The Wildwater Walking Club (8 page)

I pointed. “Maybe that one?”

“Eyebrow shape?”

“Before or after plucking?” I said. “You know, this is getting kind of personal. Is there any way we could just skip to the bowling part?”

Rick pushed a few more buttons and six cartoon characters appeared on the screen. “Sure, we can go with the default Mii’s. Which one?”

“Lower right,” I said.

“Done,” he said. “I’ll be top middle.”

He picked up two little rectangular wireless remote controls and handed one to me. “Okay, you push the A button, right there, then swing your arm back and push the B button, right there, to let the ball go. And here’s a trick I wouldn’t share with just anyone. Release the ball high, so it drops on the lane before rolling, making sure you don’t rotate your Wiimote.”

“My what?” I said. “This is crazy. It’s like learning a new language.”

“Wait,” he said. There was a little strap attached to the remote, or apparently the Wiimote, and he stepped closer and looped it around my wrist like a bracelet, then slid a little plastic Ziploc thing back to tighten it. His hair was still damp, and I could smell his shampoo, something fresh and citrusy.

He looked up and smiled. “You can’t be too careful. There’ve been a surprising number of accidents with these things. More than a few television screens taken out.”

“I bet,” I said. I felt a flicker of disappointment when he let go of my wrist.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Just bowl.”

I took an awkward little swing back, switched direction, and pushed the button. “Oops,” I said. “Gutter ball.”

“Push this arrow to change the angle,” he said. “And watch your Mii’s movements for the timing.”

I hit three pins with the second ball. I handed Rick the Wiimote. He took an athletic step forward as he swung his bowling arm back gracefully.

“Strike!” I yelled. “Ohmigod, you’re amazing.”

“Thanks,” he said. His thick hair, pale brown with paler strands of gray, was getting shorter and lighter as it dried, but it could still have used a good cut. He pushed a clump of it off his forehead. “Here’s the thing though. Anybody over the age of twelve who’s a pro at Wii bowling is quite possibly not living up to his full potential.”

“You and me both,” I said. “Come on, hurry up so I can have another turn.”

After we finished the string, we sat down in two of the red recliners to take a break. I tilted mine back until my feet popped up in front at a comfortable level. “Wow, that’s a workout,” I said. I was dying to check my pedometer, but I didn’t want to call undue attention to my midsection.

Rick tilted his recliner back, too. “Wait till you try the tennis,” he said.

“So,” I said a long minute later.

He looked up at the ceiling. “Divorced, two grown kids, homeowner, nonsmoker, Virgo, buyout.”

I looked up at the ceiling, too. “Single, no kids, homeowner, nonsmoker, Libra, buyout.”

“Movies, Indian over Chinese, everything but anchovies, no idea what’s next.”

I smiled. “Long walks, Thai over Indian, plain cheese, ditto.”

He turned to look at me. He really did have great eyes. I also liked the way his forehead wrinkled when he was thinking about something. “Are you sure we haven’t already dated?”

“It’s a possibility,” I said.

“I’ve never been more messed up in my life,” he said.

“That would be another ditto,” I said.

“There you are,” a voice said from the doorway. Rick closed his eyes. “Hey, Mark,” he said.

The guy named Mark walked into the room, followed by two more guys from our small-group coaching class.

“I can’t believe you cut class,” Mark said. “Your future’s at stake here. At least what’s left of it.” He grabbed a Wiimote off the top of the console. “Okay, we’re talking doubles tennis.” He looked over at me. “You can rotate in or be the ball girl. Up to you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I was just leaving.”

Rick stood up when I did. He looked at me and shrugged.

I shrugged back. “See ya,” I said.

I was just about to open the door, when Rick reached past me and turned the knob. He held the door open for me and pulled it closed behind us once we were both in the hallway.

“Don’t you have a tennis game?” I asked.

“Match,” he said.

I dusted off my flirty look and tried it on again. “Who’s a match?” I said.

He grinned. “Time will tell. Can I call you later?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Can I have your number?” he asked.

“Do you have a pen?” I asked.

“No, but I have a really good memory,” he said.

“We’ll see,” I said. I gave him my cell phone number, just so he could reach me wherever I was.

I turned and walked away. I was trying to be cool, so it was a good thing my back was to him, since I had a smile on my face the size of Texas. I could feel him watching me the whole way down the hall. I sure hoped some of those walking benefits had made their way to my butt by now.

“
HELLO
,”
I SAID, TRYING TO MAKE MY VOICE KIND OF LOW
and sexy without being obvious. Wow, it worked. I sounded like a cross between Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe. I’d read about a study that found that a woman’s voice was sexiest when she was fertile, so maybe I was ovulating. Or maybe I was already pregnant, and this incredible voice was my first symptom.

“Nora,” a male voice croaked. “It’s Michael.”

I didn’t say anything. I seemed to be floating on a soft, fluffy cloud of lavender, rose petals, and mint, and I took a moment to breathe it all in.

“Carleton,” he added.

I still didn’t say anything.

“How’s it going?” He coughed a loud, messy cough. “Well, I sure hope you haven’t caught this cold thing that’s going around. Listen, one of the reasons I’m calling…do you remember that time I was at your place and I had the same kind of deal and you gave me some kind of cough medicine? It worked great, knocked me right out. Do you remember what it was?”

I took the receiver away from my ear and looked at it. Then I put it back to my ear again.

“Yeah,” I said. My voice was rich, resonant, gorgeous. “I remember.”

Michael launched into another coughing fit. “Great,” he said when he finished. “What’s it called?”

“Drano,” I said.

I sat up in bed, and my dream pillow slid down to my lap. I tossed it on top of my alarm clock. “Back to the drawing board for you,” I said in a voice that was ordinary and scratchy with sleep.

I was mostly relieved to realize it had only been a dream, but I also felt an embarrassing flicker of sadness that Michael hadn’t really called. I pushed it away. He was old news.

It was still early, but since I was wide awake, I got up anyway. I made a strawberry-banana-yogurt smoothie for breakfast, then went outside to check on my lavender. My little plants were in full bloom. The Grasso and Munstead flowers were predictably purple, but the Hidcote flowers turned out to be pink. Even though it was ridiculous, I felt not only proud but also somehow personally responsible.

Still high on Rick’s promised phone call, I’d stopped at Home Depot on my way home yesterday and bought a cute little bright green mulching rotary mower. A guy working there tried to talk me into a sit-down mower so I didn’t have to work so hard, but I told him that was the point. Mowing my lawn would really rack up some mileage on my pedometer, plus I knew how proud Tess would be of me for choosing a mower that didn’t pollute the air with noise or fumes. Though come to think of it, I’d seen her husband riding around their lawn on a sit-down mower. Maybe even Tess had to pick her battles.

After I got home and unloaded the mower from my trunk, I called and left a message canceling my lawn service. Then I checked unsuccessfully for phone messages. And then I went outside to mow.

I liked mowing my lawn. The mower made a soothing
clackety-clack
sound as the blades rotated, and I fell into a rhythm right
away—a long swath down to the edge of the grass, then a little swing around, and back again with just the tiniest overlap of the strip I’d just cut.

Unfortunately, mowing the lawn gave me way too much time to think about Rick, and even though I’d been trying to resist, I’d been thinking about him pretty much nonstop ever since. I liked him. On the pro side, he was fun. He was cute. We were even astrologically compatible, though I had to admit I only believed in astrology when it told me what I wanted to hear. He seemed like a nice guy, and he was definitely a good bowler.

On the con side, he was a mess. I was a mess. So the ultimate question became: Could two messes ever be equal to more than the sum of their parts?

This morning I formulated a new set of questions: Why did Rick say he was going to call unless he was going to call in a timely fashion? If he wasn’t going to call right away, he should have waited until the next time he saw me to tell me he was going to call. So what exactly had Rick meant when he said he’d call me later? Clearly not later today, since today had become yesterday already. Later tomorrow, which had turned into today? Later this week? This month? This lifetime? I was too old for this stuff. I should have turned the tables and told him I’d call him later. Let him see what it felt like.

Tess stepped around the edge of her fence to my backyard. “Morning,” she said. “So, what’s the scoop, did you find us a hotel?”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I’m sorry, I completely forgot.”

Rosie stepped off the path and into my yard. “We’re probably not going to get one within a hundred miles anyway. You know, I think we should just go next summer instead. It’ll give us more time to plan.”

Tess let out a gust of air. “I really hate it when people tell you they’re going to do something with you, and then they back out.”

“I know,” I said. “I think I hate that more than anything in the whole world. I mean, why even say it in the first place if they’re not going to do it?”

Rosie looked at Tess, then at me. “Why do I think we’re not talking about Sequim?” she said.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s my fault. You two go walk, and I’ll try to find a hotel by the time you get back. I can always walk later.”

“No way,” Tess said. “First we’ll walk and then we’ll find a hotel. And then we’ll book our flights. Today.”

“I can’t today,” Rosie said. “I’m lucky to get out for a quick walk. I’ve got plans that I have to finish drawing, and the lavender fields are choking in weeds.”

“And then we’ll go help Rosie weed,” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” Tess said. “I’ve got weeds of my own.”

It was the quietest walk we’d had so far. Our rhythm seemed off, too, as if our strides didn’t quite match anymore, and we stretched out into a single file on the sidewalk, even though we didn’t have to. Maybe the honeymoon was over, and pretty soon we’d take turns making up excuses why The Wildwater Walking Club wasn’t walking today.

It was going to be a hot one. It was just July and it already felt like August. I wiped some sweat off my upper lip with the sleeve of my T-shirt. Maybe Rick didn’t want to appear overanxious. Or maybe he was having second thoughts. Or maybe for him, later meant tomorrow, the way next summer can mean this coming summer to some people and the summer of next year to other people.

Maybe I’d just call him and tell him not to bother calling me, because I really didn’t need the aggravation. I mean, I was fine with him calling me, and I was fine with him not calling me. But what I really hated was not knowing whether or not he would call, and even assuming he would, exactly when it might be. I just couldn’t
take it. Maybe there’s a point in your life when you’ve simply had enough of this kind of thing.

I stepped off the curb, and Tess yanked me back by my T-shirt. A car beeped.

“What are you trying to do?” Tess said. “Get yourself killed?”

ROSIE, TESS, AND
I leaned over my computer and searched the Internet in the bedroom I’d converted into a home office. I would have dusted things off a little if I’d known I was going to have company, but other than that, it wasn’t too bad. We’d dragged a couple of my dining room chairs in for Rosie and Tess to sit on, and I’d passed out bottled water all around. I wasn’t Martha Stewart, but I thought I was doing okay in the hostess department.

We scrolled past a lavender-themed lesbian Internet chat line and a lavender-named historic railway run solely by volunteers in the village of Isfield in East Sussex, England. We learned that “laid out in lavender” could mean prepared for burial, since lavender was one of the herbs traditionally used to mask the strong smell of dead bodies, or it could also mean to show something in the best possible light. We found out that Adam and Eve may or may not have taken lavender with them when they were banished from the Garden of Eden, and that long ago, women used to throw their laundry over lavender bushes so it could absorb the scent as it dried.

“Do you think I could have sea lavender in my garden?” I asked.

“Sure,” Rosie said, “but it’s not really lavender. It’s actually statice.” She took over the mouse and surfed up a picture.

Eventually we moved on to finding a hotel. Nothing. Not a single available hotel within a hundred miles of the Sequim Lavender Festival.

“Bummer,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I blew it.”

“I’m sure a day didn’t make a bit of difference,” Rosie said.

“Wouldn’t you know,” Tess said. “Just when I was starting to get used to the idea.”

“All right,” I said, “let’s think for a minute.” I propped my elbows up on the desk and rested my head in my hands. One of the things I’d learned at work was that there was usually a solution if you just backed up, reassessed, and then approached the problem from a slightly different angle.

It was so quiet in the room you could almost hear our brains ticking. Outside, we heard a distant
cock-a-doodle-do.

“Oh, Rod,” Rosie said, “keep it down, will you.”

“I thought roosters were only supposed to crow to greet the day,” Tess said.

“Try telling Rod Stewart that,” Rosie said.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ll print out a list of hotels and bed-and-breakfasts in the area. We’ll split it three ways and just keep calling until we find one that’s had a cancellation. I bet lots of people book their hotel early and then something comes up.”

“Let’s just go to New Orleans instead,” Tess said.

“I can’t,” Rosie said. “I’ve got way too much to do without visiting teachers I don’t even know. And I really think we should wait until next year to go anywhere.”

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

The minute they left, I printed out a list and curled up on the couch in my living room and started calling. Just on the off chance that today was Rick’s idea of later and in case my call waiting wasn’t reliable, I made sure I used my home phone and not my cell.

On the fifth call, to an all-suites hotel just off Highway 101, I hit pay dirt. “Good afternoon,” a friendly woman’s voice said. “Sequim Suites, how may I help you?”

“I’m hoping you can conjure up a hotel room for my walking partners and me for the lavender festival. We have our hearts set on
going and we all really, really need to get away. One of us even has a lavender farm way over here on the East Coast in Massachusetts, and I just took a buyout from my company and it’s the first vacation I’ve had in—”

“You’re not going to believe this,” the woman said.

“What?” I said.

“I just had a cancellation not five minutes ago. Technically, I’m supposed to check the waiting list…”

“Oh, please,” I said. “Please, please, please. I’ll bring you a pair of sneakers. Balancing Act. The Walk On By—top of the line. What size shoe do you wear?”

I called Tess and Rosie right away, and they came back over after dinner. I poured them each a glass of white wine. “It’s not lavender black currant champagne,” I said.

“It’ll do,” Tess said.

“To hot times in Sequim,” Rosie said. We clinked our glasses.

“I can’t believe the woman who answered the phone wears an eight and a half,” I said. “I mean, how lucky can you get?”

“I can’t believe you got us a hotel room,” Rosie said. “And a suite, no less.”

“No way am I sleeping on that pullout sofa,” Tess said.

“We’ll take turns,” I said. “Come on, let’s spend those frequent flier miles.”

It took almost two hours, but eventually we worked our way through the online frequent flier reservation maze, and got all three of us on the same flights, both ways no less.

“What a workout,” Tess said. “They sure don’t make it easy. I can’t believe how many miles it took. And how about that fuel surcharge—such a rip-off.”

“But we did it,” Rosie said. “That’s the important thing. Ohmigod, how am I ever going to take that much time off?”

“Not a problem,” I said. “I’ll come weed for you tomorrow.”

“Really?” Rosie said. “You’d do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “As soon as we finish walking. And lifting and stretching.”

After they left, I went into my kitchen and stared at my phone for a while. I closed my eyes and willed Rick to call. I went into the bathroom, washed my face, slathered on some moisturizer, brushed my teeth, gargled with mouthwash.

Just as I was walking to my bedroom, my cell phone rang.

“Wow, that was quick,” I said out loud. I took my time walking to the phone. unavailable, my caller ID said, which was probably true, but I thought I should talk to him anyway. My heart took an extra beat as I reached for the phone.

“Hello,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to conjure up my sexy dream voice.

“How’re your windows working for you?” a rich male voice said.

I knew I should just hang up. “Okay, I guess,” I said.

“Did you know that hands down the best thing you can do to increase your home value is to install tilt-to-clean vinyl replacement windows?”

I closed my eyes. “Really?” I said, just to hear him talk some more. I imagined him handsome, but not too, with kind eyes and a killer smile. I mean, everybody had to make a living, and who knew, he might make big bucks selling tilt-to-clean windows. Not that money was the most important thing.

“I kid you not. You’ll pay them off in one to five years with just the energy savings alone. And that’s without factoring in the sizeable tax rebates you can receive for making your home more energy efficient. And best of all, our personalized, professional estimate is free, and if you hurry you can just make the deadline on our thirty percent off special.”

I’d heard stories about a woman my age at work who was paying
some guy in his thirties for regular “massages” that included more than a massage. Maybe it had all started with a phone call like this.

I was lonely, but not that lonely. “Thanks anyway,” I said before I hung up. “But windows are the least of my problems.”