Sisterchicks Down Under (24 page)

“Wow!” I said.

“I’ve had the paint for a couple of years. Ray and I were always going to do this when we had time, but you know what? We never had time. I have time. I woke up at 4
AM
and decided I had time to do this. What do you think of the color?”

“I love it.”

“Really?”

“Reminds me of an orange grove,” I said with a warm smile.

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“Do you want some help?”

“You’re dressed too nicely,” Jill said.

“No, I’m not. Give me an old shirt like you’re wearing, and I’ll be fine. I don’t care about these jeans.”

Jill looked at the shirt she had on. It hung off her shoulders
and almost to her knees. “This was one of Ray’s,” she said with the corners of her lips upturned.

“He was a big man!” I wished the words hadn’t flipped out of my mouth the way they had.

“Yes, he was,” Jill said proudly. “He was an awesome man. A very big man.” She tilted her head. “Do you want to see our wedding pictures?”

“What about painting the room?”

“I need a break,” she said. “I want you to see our pictures.”

For the next two hours, Jill took me to visit her life when Ray ruled the world. She likened it to when dinosaurs ruled the planet, because he was larger than life. I loved hearing the stories and watching her face light up with each page she turned. I was still processing the details of Ray’s death, as if it had just happened the night before. Jill was moving forward. She undoubtedly had relived the experience a thousand times. Now she was thinking about other things. She was in such a different place from the person I had met less than two months earlier.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said about going to Paris,” Jill said.

“Paris?”

“Giving the art tours,” Jill said.

“You were the one who brought up Paris,” I reminded her with a tease in my voice. “Something about art museums and your friends Mona and Monet.”

“Mona?”

“Lisa.” The way I said it sounded as if I were trying to play a swimming pool game of Marco Polo.

Jill laughed. “I’m considering leading art tours to Paris. So what do you think of that?”

“I think Bob’s your uncle, and the world is waiting for all you have to offer.”

Jill filled her quiet home with the sweetest, most endearing laughter. “It’s more like, God’s my Father, and He has a handful of mercies He’s been waiting to give me.”

On that note, Jill and I turned our attention to her paint job. We came up with all kinds of new decorating ideas, including the upside-down parasol as a light fixture.

“All we have to do now,” I said, “is go shopping for a parasol.”

“Oh, isn’t that too bad; we have to go shopping.”

“And get someone from the studio to come over and rewire the light. I’ll ask Tony to have one of the lighting guys over.”

“Make sure he doesn’t ask anyone in special effects. When we first moved in, Ray had a special effects guy wire our front patio for us.”

“What happened? I would think he’d do an extremely good job.”

“
Extreme
is the key word in that sentence. I had a laser show on my front deck every time I turned on the lights. If we had music going while we were out there, the lights pulsed with the music. The neighbors thought the wacky Americans were trying to host an outdoor disco.”

“Is it still hooked up?”

“No, I dismantled the system.”

“By yourself?”

“Never underestimate the power of a woman with a pair of wire cutters.”

It seemed Jill was about to surpass me as the queen of one-liners the way she was going.

During the next week we shopped till we dropped or one of Jill’s hot flashes made us stop. We found the perfect parasol
along with an assortment of must-haves such as nightstands, a shower curtain, a waffle maker, and eight CDs with fun music that got Jill’s head and shoulders bobbing whenever she put one on.

I told Tony it was like having a baby shower, the way we were buying everything Jill needed to prepare for her new life. She said she was making up for not buying anything other than food the past two years.

Ten days after starting the renovation, Jill’s home felt new. She and I had painted three more rooms, hung new curtains, and had one of the living room chairs reupholstered. Her beautiful wooden bowl from the Saturday market in Sydney sat in a prominent place on the coffee table. In the bowl she cradled a handful of postcards from the locales she and I had been.

We were rearranging the furniture when, out of thin air, Jill said, “There’s one thing I didn’t tell you about Ray, and I think I need to tell you now.”

I found it hard to believe there was any detail about Ray I didn’t know. While we had been working side by side for the past week and a half, Jill had reminisced about Ray as a sort of final cleansing. With each story from their years together, she seemed to find a place to put that experience in the new structure of her future. I was there mostly to listen and wield a steady paintbrush.

I leaned against the edge of the couch. “What’s that?”

“It’s actually more about Mad Dog than it is about Ray.” Jill brushed the bangs out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “For the last few weeks, of all the things I’ve thought through hundreds of times, this is the part that has bothered me the most.”

“Do you mean since you saw Mad Dog at the Embassy Theatre?”

Jill nodded. “You saw the look on his face. All that shame and regret is still there. I never told you, but Mad Dog came to my house after the settlements were finalized. I was still so raw inside. I remember opening the door that day seeing Mad Dog, and feeling like I wanted to hurt, him.”

“You weren’t ready to face him, I’m sure.”

Jill seemed to have made so much progress in finding peace. I didn’t want her to digress now. Especially for an unsettled feeling she had about Mad Dog.

“It was more than that. I …” She folded herself into the corner easy chair. “I hated him. There, that’s the truth; I’ve said it aloud. Finally. I hated him. Mad Dog lived, and Ray died, and I hated him for that.”

I pulled up a chair and sat across from Jill.

“When Mad Dog came to me, he tried to apologize. He said he knew Ray was a good man, and Ray should have been the one who lived and not him. I just stood there. I didn’t say anything. I think he was looking to me for a release of some sort.” Jill started to cry. I hadn’t seen her cry for days.

“And what did you say to him?”

“I told him …” Jill swallowed and cried some more. “I told him I had nothing to say to him. I said he would have to live with what happened the same way I had to live with it.”

She wiped her tears on her sleeve. “You know what? I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I was okay with that until the day I met you.”

“The day you met me?”

She nodded. “It was something you said. You said that you
were the one who has enjoyed the reward of my husband’s zeal because he saved those crazy orange trees.”

For an instant I was really worried about Jill. I wasn’t tracking with her logic. Maybe she was tipping off-center emotionally because of all the processing she’d been through during the past few weeks.

“When you said that, Kathy, I immediately thought of Mad Dog. I didn’t want to think of him, but his face was right there in front of me. And as clear as we’re talking now, I thought, ‘Mad Dog’s life is also the reward of my husband’s zeal, and a human life matters more than a couple of trees.’ ”

I didn’t know how to respond.

Jill drew in a deep breath. “At Ray’s funeral the pastor read a verse from John in which Jesus said there’s no greater love than for a man to lay down his life for his friend. When the pastor read that, everyone looked at Mad Dog, but I couldn’t look at him. I still can’t look at him. I don’t hate him anymore. I feel something different for him, but it’s not hate.”

I blinked back the tears that had been brimming my eyelids and looked at the postcards fanned out inside the wooden bowl on the coffee table. The card on top was the picture of the Victorian woman from the museum in Sydney. She now stood in the center of Jill’s living room, cradled by the bowl and holding a treasure in her hand.

“I don’t know what to do,” Jill said.

“Open your hand.” I didn’t know why I said that or what it meant.

“What?”

I tipped my head toward the postcard. “What do you have in your hand?”

Jill looked at her palm. “Nothing. Except a small callus
under my wedding band. That’s all. Are you saying it’s time for me to remove my wedding band?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. I was looking at the postcard, and that thought just popped into my head. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do.”

I felt so foolish.
Why did I say that? Just because I inadvertently said something meaningful without knowing it the day I met Jill doesn’t mean I’m a fountain of wisdom. But she’s waiting for me to spout the next life-changing one-liner.

“Jill, how about if we finish moving the furniture around, and then we can talk some more about this.”

“I don’t have anything else to say. I know it’s awkward because Tony works for Mad Dog and you’ve known him all these years. That’s why I kept this to myself for so long.”

“I’m glad you got everything you’re feeling out in the open. I just don’t know what to do with it.”

Jill rose, and with a slight shrug, she said, “Neither do I.”

O
n our final day
of touch-ups to complete Jill’s renovations, we talked Mr. Barry into bringing Dorothea over to see the changes I’d been telling her about. He pushed her wheel-chair up the steps to the deck and into the living room.

From Dorothea’s position in the middle of the room at renovation central, she used her pointer finger on her left hand to direct the final-day operations. I saw what Mr. Barry meant about the red nails. Those baby fireballs could grab your attention from all the way across the room. All it took was one wag of her index finger, and I hopped up to move a lamp or a chair a few inches to the right or left to satisfy our sweetest critic. Dorothea was a happy woman that day.

So was Jill.

Mr. Barry took Dorothea home in the late afternoon. We invited them to stay for dinner, but Dorothea had worn herself out giving directions. Tony had agreed to come over to Jill’s with the lighting guy since the parasol light was the final detail
that needed to be put in place. Jill offered to prepare dinner for the lighting guy in return and opened the invitation to Tony and me as well.

She and I went to work in her newly spruced-up kitchen. Jill had promised me she would make her favorite New Zealand lamb dish with her version of Pavlova if I’d make something American.

A few days earlier, Skyler had sent me a box of Cheerios as a joke. I brought the box with me to Jill’s that day, but I hadn’t shown it to her. All I said was that I had the first course covered. I also brought all the ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies from a recipe I knew by heart.

The weather was nice enough for us to have dinner on the front deck so, as soon as the cookies were in the oven with the timer set, I volunteered to set the patio table.

“Do you need salad plates?” Jill asked, trying to guess what I’d brought for the first course.

“No, soup bowls. And some milk. And maybe some sugar.”

Jill grinned. If she had guessed my surprise, she was being gracious enough not to spoil my fun. Giving me what I needed, she sent me to the deck where I poured the happy treat into the bowls. Then, because no one was watching, I picked up one of the golden rings, held it between my fingers, and murmured, “My precious!”

Then I popped it in my mouth.

I would have performed my tribute at dinner, but I didn’t know whom Tony was bringing from the studio with him. If it was a true Middle-earth kind of guy, I might be putting Tony’s job in jeopardy. And that would not be good, since Tony still hadn’t heard if he’d gotten the position on the next project.

I lit all the candles in the whimsical holder that circled the
center of the patio table. That’s when I noticed the wire that led up the center of the umbrella pole and spread out along the spokes with hundreds of twinkle lights.

Ten minutes later, I opened the front door. “Jill, can you come out here a minute?”

Jill arrived, drying her hands with a dishtowel. I plugged in a cord, and the twinkle lights inside the umbrella lit up—along with the blue and green laserlike light show

“What did you do?”

I held up my two tools. “Never underestimate the power of a woman with a pair of wire cutters
and
a roll of duct tape!”

The studio van stopped at the bottom of the driveway.

“Good. The lighting guy and Tony should be able to fix this.” Jill reached over to pull the plug before it started an electrical fire.

Lifting my head, I saw Tony coming up the driveway. Next to him was Mad Dog.

“Tony!”

Of all the people you could have chosen, why did you choose Mad Dog?

“It’s okay.” Jill stopped me before I pulled out a one-liner that I wouldn’t be able to swallow later. “I asked Tony to bring him.”