Melissa Senate (13 page)

Nick smiled. “So write that. That’s your homework tonight, Jesse. Write
that
essay, about how what happens to Johnny relates to your life, what it makes you think of, and how you feel about it. If you do refer to BLA kids, give them secret code names, like Potatohead. And use at least three examples from the book. Seven hundred fifty words typed. Hand it in tomorrow, and I won’t take off any points for not getting it done in class.”

The boy brightened. “Really?”

“Really.”

The boy walked out, shoulders squared, chin up. That was when Nick noticed me in the hall.

“That was beautiful,” I said like an idiot.

Nick smiled at me with that smile, the one that disarmed everyone. “Thanks. Does that mean I can take you to lunch? If you’re the new teacher I’ve heard about.”

I wasn’t sure if he was asking me out on a date or just being friendly on the new teacher’s first day. I was a midterm replacement, and starting in medias res was never easy.

“Actually, my new boss has that covered,” I said. “But thank you.”

“Another time then,” he said, and I could barely look away from those eyes.

As I was leaving Nick’s classroom, I ran smack into Tom Truby. He glanced at Nick, then smiled at me.

“I’d better work fast, huh?” Tom said.

“Excuse me?”

“If you’ve already met McDermott, I’d better ask you out right away.”

I laughed. “It’s amazing that on my first day here, two men have asked me out. At my last school, not one date.”

“They must have all been married,” he said. “If you like Indian food, there’s a very good place in Portland. In the Old Port.” He was looking at me the way Nick had been looking at me. But Tom was looking at me seriously, earnestly, whereas there had been a sparkle in Nick’s eyes. The love of the game, the hunt, the flirt.

I had dinner with Tom that very night. Over chicken tikka and Taj Mahal beer, I discovered that true as his name, Tom Truby was also funny, chivalrous, charming, kind, smart, all good things. Granted, he didn’t have the same physical effect on me that Nick did. But by the next time Nick asked me out for lunch, Tom and I were already a couple, so Nick and I drifted into a friendship that I never expected would become so close, so necessary.

Stella’s face reading made Nick so uncomfortable that he got up and said he’d like to walk around the property, see a bit of Nebraska before he’d have to head back. The farmhouse sat on three acres, and from the back porch that wrapped around the house, you could stare out onto gently rolling hills and have a good think.

Nick and I sat on the chaise longues, two glasses of iced teas on the table between us.

“You don’t think I’m serious, do you?” he said. “You think once I win you away from Truby, I’ll lose interest.”

“Part of me is worried about that, Nick. But that’s not really the question here.”

“What is the question?” he asked.

“The question is—how do I really, really feel?”

“How
do
you feel?”

“All I know for sure is that I
should
know. In order to make a decision, I mean. About being with you. About marrying Tom. I should know how I feel. And I don’t. How scary is that?”

“You don’t have to know, Ruby. You don’t always have to know how you feel. Sometimes you have to find your way to the answer. I guess that’s what you’re doing now. Why you said yes last night.” He smiled at me and reached for my hand. “We were pretty amazing.”

I smiled back. “We were.”

We stood up, and he kissed me, a long, delicious kiss that was every bit heartfelt as it was passionate. Then he pulled back and looked at me, squeezed my hand, and was gone.

I
USED THE
I-
DON’T-WANT-TO-TALK-ABOUT-IT RESPONSE THAT
Stella had taught me, and she got so fed up she finally went into her room to pack. There was nothing to tell her, nothing to say. “I don’t know” was actually the only answer that came to me.

I went into the parlor for a cup of tea and with a novel I’d been meaning to find time to start. But I couldn’t concentrate and ended up reading the first paragraph four times.

I closed the book and stared out the window, trying not to think about men.

Scratch that. I decided to dedicate my brain to another man: figuring out a plan for finding Jake or Jason or James in Las Vegas. His name would probably turn out to be Stephen.

“Did your friend leave?” Maxine asked, coming in to refill the sugar bowls.

I nodded. “Maxine, how did you know that Nick was just a friend and not my fiancé?”

“I suppose you didn’t seem like a couple.”

I stared at her. “How could you tell?” Aside from V Squared, most couples didn’t get all PDA in restaurants, did they?

“Let me ask you before I put my foot in my mouth,” she said. “Was that your fiancé? Did I get it wrong?”

“No.”

She smiled. “Well, despite what Stella said, about you not loving your fiancé, or not being sure, I sensed something else in you.”

I almost started to cry. This conversation reminded me so much of the talks I used to have with my mother, over things big and small. But now I was on my own.

“What did you sense?” I asked.

“Just questions, I suppose,” she said. “And I think the best place to find your answers is on the road, like you gals are doing. I always did my best thinking on miles-long walks on the plains. You just need air and time and answers usually present themselves.”

I hoped she was right. Because we’d come halfway, and I was no closer.

“Thank you, Maxine,” I said, going over to give her a hug. “You’re very wise.”

She beamed and excused herself to the kitchen.

My cell beeped. Text message from Tom.

EV OK?

I typed back:
Y. XO. R.

But everything wasn’t okay.

We were halfway to Denver when Stella said, “I am so sick of hearing ‘I don’t know!’ Stop saying ‘I don’t know.’”

I laughed, signaling my intent to move into the fast lane to get around a slowpoke elderly man going ten miles under the speed limit. “Now you know what it feels like.”

She took a bite of her McDonald’s hamburger, then checked to see if she got her extra pickles and extra ketchup. Seemingly satisfied, she put the bun back on top and took another bite. “He told you he thinks he’s in love with you, and you’re still questioning?”

“
Thinks
is not
knows,
Stella.”

She groaned.

“I
know
I love Tom,” I said. “That’s never been in doubt.”

“Ugh, if you say so. But do you love him enough to spend the rest of your life wondering if you should have given Nick a chance?”

That was the Magic 8 Ball question. Which right now said:
I Don’t Know.
And
Ask Again Later.

Stella popped a malt ball into her mouth. “Every time I used to ask Mom about Dad and how she felt about him, she’d always say she had no regrets. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Maybe it’s different when you have children,” I said. “I mean, we come along with that regret. If there’d been no Eric Miller in her life, there’d be no us.”

“Do you think she would have married him if she’d had that list of questions from the
New York Times
article?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure she had her own checklist. And I’m sure he seemed like a good match, that he’d make her happy, that she’d make him happy.”

“Or maybe she didn’t ask herself any questions. Maybe she just went with how she
felt,
” Stella said.

“Well, if that was the case, it’s not like it worked out. Not asking questions. Maybe if she’d asked some important questions about compatibility, she would have realized he wasn’t the right person for her.” I shook my head. “Or maybe he just changed. I don’t know. It just seems to me that you know, from somewhere deep inside you, what’s right for you, and you either listen to it or not.”

“And you know deep inside that Tom is the right person?” she asked. “Even after sleeping with Nick, you still know for sure?”

I burst into tears. “I don’t know anything.”

“Rubes,” she said, rubbing my back. “You’ll figure it out. I’ll shut up, okay?”

“Promise?” I asked.

She laughed. “Promise.”

Four hours later, we arrived at our hotel in Denver, the majestic peaks of the Rockies visible from our room. I was dying to get out and explore, to forget everything crowding my head and just appreciate the gorgeous vistas, but lying down for a half hour turned into all night. When we woke up, the sun streamed through the windows right into my face. Stella wasn’t feeling so hot and just wanted to get in the car and go. The plan was to drive four hours to Grand Junction, stop for the night, and from there drive to Richfield, Utah. And then finally, we would take off for the final leg of our road trip.

We ended up spending two nights in Grand Junction because Stella’s “I’m not feeling so hot” turned out to be a bad cold that knocked her out the first day. Grand Junction was Colorado’s wine country, and we’d planned on a tour or two, but it was over ninety-five degrees and Stella wasn’t up for anything but bed and a cold compress and her
Girlfriends’ Guide To Pregnancy
. She got all guilty about making me miss out on some of the most beautiful parts of the United States, but I reminded her that this trip wasn’t so much about sightseeing as it was getting to where we were going.

I did some serious walking in Grand Junction, hoping the open air would whisper some truths in my ear, about what I wanted, how I felt. But there was just more of nothing, a blank line where a name might go. The walk that was supposed to calm me down got me so riled that I picked up a rock and threw it as far as I could, aiming for a wooden sign on the side of the road about fifty feet in front of me. Bull’s-eye. There was something satisfying about hitting my mark.

“Could you please not throw rocks at my sign?”

I whirled around, and there, on an ancient yellow bike with a basket, was a tall, very tanned, almost leathery woman, her long, brown hair in a braid down her back. She wore a beige leotard, and because her skin was pretty much the same color, I thought she was naked at first.

“If something’s bothering you enough to throw a rock, you might want to meditate,” she said, getting off the bike and setting the kickstand. “You’re welcome to use my studio.” She gestured behind her. “My class won’t start for another couple of hours.”

I glanced behind her. On this stretch of rural road, just a mile from the hotel, was absolutely nothing but grass, brownish grass, at that, trees, and the majestic mountains in the distance. “Your studio?” I repeated.

“Look more closely,” she said.

I walked over to her, and there on the grass were ten straw mats placed rather haphazardly. I looked up at her. “Do you mean these?”

She nodded. “Choose one and lie down and close your eyes. Silently say the word
peace
seven times. Then think about peace.”

“Right now?”

She smiled and stepped aside. I wondered if she had a portable CD player and if Enya would blare at me at any moment. I chose a mat right in the middle of the ten.

“Interesting choice,” she said. “You feel bombarded.”

Oh, c’mon. I squinted up at her. “Wouldn’t I have chosen a mat on the edges, then? For breathing room? Or to run away easier?”

“We tend to choose the comfortable, the familiar, over and over. If you’d chosen a mat on the edge, I would be less concerned for your spirit. Now, close your eyes.”

I let out a deep breath and closed my eyes, then sat up and turned around. “For how long?” I asked her.

“As long as it takes,” she said and sat down across the road in some kind of yoga position, her palms up on her thighs.

I lay back down, closed my eyes and said
peace
to myself seven times. By number four, I started thinking about my mother, her round hazel eyes, their flutter of lashes. That her favorite color was turquoise. That every night she would open to the dinner section of
Have Fun Cooking With Kids
and randomly pick a page. Then the three of us—Mom and Stella and I—would go to the supermarket with the recipe, and come back home and cook together.

Which made me think of the last time Tom and I cooked together, the night we got engaged. Yes, he’d proposed on the stairs. During fourth period. But he’d also had my mother’s ring in a beautiful velvet-lined box that he presented to me and then slid on my finger when I said yes.

That night, Tom had taken me to dinner at my favorite restaurant and arranged for three opera singers to sing with their “inside voices” (I loved opera). We’d been too full for dessert, so we’d gone home, planning to open another bottle of champagne, but while I was getting the corkscrew, Tom Truby very uncharacteristically began undressing me in the kitchen. We’d made love right on the kitchen floor, in front of the little island. And then we’d gotten to work, measuring flour and cracking eggs and melting bittersweet chocolate for a tiny chocolate cake for two. We ate our cake on the porch swing, our special place, just before midnight.

At peace number seven, Nick’s face floated into my mind. Cooking seemed to be the theme of peace for some reason. We were at his apartment on a Saturday morning, creating a curriculum for an elective course in multicultural poetry. All of a sudden it was lunchtime and we were starving, so I explored his refrigerator and cupboards and put together a picnic lunch that we took out to the promenade. A seagull had been patiently waiting for a crumb or two, and Nick made the mistake of being generous and then we were surrounded by the birds, hoping and waiting. I took a great photograph of him standing up on the bench, half a sandwich in his hands and beaks at the ready.

And then it was Stella, at fifteen, with bright-pink hair that took forever to color over. And Stella and Silas and I at the Blueberry Hills Festival, throwing blueberries at each other’s mouths and missing.

My eyes fluttered opened. I stared up at the bright-blue sky with its cotton ball clouds, content to lie there for hours. But then I remembered that I was lying basically on the side of the road, albeit on a wide grassy expanse. I sat up and turned and looked for the tanned woman, but she and her bike were gone.

There was something taped to the wooden sign. I jogged over. It was a note.

At that moment, I wanted the three-foot-long straw mat more than I wanted anything. I rolled it up and put it under my arm, then ran back for the note and folded it and put it in my pocket. I ripped off the bottom half and wrote “Thank you so much—Ruby” and used what I could salvage of the tape of her note to tack my note up where hers had been.

By the time I returned to the hotel, I wondered if I’d imagined the entire experience, if it had happened at all, if I’d lain on a yoga mat on the side of a road and thought about peace, about cooking, about the people I loved.

“Hey, what do you have there?” Stella asked, eyeing my mat. “Did you take a yoga class or something?” She sat up a bit, barely able to lift her head. “You look great. So relaxed. You’re almost glowing.”

I wrote myself a mental note: meditate more often.

The vivid blue sign welcoming us to Utah was the only color in sight as far as the eye could see. Except for Stella’s face, which was back to its rosy glow from the depth of bad-cold-itis. She was almost one hundred percent better by the time we saw our first Joshua tree. It had been three days since her throat could handle a malt ball, so she was thrilled to crunch them along I-70, a desolate stretch of highway that still managed to be utterly beautiful with its rocky cliffs and barren hills, the mountains appearing like distant jutting clouds along the landscape.

I’d bought a guidebook that included Utah and Las Vegas and Arizona, which we would only pass through for five minutes before we hit Nevada, and while Stella drove, I did some reading to find out what might be worth stopping to see. Apparently, the entire state was worth stopping to see, but Stella thought we lost too much time in Colorado.

As Mainers, Stella and I knew from breathtaking scenery, but at one point, we were in such awe of the landscape that Stella pulled over and we got out just to stare, just to see absolutely nothing but land and mountains for miles in any direction. According to the guidebook, the best was yet to come, in Southern Utah, where we’d descend from the mountain region into the high desert with its red rock and buttes and mesas. Where we’d drive through the Virgin River Gorge, created from cliffs that jutted out on both sides of the freeway. You could forget about cell phone reception until you exited. And when you did you’d be in Nevada.

“This totally makes me understand why people get so outdoorsy and go hiking and climb mountains,” Stella said, taking a photo of nothing but brown expanse.

Or meditate on straw mats on the side of the road, with the birds and quiet wind for music.

Despite being Mainers, we were New York City kids at heart, and our hearts seemed to be in observing people rather than land. We were both shoppers, eavesdroppers on conversations, and liked our lattes. But this trip instilled a new appreciation for nature in both of us, in just breathing pure clean air.