Tea and Primroses (14 page)

I swallowed the lump in my throat and met his gaze across the table. The candlelight flickered between us, making shadows on the wall. Outside, the evening had grown dark. “It’s all I want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted since the moment I first read with a flashlight in my bed after everyone was asleep. Never a boy or an entrance to a club. Not even a friend. Nothing more than this. To write something that matters to someone else, that makes their journey in this messed up world a little easier. What could be better? The house with the white picket fence my mother wants for me? Absolutely not.”

“What about love?” He pushed aside his now empty salad plate and tilted his head, resting his chin on his thumb. His long fingers were twined in his hair and I could think only of my own hand being there. What was the texture of his hair? What would his skin feel like beneath my fingers?

“Romantic love, you mean?”

“Yes. Romantic love. Why don’t you want to get married?”

“Because happy marriages are only for a lucky few. Most of us marry the wrong person and live unhappily for most of our lives.”

He grimaced. “You’re so cynical for being so young.”

“You’re unhappy. Aren’t you?”

“Yes.” He looked behind me, as if there were answers in the patterns of the wallpaper. “But I’m done. I’ve ended things. I stayed too long.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes. My father-in-law fired me when he found out I left his daughter.”

“Will you find another publisher to work for? Surely you’re well known enough for that.”

“My father-in-law will ensure that never happens.” He paused, shaking his head. “Sometimes I think all I want is to open a pie shop.”

“A pie shop?”

“I love pie.”

“Everyone loves pie.” I smiled and touched his arm briefly. Our eyes locked. “I’m sorry, Patrick.”

“Thank you.” He moved his finger over the flame of the candle, his eyes blank. “I’m a bit lost at the moment.” Withdrawing his hand from the flame, he picked up his water glass and shook it back and forth. The ice made a clanking sound. “Starting over is harder than it looks.”

“But not impossible.”

“Not impossible. It’s hard to imagine what other work I could do, really. But I couldn’t salvage any part of who I once was and stay in the marriage.”

Our steaks came and we were both quiet for a few minutes as we cut into the juicy meat. I made an audible sound of pleasure at the first bite.

“Aha. I knew you were starving,” he said, nodding his approval at the way I attacked the next piece.

I looked up from my food, wiping the corners of my mouth with the cloth napkin. “I’m a little worried about the winter.”

“Why’s that?”

Feeling sheepish, I gave him a half-smile. “I’m getting around on a bicycle and this place I live in, well, let’s just say it’s not well-insulated. I’m afraid I won’t be able to type because my hands will be so cold. I do my best work in the early morning.”

He laughed—a big laugh from deep in his chest.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Most girls would be concerned about freezing their asses off, not about whether or not they can type.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “I’m worried about freezing too, although my mother knitted me the most God-awful, ugly sweater and hat from thick wool.”

We talked of less emotional topics than his dead marriage through the rest of the main course. He told me of some of the famous authors he’d worked with, making me laugh with details of their antics and demands. “Writers are crazy for the most part, Oregon,” he said as I squealed with laugher about one of his romance authors, who wrote from her basement surrounded by her three cats (her children) and insisted he say hello to each of them before discussing edits. “Imagine her holding the damn phone next to some cat’s ear while I talk to them in my best baby talk voice. It’s completely ridiculous but the woman can crank out a bestselling romance between litter box changes every single time.”

During dessert, he asked me to tell him about my manuscript.

I took my time with the answer, knowing this might be the only chance I had to describe it to someone of his position and also wanting to be honest about what it truly was. “It’s commercial, a love story about real people, not one bit literary. John called it a ‘Girl Book,’ which I found mildly offensive, but it’s true.” I smiled, using my fork to spear a piece of baked potato. I held the fork in the air and then waved it at him like a wand. “I tried to write something about a girl like me living with her controlling mother who wants her to become a housewife and become as shabby and gray as the houses that line the street I grew up on. But, my God, it was all so bleak and depressing and I kept coming back to this—what do I love to read? Not that. It was Anne of Green Gables and Jo Marsh I loved, not Madame Bovary. Isn’t that awful?”

He didn’t respond except with a shrug of his shoulders.

“So I set out to write a book like that, about family and love and all wrapped up in a happy bow at the end. Oh, you can’t imagine how I was mocked in writing group at college the first time I read one of my chapters out loud to them.”

He grimaced. “Writing groups—the birth of many inner critics. That, and your parents’ voices.”

I stared at him, amazed he understood. “Exactly.” I looked around the room, noticing suddenly that we were the only patrons left. Glancing at my watch, I was surprised to see it was almost eleven.

Becky brought the bill shortly thereafter and thanked us for coming in for dinner. She didn’t make eye contact with either of us and there was a tight little pucker of disapproval to her mouth I’d never seen before. When she was out of earshot, Patrick moved to get his wallet from his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash, counted out four twenties and left them next to the bill. “What did we do to piss her off?”

“She disapproves of me having dinner with a married man.”

He looked at me with surprise. I shrugged as we walked toward the front, the bell making a sound as we exited. “Small towns. Everybody knows your business,” I said, as if he hadn’t grown up here.

The main street was empty, with only the tavern’s light still on. “Let me take you home?” he asked.

“I have my bicycle outside Doris’s.”

“No way I’m letting you ride home in the dark. It’s dangerous. We can pick your bike up on the way home.” He tucked my arm under his. “Come on, Oregon. I need to pick up your manuscript anyway.”

I stopped, staring up at him. “You mean it?”

“Yep.” He tugged my arm again and we walked to Doris’s, where there was a beat-up looking blue truck in the parking lot, circa 1970. A lot of the folks back home had the same kind of truck. It looked like Oregon. “This is me.” He slipped my arm from his and pointed at the truck as he shifted away from me. I immediately felt the chill of the night and shivered. He pointed to the sky. “Look at the color of the sky there.” I did. It was almost purple and the sky was alive with a billion lights. The same stars I gazed upon all my life and tagged my dreams to. They were here too. And yet, they’d never looked like these; they’d never been gazed upon with Patrick.

“Same color as the Van Gogh painting,” he said.

“Yes.”

He unlocked the door and held out his hand. For a moment I hesitated but then I put my small hand in his large one and let him help me into his truck. When the door slammed there was a rattling, like something was inside the space. There were no seatbelts. It smelled of gasoline.

In the passenger side mirror, I watched him walk around the back of the truck. He stopped, resting his hand on the truck’s trailer door and tilting his head toward the sky, brushing his hair back from his forehead with his long fingers. His chest rose and fell. After a moment, he climbed into the cab of the truck, bringing the smell of the night and his leather jacket. He put both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes on the dashboard. “Listen here, I’m still married. We’ve got to remember that.”

“I know.” My heart beat hard in my chest. I put my hand over my heart, as if he could see it.

“Of course you know.” Still hunched over the steering wheel, he looked at me. “I don’t know why I said that.” Sitting up, he took keys from his jeans pocket and put them in the ignition. But instead of starting the truck, he turned toward me, one arm draped over the steering wheel, the other resting on the seat near his thigh. “It matters to me that I’m an honorable man. And I’m not feeling very honorable right now.”

“Nothing’s happened. We just had dinner. That’s all.”

He sighed and reached his hand across the seat, resting his fingers mere inches from my thigh. “Yeah, right. Just dinner.”

I couldn’t breathe. Time stopped as he reached up and touched my hair, wrapping the section that fell over my cheek around his index finger. “You’re beyond lovely,” he said. He took his hand away, slowly, like we were suddenly stuck in mud, and turned on the truck.

After we picked up my bicycle, I don’t remember much of the ride out to my place except we were silent for most of it but for my directions out to the Williams farm. My heart continued to pound and my thoughts turned and tossed like I would later do in bed until the early light of dawn filtered into my room.

When we turned into the dirt driveway, I pointed to the barn with my studio. There were two barns on the property, one where the cows were cared for, the other held equipment and my studio. “I live there.”

“In the barn?” He looked at me. The truck bounced in a pothole and I felt like I might fall into him, like the freefalling mess that I was.

“It’s cozy.” The Williams farm was like something out of a book, red barns and white fences, rolling cow pastures. I never tired of looking at it.

“Oregon, you can’t live in a barn.”

“It’s not so bad.”

The equipment barn was set far away from the Williams house near the cow field. I told Patrick where to park his truck, which he did, turning off the ignition. We both sat like that for a moment, neither of us moving, until Patrick cracked his window a few inches, bringing in the faint smell of cow manure. Finally, I shifted on the seat to look at him. “Do you want to come in? I mean, for the manuscript?”

He glanced over at the Williams farmhouse. It was dark. I knew they were usually in bed before nine, both of them up at first light. “You better bring it out to the truck.” He gripped the steering wheel. “I’ll put your bicycle in the barn for you.”

I don’t know if I was relieved or disappointed but I just nodded and slipped out of the truck, running inside. This barn always smelled slightly of diesel grease and steel. Just off the main doors were skinny stairs leading up to my studio. I held onto the rail; my legs were trembling.

The studio was roughly twenty feet by twenty, plus a small bathroom with a narrow shower, small sink, and toilet. The floors were made of pine and so soft I’d made a mark in it when I dropped my teacup one day. The teacup came out unscathed, fortunately, since I possessed only two cups, one plate, a single set of silverware, a saucepan, and one frying pan. There were still bits of sawdust between the cracks in the floorboards that made it smell of freshly sawed wood. When I first arrived in town, I used most of my savings to buy a full-size mattress and frame and covered it with my childhood quilt, made by my mother before I was born, the patterns of flowers sewn from scraps of material from her treasure chest.  She’d sent it out to Vermont after I told her I’d secured a place to live. It was a gesture of love that surprised me, given the angry words exchanged between us on the day I left.

 I’d lucked into finding a small, wooden desk and chair at the town’s thrift shop. On it were my manual typewriter and stacks of notebooks I kept around in case I got an idea I wanted to jot down or something of particular beauty caught my eye. Next to the typewriter was the blue rabbit’s foot. Sometimes I rubbed the less worn side with my thumb when I was stuck on a plot point. This soft blue muse never let me down.

I’d placed the desk by the only window, a plain, square window with a screen, which I’d taken off so I could see out better now that it had turned cool. The view of the cow field and the ever-changing landscape was a source of great inspiration to me. Since I’d arrived last spring I had seen the green fields turn to yellow and back to green. I loved the cows, too. I’d written down all the different types of breeds from Mr. Williams’s explanation and it gave me a thrill to be in this strange land of cows and hay and Mrs. Williams’s vegetable garden. “Everything grows here,” I’d written to my father and Louise. “Big fat tomatoes and zucchini and beans.”

Now, I went to the desk and opened the drawer. I stared down at the typed manuscript, the product of two years’ work. It was risky, I thought, giving this to Patrick. He was the real thing. He would know one way or the other if I had what it took and also if it was something the market would embrace.
No risk, no reward
. My father’s saying echoed in my head. I reached in and grabbed it.

My bicycle was inside, leaning against the wall, and Patrick was sitting in his truck when I came down. He rolled down his window as I approached. “You’re brave, Oregon. I’ll give you that.”

I smiled at him. “Fine line between brave and stupid.”

“Indeed.”

I handed it to him. He took it, putting it on the seat next to him. “I’ll take care of your baby, don’t worry.”

“Thank you.” I stepped back from the truck.

“I’ll wait for you to get upstairs before I go.”

“Good night. Thank you for dinner.”

“It was my pleasure.”

I sprinted upstairs and then watched from my window as he drove down the Williams’s dirt driveway to the country road. I watched his lights until they disappeared and the night was nothing but the inky sky and a sliver of moon low on the horizon.

SUTTON WAS RECLINED ON THE COUCH,
her feet in Declan’s lap, when he read the last word of the chapter. She glanced at her watch. It was almost seven. Their friends would be here any minute for the reading of Constance’s letter. “We have to stop,” she said.