The Mill River Redemption (22 page)

No, she figured that if she was meant to meet someone else, it would happen in its own good time. If it didn’t, well, that would be all right, too. She wouldn’t have to worry about being hurt, or her girls being hurt, again.

When they arrived back home, the Johnson and Weider kids were running and laughing in the yard across the street.

“Mom, can we go over and play?” Rose asked.

“Please, Mom?” Emily chimed in.

“Fine,” Josie said. “But, wait, so I can watch you cross the
street. You and Emily hold hands and look both ways, and I don’t want any dillydallying when I call you for dinner.”

Rose and Emily scrambled out of the car. The neighbor kids called to them and waved, and it was only a few seconds before the girls were integrated into the group.

Josie said goodbye to Ivy and unloaded a few things from the car before going inside. It didn’t take her long to straighten up the kitchen and fix supper, and she soon went back to the front door to call the girls. She shielded her eyes from the early evening sun as she watched the children playing across the street.

The girls were on the tire swing, Rose on the top and Emily in the hole below, as other kids stood on either side, taking turns pushing them. Instead of yelling to catch their attention, Josie just leaned against her front door and watched. The girls were squealing and laughing, hanging on to the swing for dear life as they were pushed and spun in different directions. She touched her locket. The girls were so much older now than they had been when the tiny pictures she kept inside it had been taken. It was time at work again.
Before long, they won’t play like that anymore
, she thought.

Josie watched and listened with greedy eyes and ears, trying to capture and commit to memory every detail of what she was seeing. The deep orange leaves of the oak tree glowed in the sunlight, forming a brilliant awning over her swinging girls. She saw Rose’s ponytail and Emily’s curls swept back and forth by the motion of the swing and their heads thrown back in delight. Their laughter, so familiar and easily distinguishable to her from that of the other children, carried across the street. Finally, one of the Weider boys grabbed the swing to stop it, and Rose and Emily climbed off, teetering with dizziness and still giggling. The girls clutched each other as they regained their balance and caught their breaths. Overcome with love and gratitude, Josie felt a little dizzy as well.

Time was passing faster and faster now, and before she knew it, Rose and Emily would be grown up. That knowledge only reinforced
the fact that the precious scene Josie had just witnessed would stay with her for the rest of her life.

1990

“S
O
, M
OM, SINCE
I’
M GOING TO BE
ELEVEN
NEXT WEEK, CAN
I please have a sleepover party with pizza?” Rose said one evening at dinner. She used her sweetest voice and her usual wide-eyed, pleading expression.

“I suppose we could do that, Rose, if we scheduled it for Friday night. I could be home early that night, and you wouldn’t have to go to school the next morning.”

“Thanks, Mom!” Rose squealed. “I want to invite Jill, Becky, and Sherri from my class, and Jennifer Johnson from across the street. And maybe I’ll ask—”

“You know, four sounds like plenty,” Josie interrupted. “I know you’d like to have every girl from your class over here, but the house really isn’t big enough to hold them all.”

Rose crumpled her face into a pout.

“Can I have a friend over, too?” Emily asked from her place at the table. “Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to do while Rose has her party.”

“It’s
my
birthday,” Rose said before their mother could answer. “And you just said there’s not enough room for more than four people.”

“I said we don’t have room for your whole class,” her mother answered. “And, yes, it’s your birthday, but if your sister has a friend over as well, you won’t have to worry about her bugging you and your friends.” Rose glared at her and then turned to look at Emily, who flashed a smug, taunting smile.

Rose started to grumble, but the phone rang, and her mother jumped up to answer it before she heard the complaint.

“Hello?” Josie listened for a moment and then carried the
phone into her office. She bustled out a few minutes later with her pocketbook. “Girls, I’m so sorry, but I’ve got to run back to the office for a little while. I shouldn’t be too long, hopefully no later than eight. Make sure you take care of the dishes after you finish supper, all right?”

“Sure, Mom,” Emily said.

“You’re my angels,” her mother said as she headed out. “Ivy’s next door, and my office number’s on the fridge, if there’s an emergency.”

As soon as their mother had gone, Rose jumped up from the table. She left her place setting behind without saying a word.

“Hey,” Emily called, “Mom said we’re supposed to do the dishes.”

“You’re the one who said you’d do them,” Rose replied. She bounded upstairs, ignoring her sister’s look of disgust.

Rose was giggling on the phone with Becky McIntyre when a huge crash sounded from the kitchen. She rushed back downstairs to find Emily and an overturned chair on the floor, surrounded by bits of a shattered coffee mug. The dishwasher and several cupboards were open.

“What happened?” Rose asked. “Are you okay?” She bent down and helped Emily up.

“I think so. I was trying to put the clean dishes away, but I couldn’t reach the shelf where the cups go,” she said. Tears filled Emily’s eyes when she saw the sharp pieces of ceramic on the floor. “That was Mom’s favorite mug.”

“The one we gave her last Mother’s Day?” Rose said, and Emily nodded. Rose reached out and picked up the two largest fragments of the mug. Held together, the writing on the pieces read “#1 Mom.”

“I’m so sorry,” Emily sobbed. “I didn’t mean to break it. Mom’s going to be so upset.”

Rose stared at her younger sister, but instead of feeling angry, she was only ashamed that she’d left Emily to clean up the kitchen alone and relieved that she hadn’t been hurt. She reached out and squeezed Emily in a big hug, which only made her cry harder.

“Don’t worry, I’m not upset, and Mom won’t be, either,” Rose said. “Let’s gather up all the pieces. After we get the dishes done, I’ll try to superglue it back together.”

Together, they collected all the bigger chunks of the mug and then swept the floor to get all of the tiny ones. Rose took the bag of mug pieces up to their room, where she could keep it hidden until she had the glue and the time to reassemble it. Then, she helped Emily put away the rest of the clean dishes and load the dirty ones into the dishwasher.

“I don’t think we have enough Cascade left,” Emily said as she took a green, rectangular box from the cupboard beneath the sink. She turned the box upside down and aimed the pour spout toward the dishwasher’s soap reservoir, but only a few particles of powder came out.

“Mom forgot to get more when we went shopping,” Rose said. “But, no biggie. We’ve got plenty of the liquid kind.” She grabbed the bottle of Dawn by the kitchen faucet and filled the soap reservoir with it. It took her only a moment longer to close the dishwasher and turn the dial to start the wash cycle. “There. Now, all we have to do is wipe the counters and we’ll be done. Do you know whether Mom has any superglue?”

“No, but we could check her office,” Emily said. She had picked up the bottle of Dawn and was reading the back label. “Hey, Rose, are you sure we can use this in the dishwasher?”

“Don’t worry, it’ll work fi—” Rose started to say, but at that moment, the sound of the dishwasher motor took on a strange, muffled quality. She turned just in time to see a thick stream of white suds spill from the crack where the door of the dishwasher
attached to the unit. It was like a white, fluffy waterfall, gushing in a steady veil all over the floor.

“Oh, my gosh, what do we do? What do we do?” her sister yelled. “It’s flooding everywhere!” Emily was frozen in place, watching with a horrified expression as the suds approached her feet.

“Turn off the dishwasher!” Rose ordered.

Emily gasped. “We can’t do that. It’s already running. If we break the dishwasher, Mom will kill us.”

Rose sprinted out of the kitchen to the bathroom, where she grabbed as many towels from the linen closet as she could carry. By the time she got back, suds had covered nearly the entire floor, and they were still being churned out of the dishwasher at breakneck speed.

She ran back into the kitchen with the towels, took two steps on the soapy floor, and felt her feet slide up and out in front of her. With a great
splat
, she landed on her rear end.

“Rose!” Emily said. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

As she gasped, trying to catch the breath that had been knocked out of her, Rose shook her head. She was buried in towels, and the warm suds and water on the floor had soaked through the entire backside of her jeans.

Emily giggled. “I guess we’re even now, right?”

Her sister’s good humor helped soothe her. Rose slowly, slowly moved her hand under one of the towels to scoop up a handful of suds. “Almost,” she said as she flung the bubbles at her sister.

Emily’s mouth dropped open as she inspected the globs of bubbles stuck on her shirt. Then she was bending down, trying to keep from slipping as she used her hands to launch a return assault. It didn’t take long before they were both sopping wet and soapy, continuing to attack each other with the suds and shrieking with laughter as the dishwasher kept up a steady supply.

“Mom’s gonna be so mad,” Emily said, gripping the breakfast table for support.

“Hey, at least the floor’s really clean now,” Rose said. “Maybe we can get it all mopped up before she gets home.”

“Too late.”

Rose startled at their mother’s voice and looked toward the kitchen doorway, where she and Aunt Ivy stood looking in at them.

“What in the hell happened here?” Josie demanded. “For God’s sake, what did you put in that dishwasher? Why didn’t you turn it off?”

Rose watched her mother step out of her dress shoes and into the suds.

“Be careful,” Ivy called from the doorway. “It must be slicker than owl snot in there.”

Rose tried unsuccessfully to suppress a giggle.

Josie slid and sloshed her way to the dishwasher, turned the dial sharply to
OFF
, and opened the door. A wall of suds made it impossible to see any of the dishes inside, and more suds and quite a bit of hot water poured out onto the floor.

The expression on Emily’s face was pure panic, so Rose gave her a quick wink before turning to her mother. “It’s all my fault, Mom,” she said. “We were out of the powder for the dishwasher, and I thought it would be okay to use Dawn even though Em wasn’t sure. And, we didn’t know you could turn off a dishwasher once it was started. We thought about doing it, but we were afraid of breaking it.” She glanced again at her sister, who shot back a quick, grateful smile.

“Lordy, Lordy,” Ivy said under her breath.

“Well, I suppose you didn’t mean any harm,” Josie said after a long pause. She stared down at the bubbly mess that came well up above her ankles.

“You’d better get that water up, before it seeps down into the floor,” Ivy said.

“Yes. I’ll get the push broom from the garage,” Josie said. “You girls pick up those towels—whoa!”

Her mother had taken only two steps forward before her feet slipped out from under her, just as Rose’s had. She landed in the middle of the kitchen floor.

“Mom! Are you all right?” Rose leaned over, trying to grab her hand.

“Ow. Yes, I’m fine,” Josie said. She smiled and laughed a little as she carefully got to her feet. The back and side of her suit were soaked and sudsy.

“Rose slipped, too, Mom. That’s how the bubble fight started,” Emily said.

“It’s a good thing nobody got hurt,” Josie said.

“It could’ve been worse,” Ivy said, still standing safely in the doorway. “At least this mess is just soap and dirty dishwater.”

“Yeah,” Rose chimed in. “It’s way better than owl snot!”

C
LAUDIA WOKE UP ALONE
. S
HE OPENED HER EYES SLOWLY
and stretched, enjoying the feeling of having slept late and being fully rested.

The feather pillow next to hers had an indentation in the middle from Kyle’s head. He’d managed to get up and leave for his early shift without waking her. Maybe it was because their time together before falling asleep had involved enough physical exertion to result in her sleeping more soundly than usual. She smiled at the memory of it and wondered whether she’d gotten enough exercise last night to justify skipping the treadmill. It was tempting, but she also remembered the delicious feeling of having watched Kyle’s gaze slowly travel the length of her naked body, of seeing his attraction to her reflected in his expression.

Being physically attractive to anyone was still new for her, and she understood that physical attraction was not love. But, her journey from obesity to a healthy weight had been long and difficult. She had no desire to regain the pounds she had lost or return to the world of dateless Saturday nights and cheesecake all to herself.

What she felt for Kyle was an intense mixture of love, admiration, and a physical attraction that often left her breathless. Of course, she was still incredibly inexperienced in the relationship department, but even so, she knew a good thing when she saw it. Kyle was strong, honest, and kind, and a wonderful father. He was
handsome, too, and his good looks were enhanced by his inner qualities. She had realized over the last several months, as her feelings for him had deepened, that he was everything she had dreamed of in a partner.

The thought of losing him, after all she had been through, after all the dieting and workouts and the struggle to overcome her insecurities, was more than she could bear. Although he insisted that he loved her for the person that she was on the inside, she
needed
to stay attractive to him on the outside.

She would maintain her healthy weight.

She would put in her time on the treadmill, and she would reward herself by surprising Kyle with lunch at work. He was, after all, her ultimate guilty pleasure.