The Do-Over (22 page)

She’d dreamed of ringing phones she couldn’t get to and cars that wouldn’t start, and she’d shopped in a grocery store where goats grazed in the dairy section. There hadn’t been strippers, but there had been men thinking about it, men with big hands on their buttons and zippers. But with the summer morning blazing in her windows, the image that stuck with her was a Hollywood flash of Patrick Swayze up to his elbows in wet clay.

The glass dome finally showed some java progress, the brown now a deep chocolate color that said
caffeine at last
. She pulled the pot off the burner and heard Lois’ efficient movements as she zipped up her make-up case in the bathroom then crossed the loft to stow it in her suitcase.

Mara got down two mugs from the cupboard, the exact number she owned. She poured, handed a cup to Lois and enjoyed her sigh. Maybe she wasn’t alone in her sleepless night. “Lois, do you remember the movie
Ghost
?”

“I don’t think so. Who was in it?”

“Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze.”

“Oh. I like that Patrick Swayze. I only saw him in that dance movie. That was very good.”

“
Dirty Dancing
.”

“A little explicit, all that grinding.”

Both women hesitated over the hot steam of their drinks, blew to cool them simultaneously, and Mara drank to avoid smiling. “So, I asked about the movie because I’m helping out with the bath catalog for Abundance. There’s a scene in the movie
Ghost
where Demi Moore is at a potter’s wheel—”

“Oh! The clay…” Lois lifted a hand her cheek as if to cool off.

Mara laughed. “Yeah. That one.”

Lois dropped her hand and tipped her head back in the first real laugh Mara had ever heard from her, and for the first time she felt some love for Lois. They were just women, weren’t they? The same in so many ways, just women who struggled with families and life and sometimes even temptation. “It’s been a good visit.”

She heard Lois catch her breath, nod once, and she knew that although her mother-in-law wasn’t going to stop being Lois any time soon, something had changed between them. Mara felt the rush of tears that seemed to come upon her as suddenly as too much oxygen and made her just as disoriented.

Lois closed the gap and hugged her, and she felt the light squeeze just before Lois stepped back. In the gap between them she felt her body shake with the intensity of emotions she couldn’t even identify. “I made a million good decisions, Lois. Why did they add up to something…” She paused not even knowing what word she needed. If a word even existed to hold what she felt.

What lightness Lois had shown before fled, and she looked older, less upright. “It’s something not entirely right, something half-a-size too small.”

Mara sucked in her breath. Half a size too small was exactly it. “My life doesn’t feel big enough to hold everything I want to be.” She laughed without humor. “Even though I don’t know what that is. I want…”

The door opened, and Dan stepped into the loft. “Mom, you ready?”

Lois turned to him, gave him the mother smile Mara recognized as the one she gave Logan when she wanted him to think all was well when it really wasn’t.

Abundance
, that was the word she wanted to say to Lois. What she really wanted was something the size of luscious abundance. She just didn’t know entirely what that was, how to get it, or why her old life didn’t have enough of it.

Dan picked up Lois’ suitcase and threw her carry-on bag over his shoulder.

Without even turning around Lois called out to him. “Be careful with that, Dan. You have to treat things well if you want them to last.” Mara saw a hint of a smile on her face. Maybe she and Lois would never go all the way back to the kind of related strangers they’d been.

Lois joined Dan at the door, and Mara gave her a wave, watched her head down the stairs. She felt Dan studying her across the loft, and her body woke up. It might have been the caffeine kicking in, but she wasn’t taking any chances that when the buzz faded so would her libido. She might have any number of problems, but this one was Dan’s to take care of.

She scanned the length of him like she had the cowboys. He was nothing to sneeze at. He’d always kept in good shape, and he’d help with sex until she got home. Back in her real life her on switch would probably click off. What stirred her up in Washington? Middle school teacher training sessions? Warehouse shopping excursions? She’d be in neutral again. Domestic life could do that to anyone. That’s why it was called
domesticated
, like some dog that used to be a wolf. Well, for a while she’d explore her wild roots. “Dan, come right back after the airport.”

He shifted the bag on his shoulder. “In a little while. I’ve got this thing. Then I’ll be by.”

“You’ve got what kind of thing?”

“It’ll just take an hour, a couple. How about tonight? Dinner?”

She felt her eyebrows come together. What could he possibly have to do in a town he didn’t even live in, and she was supposed to wait with her new found mojo? “What thing?” She didn’t have time to spare. She’d already been kissed. Twice. She’d seen a man toy with his zipper, and she was running with a bad crowd, the osteoporosis battling shipping crew.

“I’ll bring dinner, Italian.” He followed Lois into the hallway. “It’ll be worth waiting for.”

Through the open doorway, she heard his descent down the stairs. “Oh, it will be.”

It had taken all day to round up the potter’s wheel. In two hours she could have rented one, but it took more time to wrangle a free loaner.

She’d set it in the center of the room, figuring she’d need light from the windows but room for the flying clay when she photographed Celia at it. She could already envision the photo. There’d be just hands, Celia’s working the lump of wet clay as it spun and a man’s hands over hers. They’d have to be good hands, manly-man hands to stand in the place of Patrick Swayze’s.

The photo would show nothing and yet capture everything women loved about that scene. Heck, what women loved about sex. She imagined. The feeling of being overtaken, not by the man so much as by her own emotional and physical response. Oooh, that sounded so good she looked at her watch. When the hell was Dan going to finish his thing? That didn’t sound good, especially for what she had in mind for him.

She hit the wheel’s foot pedal and tested the speed of it. It had a nice whirr, reassuring, and it really whipped without anything on it. The clay would slow it down, the wet and pressure of it under the potter’s hand. Her impulse was to throw a lump down and give it a go as if a lovely pot would form steadily under her hands if she only attempted it. But instead, she’d make a cup of tea and wait for Dan. Her mother had always told her to finish one project before beginning another one. And her mother had succeeded at that, she supposed. She hadn’t died until her daughter had turned eighteen.

She was on her second cup of tea when she heard the knock and ran to the door. She wasn’t proud of that, so she hesitated with her hand on the knob to catch her breath. She opened it with a patience she didn’t feel and moved her shoulders back another inch so her push-up bra and low V neck could work their magic.

Dan lifted the large white sack. “Italian. Very good Italian.” His eyes remained on hers, not her cleavage or the length of leg she’d left bare under the short skirt. Not the start she had in mind, but she grabbed the front of his t-shirt and pulled him inside. His eyebrows raised, but he didn’t say anything, and she relaxed her grip and tried for calmer.

He made his way to the kitchen and pulled out a pair of plates. “Gino’s is near my hotel. It’s amazing, and I’m starving.”

“Really hungry or really
hungry
?” She wiggled her eyebrows. “Maybe we could eat after.”

He looked at his watch. “It’s after six.” He opened the sack and took out two large styrofoam squares. “Can’t you smell this lasagna?”

“Yeah, lasagna.” She shifted from one foot to the other. Eating? Really? Did they have to eat first? Couldn’t he see the invitation of her body language? Well, she was pretty sure her body had language. Theoretically everyone’s did, whether they knew it or not. Hers must be doing its job even if the evidence wasn’t exactly mounting.

She watched him open the boxes and with a large spoon transfer the food onto the plates with as little damage to the squares as possible. A man taking that much care with pasta meant they were definitely going to eat first. She sighed, pretty sure she was pouting. “So, what did you do this afternoon that made you need lasagna so badly?”

“This afternoon? Just, you know. Do you have a cork screw?”

She fished into the utensil drawer, mumbling to herself.

He stopped dishing the salads. “What did you say about screwing?”

She smiled at the dense bastard, handed him the corkscrew. “I said that you could do the honors.”

“Oh.” He turned back to the salads then handed her a plate. “Homemade vinaigrette dressing. It’s amazing.”

“Yipee.” Mara stared down her shirt and hoped her breasts hadn’t heard that the competition was homemade vinaigrette, and they’d come in second. Second and third.

Dinner took forever, and then she discovered he’d brought dessert. Who ate dessert after loading up with that much pasta and cheese? Dan, of course. Then, no sooner had the endless meal ended when he’d found the potter’s wheel and wanted to check it out. She just nodded her head, yeah, no doubt raw clay had a superior feel and sure, a flywheel that turned on a fourteen inch work head was better than the old twelve incher. What was he, the pottery detective?

“Can I?” He asked over the whirr of the empty wheel, lifted his foot off the pedal, and scooted the bucket of clay closer.

Now she was runner-up to wet dirt? She flopped on the couch and put her feet on the coffee table, allowing her skirt to hike to upper-thigh territory. “Knock yourself out.” She crossed her arms over her chest in both irritation and to lift her breasts higher, adding more valley to the valley.

But Dan just ignored her and focused on filling a large bowl with water before sitting down at the wheel. He pried the lid off the bucket and looked like he’d just uncovered his Christmas present.

So, homemade vinaigrette and pottery made the man excited. Why had she bothered with lipstick? She could have just dabbed on some garlic and mud.

He slapped a handful of clay on the wheel’s bat. Who knew the spinny top had a name beyond
spinny top
? She did, thanks to Dan’s cluelessness about how much she needed to have sex so she could stop thinking about it and dreaming about stripping cowboys and other men and, hell, other women. He dipped his hands in the water, cradled the top of the mound, and gently pressed his foot down. The whirr sounded lower as the clay spun under his fingers. Off center and messy, it didn’t look like it would ever be anything, but gradually it rounded as the grey squeezed through his fingers.

It really looked like he knew what he was doing. She got up from the couch and moved closer, but not so near she had to worry about the bits of clay that sailed. “When did you learn how to do that?”

He didn’t take his eyes off his work, but laughed at the off center blob that wobbled around. “I’m not sure I remember anything I learned, but I took a couple of pottery classes in college.”

He hadn’t taken any pottery classes she’d known about, and they’d dated from sophomore year on. It wasn’t like they’d taken a bunch of classes together, but she knew what he’d had. She recalled taking volleyball when he’d fulfilled PE with basketball. She’d loved English literature and couldn’t understand his signing up for Russian Lit. with all its cold and heartbreak. But pottery? “Why don’t I remember you taking pottery?”

He shook his head as he began to press his thumb in the top of the lump. He reached inside with his fingers and widened the center of it. “Guess it didn’t come up.”

She watched his blond hair fall over his eyebrows, the tidy cut he maintained surprisingly shaggy. He seemed relaxed in a new way as he coaxed the sides of the burgeoning pot up, higher and thinner as the wheel turned. “I didn’t need the credits, just thought it would be fun.” He leaned closer over the wheel, the muscles in his forearms working. “It didn’t seem important.”

Practical, solid Dan. “You were embarrassed.”

He laughed, shrugged. “Maybe.”

Maybe. “Do I know everything about you?”

His foot lifted off the pedal, and he looked like the ever-serious school administrator again. “Of course you do. We’ve been married fifteen years, Mara Jane Mulligan. We know everything about each other.”

He seemed to wait for her to agree. She debated pointing out to him that five minutes earlier, she’d not known he had pottery skills, and seventeen days earlier, he’d not known she needed to run away to Canada. Hell, she’d not known she needed to run away to Canada. His lips thinned. She needed to say
yes, Dan, you know everything. I know everything. We’ve left no interesting stone unturned
.

“Did you know I really want to have sex?”

Dan’s foot slipped, the motor raced, and the clay flew off to splat at her feet.

They’d cleaned up the mess in silence. Not the good kind of silence that the long married sometimes had when each was satisfied with the company of his or her own thoughts. They worked in the silence of the wildly uncomfortable long marrieds who couldn’t find ease if their lives depended on it.

She washed her hands at the sink, slowly, like killing time would help. She scrubbed at the grit of clay under her nails, between her fingers, beneath her ring. She linked her fingers in the bubbles of dishwashing soap, and her wedding ring slid up to the knuckle and down again.

She’d not even noticed her ring in the time she’d been in Canada, probably hadn’t noticed it in longer than that. It possessed a comfortable silence of its own. She noticed a thin red scratch on her finger running just beneath the ring, so she slipped it off, set it on the windowsill above the sink and ran warm water over her finger.

“I think we should discuss your previous statement.” Dan’s voice came from behind her.