. The woman at the pottery shop told me she had a special technique for painting on glass. So I bought the jar and had her paint the chickens on it. She liked how it came out so much that she decided to stock the jars for other customers. And thank you for the hankies, by the way, I love carrying them. It’s so much more elegant to weep into a hankie than to sniffle into Kleenex.”

“‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ Psalm 30. Your joy is coming, Darcy dear, I think even you can see that.”

“There are days where it feels like it’s been years that Dad has been gone. Then there are times when it feels like it happened yesterday. I don’t remember it that way with my mother.”

Glynnis selected a particularly well-frosted Christmas cookie. “It’s more complicated when you’re an adult. You’ve got different people pulling on you for different things, you understand things in a different way. You can see, I think, farther down the timeline in both directions—past and future—and get a glimpse of how someone’s death defines part of your life.”

Darcy grunted. “I don’t feel like I can see toward the future at all. I have no idea where things are going.”

“Nonsense,” Glynnis countered, swallowing the last of her cookie. “You can see very clearly. You just want to see
farther than you ought to right now. Like I said, sweetie, they call it—”

“Faith, not agreement,” Darcy finished for her. The woman had a way of drumming theology into you with sugarcoated accuracy. “I understand that, but if I can’t see, how can I plan? How do I know the things I’m doing are what God has in mind?”

“Well, now,” replied Glynnis. “That’s the harder part.”

Darcy choked on her bite of cookie. “It gets
harder?
”

Glynnis didn’t seem to think that question required an answer. Her eyes were two whopping pools of
course it does, hon
as she said, “When you start stepping out in faith—like you’re doing—you’ve got to be careful to watch who’s doing the planning.”

“Well, that’s exactly what I mean. How am I supposed to know if I’m just making my own plans or if I’m looking to see what it is God is asking me to do? I mean, this whole thing has sort of felt like one long argument with God. Weird stuff plopping down in front of my face that I’m suddenly supposed to deal with. I don’t exactly have a clear set of road maps here, Glynnis. I’m pretty much making this up as I go along.”

“That’s good, that’s good!” For a scary second Darcy thought she was going to clap hands or give her a gold star. “Uncomfortable, yes,” she added, seeing Darcy’s look, “but good. Let me see if I can explain it better.” She sat for a moment, drumming her fingers against one another, her lips pursed. “Okay now, just give me a minute.” More silence, then a slight nod. “Ah, I know where to start.” She shifted in her seat to face Darcy more directly. It was then, for some reason, that Darcy noticed Glynnis was wearing a pin.

The Standard Issue Grandma Gaudy Rhinestone Bee Pin.

It seemed as if every old lady on the planet owned a gaudy rhinestone bee pin. The one where the outstretched wings were gilt silver, the bee’s body made up of black enamel stripes and rhinestones set in gold, its shiny little legs spread across the wearer’s chest, lapel, whatever. Entirely too big—beyond bumblebee life-size. Every older woman somehow had one. As if it came free with the purchase of every
Old Lady Handbook.

Why would Glynnis own one? Then again, why
shouldn’t
Glynnis own one? The woman was such a contradiction. A fabulously vibrant person, elegant, fashionable, but with the oddest touches of “standard old lady” peeking out here and there. Darcy found herself wondering if her own mother would have come to own one had she lived. Would Darcy herself wake up one morning to discover she, too, had become one of the bee-pin-wearing old ladies? Was the butterfly pin she bought last spring just a warm-up? The gateway drug of elder-jewelry?

“…so you have to keep asking yourself if…Darcy? Darcy? Where did you go, hon? You were miles away.”

Darcy shook herself back to the conversation at hand. “Ugh. I’m sorry, Glynnis, my brain just seems to take off in its own directions these days. It’s terrible, I’m sorry.”

Glynnis actually looked pleased. “No, no, as a matter of fact that’s exactly what I’m talking about—in a way.”

“I’m not following you, Glynnis.”

Glynnis scrunched up her forehead in thought. “Let me see. Let’s see. Oh, I’ve got it. Do you ever feel like a particular thought is chasing you? When it feels more as if the thought found you than you having the thought? More as if you’ve been given the thought rather than having made it up on your own?”

Darcy had to think about it, but yes, she had. “Yes. You know, I have. The whole Restoration Project idea. It just sort of
came
to me. Details and all. Like someone opened up the top of my head and poured it in, completely formulated and everything. And yes, it
did
feel like the thought found me. I never thought about it in that way before, but that’s
exactly
how it felt.”

“And how did it feel, to have that thought find you?”

“Well, before we got into the messy business of actually making it happen—which was scary—it felt wonderful. Like…um…how I’d imagine love at first sight feels. All warm and energized. Like I couldn’t wait to get started. Like I’d just plugged into something really, really important.”

Glynnis was smiling. “It’s a real kicker, isn’t it?”

That woman had the funniest expressions. “Yep, Glynnis, a real kicker.”

“The easy ones—the pretty ones—are always a kick. It’s the hard ones—the tough ones—that feel more like a kick in the pants. Those are how you really know.”

Darcy shot Glynnis a look. “You know I’m not following you. You’re going to have to offer more of an explanation than that.”

Glynnis took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, Lord,” she said as if He’d just walked in off the back deck or something, “I’m gonna need a little help with the words. This isn’t exactly a clear-cut concept.” She squinted her eyes, thinking hard. Darcy found herself wondering if she was supposed to say Amen or some such thing.

“Near as I can figure, God tries to be as clear as He can with us. Trouble is, we’re not exactly the world’s greatest listeners. We spend lots of our time telling God what we
want, and not too much time hushing up so He can tell us what He wants from us.” She opened her eyes. “With me so far, hon?”

“Uh-huh. I get that part.”

“Where the real work of heaven happens, though, most times isn’t in the stuff we want. Lots of times it’s in the stuff we’d rather
not
do. The messes we’d rather not touch, the people we’d rather leave alone, the folks and ideas that rub us the wrong way.”

Glynnis looked at her, checking for understanding, but Darcy didn’t really have a response to that. She purely motioned for Glynnis to go on.

“It’s easy to jump on the bus when it’s going your way. It’s when you feel the bus turning down a street you hadn’t planned that you need to make sure you stay on.”

“You lost me on that one.”

Glynnis squinted her eyes tight again, searching for words. “You love this project, right? It makes your heart beat faster, you couldn’t walk away from it if you tried. Feels as if it lives right in here, doesn’t it?” She tapped her heart, just under the bee.

“Yes.”

“That’s good. And I’ve no doubt—not one at all—that this is what God had in mind for you. What I want you to be on the lookout for, though, is the part of it that isn’t so attractive. The one thing that’s really gotten under your skin.”

Darcy knew the answer even before Glynnis finished her explanation. It was the thought that had been hounding her for days, despite every attempt to shake it off. Michelle Porter. The angry young mother who refused The Restoration Project.

Glynnis eyed her. “You already know what it is, don’t you. Look at your hand. It’s just about choking that napkin.”

“It’s Michelle Porter. The mom whose baby is dying. I can’t get her out of my head. I can’t just brush off that nasty letter she wrote rejecting The Restoration Project.”

“Really got under your skin, didn’t she?”

“She was really vindictive about declining, that’s for sure.”

“Lashing out?”

“Big time. That was one bitter woman. Angry. She actually called me a misguided fluffhead or something.”

Glynnis was still eyeing her. “And you know nothing about lashing out in grief, about being angry with people whose lives look like they have all the corners neatly sewn up when yours is coming apart at the seams?”

“I never acted like that. Glynnis, she was downright mean.”

“I know. People can get vicious when they’re really hurting, can’t they?”

“She doesn’t want to have anything to do with this whole thing. She’s made that pretty clear, if you ask me.”

Glynnis sat back and folded her arms. “And you think she’s just a miscalculation, an error in judgment? That God steered her into the path of this project just so she could get run over?”

“Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that I need to listen, because God may be telling me to get cozy with a woman who wants to bite my head off?”

Glynnis clapped her hands together. “Yes-siree. And you might not see a speck of satisfaction from the whole deal. But sometimes, that’s where we really put the feet on our faith. Like Jesus said, it’s a piece of cake to love the people who love you back. It’s the folks who tick you off that are the hard ones to love.”

Darcy shot her a look. “I’m pretty sure ‘piece of cake’ did not enter Jesus’ vocabulary.”

“Yes, well, I do like to paraphrase.”

Darcy rested her chin in her hand. “Glynnis, I’m
done
growing for now. I ache from all the growing I’ve done. From all the stretching and mucking and grieving and learning.”

“Good.”

“No, not good.”

“Yes, good. That’s just the kind of place where God does His best work. This week, try spending time just
listening
to the Lord. Letting Him know you’re trying to listen, that you’re available, and even just the tiniest bit willing.”

“But Glynnis, this is the week—”

“So God doesn’t know what’s on your schedule? You can’t even
begin
to know what the Lord Almighty has planned for those women and their lives. How about you just hush up and let the Lord have the floor? You might be amazed at what you see.”

J
anuary 9, 2002. A nice day for fresh starts. Of course she hadn’t actually chosen the day—Jean Tinsdale, The Restoration Project’s very first recipient, had. Still, Darcy felt a proprietary sort of approval.

Nice day or not, Darcy was extremely nervous. They’d had no less than six recommendations for this particular salon, but Darcy couldn’t help thinking that only Ernestine could pull off something like this. Visions kept invading her brain of a fragile woman, bawling her eyes out in front of a salon mirror, wearing the most atrocious haircut imaginable.

“But dah-ling, it is time for something with drama! Time to be bold!” her imaginary stylist would be saying, waving his scissors like a rapier. “Wait till you see what we do with you in makeup! No one will recognize you.”

And the imaginary recipient would cry harder. In her brain, Darcy would hear slews of curses sent up to heaven on her behalf. Distraught, overdyed women calling all of
heaven down on Darcy Nightengale’s misguided meddling head.

Why had she ever thought staying anonymous would be a good idea? It meant she had to stay out of sight, out of the picture when the women received “their days.” They’d come to call them that—simply “their days.” Spas always had elegant little names for these kinds of packages, these full-day full-tilt indulgences. But they never fit the quiet, important purpose they had for The Restoration Project. They became, simply, “their days.”

By “her days,” though, it was simply a Thursday, and school had started back up that week. Darcy discovered she was all but useless—forgetting to pack Paula’s lunch, unable to find Mike’s field trip permission slip—locked in a fog of preoccupation. It was all she could do to keep Mike from missing his bus, but finally at 8:16, quiet descended upon the house for sixty full seconds before the phone rang.

“Happy Inauguration Day, Madam President,” came Kate’s voice over the other end of the phone. She hummed a few bars of Hail to the Chief, now a habit of hers. “I think I’m going to go out of my mind today.”

Darcy poured herself a third cup of tea. “Me, too. I’m brain dead. Nervous. It’s like having to watch the birth of your baby from behind a secret window. I’ve wiped the same counter down at least ten times.”

“I can’t stand not being there. You know, we could just
happen
to book ourselves a couple of manicures there. No one would know—they’ve never been told who funds the project. We could even wear hats and sunglasses or something.”

Darcy was just about to put the milk away in the freezer before she caught herself at the last minute.
“Tempting, but too risky. If we did it once, we’d convince ourselves we could do it every time, and someday someone would put the pieces together. No Kate, we’ve got to stay clear of this. Maybe it will get easier as time goes by.”

Kate snorted into the phone, then yelled as Darcy heard a glass shatter on the other end. “Not a chance, Dar. Great, now I’m down to three water glasses. We’ll be drinking out of paper cups if I keep this up.”

“A tea date isn’t gonna cut it today. We need to do something more drastic. Something more engrossing.”

“We could try doing our taxes?”

“Very funny.”

“Drive to Kentucky and play the ponies?”

“It’s
January,
Kate. And since when do either of us bet?”

“I don’t. But I was thinking it had to be something really drastic.”

“Let’s stick with
comfortably drastic
—it’s practically our theme song.” Darcy realized she’d left the sink tap running for the last ten minutes and sighed as she turned it off.

“Tiny tattoos with our company logo?”

That made Darcy laugh so hard she spit tea out over the counter. “What kind of brew are you drinking this morning? It sounds like you’ve been hitting something harder than the Tetley’s tiny tea leaves. And we don’t even
have
a company logo.”

“We should.”

“Sure, fine, but not today.”

“If we don’t do something big today, Dar, I’m gonna crawl out of my skin. I haven’t been this nervous since my wedding day.”

Darcy found that hard to believe, but then again maybe not. She was hard-pressed herself to think of a day when
her stomach had been in this many knots. What to do? What to do? Why hadn’t they seen this coming and planned something?

It popped into her head, an unwelcome idea she’d have dismissed in a nanosecond before her earlier talk with Glynnis.
No,
she countered,
that’d surely be a bad idea.

The thought persisted. Darcy resisted. She wasn’t ready for this. There wasn’t even a solid reason, just a knee-jerk of reluctance, a purely emotional response. Unbidden, Glynnis’s words came back to her. No, this isn’t what she would have planned to do today. Somebody Else, however, seemed to want it on the agenda.

“Kate,” Darcy began, squinting her eyes shut, “how would you like to meet Glynnis today?” She didn’t even expound upon it with “I think you two would like each other,” or “I’ve been meaning to get the two of you together.” She just let the question hang nervously in the air.

“You know,” Kate said, after what seemed like a disastrously long pause, “I’ve kinda been wanting to meet her. Why not today?” Darcy could tell by the slight edge to Kate’s tone of voice that she had been rather aware of the fact that Darcy had not yet introduced them. That it might have even become a sticking point had she let it go on longer.

Touché God. Lord Almighty 1, Darcy Nightengale O. Game, set, lunch.

“It’s settled, then. Rockwood Pottery, eleven-thirty.”

“I’ll call Glynnis. Whether or not she can meet us, I’ll meet you there at eleven-thirty. We can stay and shop until it’s time for the kids to come home.” Darcy put the last of the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher.

“Only one problem now, Dar.”

“What?”

“How am I supposed to kill the three hours until then?”

Darcy chuckled. “We could do something radical like clean our houses?” She punched the buttons to turn the dishwasher on to soak and scour. The waffles hadn’t exactly been cooperative. Or maybe the chef hadn’t exactly been on the ball this morning….

“What? High-level presidential types like us? No way, I’m going for Chips Ahoy! and an episode of
Oprah.
Maybe even Judge What’s-Her-Face.”

“You do know how to kill an hour well, Mrs. Owens.”

“Don probably wishes I knew how to kill a germ better.”

“I’ll make you a deal—one clean bathroom, one episode of
Oprah,
then lunch. Best of both worlds.” Darcy opened the dishwasher again—she’d forgotten to put the soap in.

“Can I drag the television into the bathroom?”

“How you clean your bathroom is your own business. Eleven-thirty, then?”

“Got it.”

“Okay.”

“Dar?”

“Yep?”

“We’re doing something wonderful today. You know that, don’t you? It’s amazing.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Yep. See ya, girl.”

Darcy hung up the phone and sighed, thinking that maybe the two parts of her world were going to collide, not combine. Still, she somehow knew that this was the right path, even if it was wildly uncomfortable. She looked up at the sky as she punched in Glynnis’s number.
Okay, Lord, your serve. Am I allowed to point out that I’m not really thrilled about this?

Darcy wasn’t the least bit surprised that Glynnis was free. Now even more nervous, Darcy decided to skip
Oprah
in favor of cleaning two bathrooms. She was sure today’s episode would be something like “Women Whose Friends Can’t Stand Each Other.”

Darcy was halfway through spraying the bathtub with Scrubbing Bubbles when the phone rang. She pulled off her rubber gloves and snatched the cordless phone up from the bathroom floor. “Hello?”

Jack’s voice responded, humming “Hail to the Chief.”

“Oh, great, now you’re picking up Kate’s habits. Very funny.”

“Just wanted to say hi on your big day.”

Darcy hunched the phone up on one shoulder and pulled her glove back on. One of these days she was going to get one of those headset phones before her shoulder became permanently cocked under one ear. “I wish. It’s not really
my
day at all. I don’t get to do anything but just sit here and be insanely nervous. What if she hates her hair? What if she has some kind of allergic reaction to the skin care products and we end up putting her in the hospital?”

“You’re being ridiculous, Dar. None of that’s going to happen.” She heard Jack’s other line start to ring.

“Do you need to get that?”

“No, I’ll let it go into voice mail. So I forgot to ask you, what are you going to do today? Want to have lunch?”

Darcy winced and bit her lip. She should have thought of that first. “Oh, no, I just made plans. Kate’s as nuts as I am, so we’re meeting for lunch. I’m going to introduce her to Glynnis. It’s a rather terrifying prospect.”

“They haven’t met yet? Really?”

Darcy blasted the toilet bowl with white foam. “Yes, really. They’re a bit different from each other, don’t you think? I’m not at all sure this is going to work.”

“I think they’re a lot alike, Dar. They’ll probably love each other, and you’ll call me at 2:00 p.m. saying ‘What was I worried for?’ and telling me how you could barely get a word in edgewise.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to join us for lunch? We promise not to discuss hair color.” It was a poor joke, and she wasn’t surprised when Jack didn’t laugh. He didn’t sound like he was in much of a joking mood.

“No, thanks, it’s probably better that I stay here anyway.” His phone rang again. “The phones are going nuts and people keep running into each other’s offices with the latest rumor. Best I stay close.”

“Okay.” She didn’t envy Jack one bit. He sounded tense. She was sure Canterbury Manufacturing Industries was not a nice place to be these days.

The morning dragged by. Darcy’s mind skittered a thousand different directions, pondering Jack’s work, what Glynnis would think of Kate, what Kate would think of Glynnis, what was happening to Jean and her friend at the salon. Were they going through the same experience, the same coming back to life that she had felt with Kate? What if it was awkward and forced? What if the massage felt invasive or the person doing her facial made some disparaging remark? Doug and Meredith had gone over with the salon staff—twice, in fact—how fragile these women were, how neglected the nurture and social sides of their lives had become. For some of them it may have been their first “nonnecessity” outing in months. The first time they’d done something—anything—for themselves.

They have their best friends by their sides, she reminded herself. That can make anything better. This particular woman, as a matter of fact, had asked a dear friend to come visit for the occasion. They’d been close years back, still talked by phone, but visited each other far too infrequently. Darcy liked that her idea had rekindled a friendship as well as a spirit. She was glad Jean was the first recipient, and that it had already seemed to spur changes in her life like calling this friend. She was lucky, though; the friend had the time and resources to hop on a plane and come. Not every woman would have that opportunity. Would The Restoration Project one day be large enough to fly in friends? Restore relationships that miles had broken?

Darcy stopped what she was doing and laughed at herself. She’d wiped the same faucet four times now, was dreaming up expansion plans for The Restoration Project, and they hadn’t even made it through their pilot run. Whoa, girl. Life is complicated enough as it is.

By the time she pulled the back door shut and drove to lunch at the Rockwood Pottery Restaurant, no disaster had come calling. No salon called to report the catastrophic results of any treatment, no assistant principal called with yet another “issue” regarding Mike’s behavior, and no one within one hundred yards had thrown up or contracted any virus. Darcy considered that the day might just prove itself successful, and tried to calm her stomach for lunch.

She got there fifteen minutes early, determined not to let Kate and Glynnis meet each other without due supervision. When she thought about it, Jack was right—Glynnis
was
kind of like Kate. Slightly unconventional, fun loving, direct. But Kate was Major Babe to Glynnis’s Mrs.
Claus—Kate was smart and sassy to Glynnis’s warm and gooey. Then again, Glynnis had her smart and sassy side. Kate, however, didn’t seem to have a warm and gooey side. You could imagine, if you really let your mind go, that Glynnis may have been a bit like Kate when she was younger. Maybe they would get along.

Stop kidding yourself, Dar, you know the real reason you think they’ll clash. Lunch with Glynnis is like tuning into the all-God-all-the-time channel. Sure, she wasn’t pushy about it, but God was such a pervasive part of Glynnis’s life, such a constant in her everyday existence, that two minutes didn’t go by before spirituality came up in the conversation.

She didn’t think Kate was ready for that. Darcy had barely brushed up against the topic in conversations with her, and it was always uncomfortable when she did. Darcy thought to call Glynnis back several times this morning to ask her to go easy on Kate. She realized, though, that Glynnis knew an awful lot about Kate and their relationship from Tuesday Morning Prayers in the Henhouse. And, when it came right down to it, asking Glynnis to go easy on the God stuff was rather like asking her not to breathe.

She checked her watch—11:20. She’d done worlds of worrying in the space of five minutes. Then she heard Kate’s infectious laugh coming through the doorway and turned just in time to see her arrive.

With Glynnis.

Arm in arm.

Laughing like they’d known each other for decades.

“Oh, there she is!” Glynnis cried with embarrassing glee. “Quick, Kate, get it out!”

Kate produced a bright-red shopping bag, thrusting it toward Darcy.

“How did you two…?”

“Oh, we’ll tell you in a minute, just
open
it!”

With no small amount of trepidation, Darcy slipped her hand in through the tissues to produce a twinkling, princess-worthy tiara.