Authors: Josephine Garner
Walk on Water
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August 27, 2012
Copyright © 2012 Josephine Garner
All rights reserved.
ISBN 10: 1479296562
EAN 13: 9781479296569
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62346-293-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012916937
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
.
Many thanks to all the friends and family who support and encourage my writing, and most especially to: Tracey Hardy, Charlotte Kent, Barry Davies, Katrin Kohl, and David Johnson.
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CONTENTS
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“And Peter answered him and said, ‘Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water.’ And he said, ‘Come.’ And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, ‘Lord, save me.’ And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, ‘O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?’”
Matthew 14:28-31
.
I
t was about time to forgive myself for being cheap—frugal, I mean. I was just good with money. Practical. Thrifty. What was wrong with that? Armed with a
buy-3-get-2-free
coupon, I had come to the mall on a mission to stock-up on my favorite fragrance,
Juniper Breeze
. Bath & Body Works was having a sale. I was thinking I might buy a year’s supply of body lotion and body wash.
Juniper Breeze
was my
signature scent
. It wasn’t a bold fragrance, but rather it made a calm, clean statement, blending in, barely noticeable. Passionate perfume commercials deceived people. How could taking somebody’s breath away be good? Maybe it was fine for television and fantasies, but on elevators—not so much.
A sales associate, wearing a bright red apron and a brighter smile, greeted me, offering to help.
“Oh!” she exclaimed when I told her what I was looking for. “It’s one of our all-time favorites. It’s over here.”
Back here
was more apt. Time was when the
Juniper Breeze
collection had been at the front of the store. I supposed even
all-time-favorites
eventually became passé.
“Have you tried it for the house?” the sales associate wanted to know. “It’s great in a wall-flower.”
Juniper Breeze
was for me. For my house, a two bedroom condo in an older development suitable for a social worker’s salary, I preferred vanilla-scented candles, which men were also purported to prefer if you believed the women’s magazines; which I sort of did, judging by how many of them I was willing buy at the supermarket check-out. I wasn’t a total loser when it came to romance and/or sex, but a little counsel couldn’t hurt.
Robert, my ex-husband, had said I was boring, not in the divorce papers, and not even during the bitter arguments between us, when we had both said hurtful things. He had pronounced it when we were both relatively composed, resigned to the fact that our marriage was over, and maybe should have never been. He had said it objectively, and I didn’t blame him, because after all he had bored me too.
Although not in the beginning. In the beginning I had been grateful, having read too many articles that prophesized spinsterhood for women like me. The older a woman got, the writers warned, the more educated, the more career-minded, the more likely she was dooming herself to being alone, vanilla fragrance notwithstanding.
Mommy had agreed. “A man has to feel needed,” she had cautioned me, when I was just a twenty-something, as if the self-sufficiency she had taught me was a sin similar to sleeping-around, and possibly less forgivable. So when Robert had come along, undaunted by my independence, and perhaps actually impressed by it, he had seemed like a godsend to the both of us. Good-looking, smart, ambitious, even religious, he had been my escort to the American dream, the
Prince Charming
for my
Cinderella Complex
. I just didn’t—couldn’t—love him.
But also according to Mommy, I didn’t have to. Respecting him, being thankful for and to him was supposed to have been enough. “One day you’ll wake up and it’ll just be there—you love him.” And I had been comfortable with Robert at first and for awhile. We had even tried to start a family. Maybe we’d still be married if we had succeeded. Mommy-Daddy bookends with happy children in between, holding us together. I supposed I had just been lucky again, perhaps naturally contraceptive, or sterile. In the end there had been no children; and not enough respect and gratitude to keep us together without them either.
Yet Mommy insisted that we could get back together. Robert had not remarried, and I barely dated. “Sometimes people are just made for each other,” Mommy argued all the time.
Or made to be alone
, I would think. But she was right, some divorced people did reconcile. They grew up, or got over things, or just acquiesced and settled down, seemingly wiser for the experience. As a family counselor, I often tried to help that happen. It was better for the children. But of course Robert and I didn’t have any. He still called me,
just to talk
he would say whenever I would answer, however there were lots of times when reading the caller-id, I didn’t.
I set my Bath & Body Works basket down on the floor and squirted a dab of the pale green cream into my palm. It blended quickly, soaking into my skin and releasing the fresh scent. The perfume industry was a billion dollar enterprise, and as popular as the sales associate claimed
Juniper Breeze
to be, it wasn’t driving the market, not from the back shelf of the store, yet I liked it and I didn’t care what anybody else thought. I often followed my own mind that way.
“Rachel?” a woman’s voice called my name interrupting my private revelry. “Rachel Cunningham?”
I looked up.
Luke’s mother.
At first all I could do was stare at her. What was she doing here? In the not-so-fashionable, kind-of-struggling Northside Mall? How many years had it been? Fifteen? Twenty? Forever?
“I can’t believe it!” cried Mrs. Sterling as she wrapped me up in a happy embrace.
Her heavy perfume filled the air, overpowering the
Juniper Breeze.
“Mrs-Mrs. Sterling,” I stumbled. “He-Hello.”
Her thin arms held me tightly. Because she never had before, I was stunned on lots of accounts, but I managed to hug her too. This was the closest I had ever been to her, in spite of her son having tried mightily to make us friends.
“Hello!” I lifted my voice. “How are you?”
“Look at you!” she said stepping back as if to admire me, squeezing my arms in her hands. “Just as pretty as ever. You haven’t changed a bit!”
The
as ever
made it not a total lie.
“Neither have you,” I replied.
“Oh,” Mrs. Sterling demurred faintly, touching her hair which was now a lustrous silver. “I’m just an old lady.”
That was true, but she remained an elegant one. Luke had always been proud of his mother. In her youth she had modeled in New York before marrying Thomas Sterling and settling into Dallas society as the wife of a successful business man and local politician. Her face was wrinkled now but her cheekbones were still perfect, her makeup flawless. She could still do a photo-shoot for one of those boomer-friendly glamour magazines that celebrated aging gracefully. A paisley silk scarf concealed what twenty years might have done to her aristocratic neck.
The last time I had seen her was at Luke’s wedding; which I had made myself go to as if on a dare, needing to prove something to myself and to everybody else too. That I was happy for Luke. That he was marrying the
right
girl; a woman of fashion-model quality just like his mother, who would make him and their children her
career
. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Like Mommy said, people could be made for each other; and not.
Their wedding had been storybook. Christina had been a dreamy angel in billows of white, Luke serene and serious, the Episcopal cathedral filled with family and friends. “You’re like a little sister to Luke,” Christina had assured me.
Little sister
—more like
Little Orphan Annie
except I didn’t have a dog. In those days Mommy had been too fussy about her house for pets.
I hadn’t even been in the right sorority or in a sorority at all. I wasn’t much of a joiner. I had never belonged to anything, or anyone, except Mommy. I used to wonder if that was what Luke had liked about me, my being a
free spirit
as he had called me. Although he had been free too, and in a lot of ways freer than me, despite being in a fraternity himself. In any case, he had made me his friend, and ultimately that had made me Christina’s friend; so on their wedding day there I had been, the odd one, lined-up with Christina’s five sorority sisters, executing my bridesmaid’s duties as I grinned goofily like I was supposed to, a real team player, all decked out in pink satin right down to the three-inch-heel sling-back pumps. Afterwards Christina had mailed me a set of wedding pictures, a keepsake for my loss, except that it had never been mine.
From day one in
English Literature 315,
Luke and I had forged an unlikely bond, building it through essays and book reports, and mathematical formulas, over cappuccinos and burgers and beers, and during shared car trips back home to Dallas for the holidays. Our friendship had been as improbable as Luke taking a romance writers’ course in the first place. After all he had been an engineering major, more suited to numbers and equations, enchanted by angles and circumferences, and the way the physical world fit together regardless of whether or not we had the words to explain the relationships.
Taking an English literature elective was something he had done to satisfy his mother. Liberal arts, the Humanities, these were the things she loved and he enjoyed making her happy. Fortunately for him, Luke had said, I had been there to escort him through an alien world of the subjective. On his graduation day, with his parents for witnesses, he had credited me for his
Summa Cum Laude
.
And I might have died in
Chemistry 301
had it not been for Luke. The memory of my statistics exams could still cause me to catch my breath, but he had coached me through all of it, patiently explaining Chi Squares and P Values as if he had been taking me on a trip to
Disney Land
. It had practically been a cliché, like we were Don Henley and Stevie Nicks singing about
leather and lace,
except it had been numbers and words.
And Christina had gotten the lace. The bridesmaid dress had been frill-free and so tight that I could barely breathe. Confined in it I had gone through the reception line with Mommy right behind me, congratulating them all: Mr. and Mrs. Sterling, Christina, Luke, wishing them every happiness, and meaning it too.
“I’m so glad you shared this with us, Rachel,” Christina had said. “It means a lot to Luke that you’re here.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” I had replied meeting her radiant smile with my own.
I hadn’t had a choice.
“You’re his best friend,” Christina had told me.
“No,” I had corrected her. “You are.”