Whole Latte Life (35 page)

Michael watches the next batter come on deck. “You’re good.”

“Hooray!”

“But not good enough.”

“I’m wrong?”

“During World War II, the lights of Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds revealed our ships at night. The ships in New York harbor. Out of respect to America, The Yankees didn’t install their lighting system until after the war. They played their first night game on May 28, 1946.”

“I’m wrong? Drat, I thought I was pretty tuned in to this place.”

Michael lifts her hand and kisses the back of it. “Tuned in to Yankee Stadium? My grandfather would have loved you.”

“Wait a minute. He worked there, didn’t he? He built that wonderful old stadium.”

“His very first job in America. Doing manual labor at the Yankee Stadium site. He and my grandmother lived in a tenement house a few blocks away. Walked to work every day with his toolbox and his lunch pail.”

“Do you know how amazing that is? I mean, every kid dreams of playing ball. And your grandfather came to America and helped build the most famous house of dreams. Wow.” She leans a little closer.

Michael slips his arm around her shoulders. “I can taste that Polla Capriccioso already. Warm Italian bread. Little side of ravioli.”

Rachel pulls into her driveway the next evening and takes a deep breath. For the past hour, she drove too fast and changed lanes too often.

So now she sits for a minute and considers her ranch home, her hands still gripped on the steering wheel. Her heart slows. The lawn needs to be cut and last week’s PennySaver lays beneath a bush. The impatiens she planted have spread around the maple tree like a magenta wedding band, and the petunias growing in the pot hanging from the lamp post explode into trailing vines of pink bells.

Wedding bells.

Everywhere, all she sees are weddings. The white siding on her ranch becomes the white chapel. The stone walkway winds itself into a silver carpeted aisle. Her front door is the altar.

It is this very thought that rushed her home, making her drive like crazy. Michael hasn’t said anything. It’s too soon to think marriage. But he won’t consider the ending, either.

The thing is, the summer has grown exquisite. Rachel can spend as much time as she likes at an old cottage at a special beach. And they’ve gone from Manhattan dinners to take-out seafood on a screened porch where they talk softly, like in a library, revealing their selves one page at a time, little stories. And that is how she knows.

Michael is as imbedded in New York as the gnarled roots of that old maple tree are imbedded in the rich, brown soil of her front yard. As the petunia bells are pot bound in their hanging pot. There is no uprooting him. It wouldn’t be fair to ask, and he wouldn’t be capable of doing so. All that he loves, all of New York, it nurtures his second chance at life.

She unlocks the front door and steps inside her house. The air is closed-up stuffy, so she opens windows and considers her home. A different light shines on it now, a light cast by another life.

In her beach room, low sunlight bathes the space in golden rays. She looks at Sara Beth’s portrait. Michael wants Sara Beth back in her life. Their friendship matters.

And Rachel so needs Sara Beth to dally with this Michael question and the real possibility of marriage. And the fact that he killed someone. That’s in him. Eventually she’ll face a huge decision. And Sara Beth will know how to find it in the tangled mess of love, and her worry about his hypervigilance along with the repercussions of ending a life, and his divorce, and Summer becoming her stepdaughter. And the danger inherent in his work. He’s got nothing to fall back on should he be injured or decide to switch careers. No other experience, no advanced education.

But that’s not why she rushed home.

It happened this summer over finding conch shells on the beach and lacing up bowling shoes. While standing on the Empire State Building and walking along an old, weathered boardwalk. She walked right into his life.

Now she has to look at her home in this new light, to study it and feel its history and let it possess her. Memories will surface. Emotions will rise. Especially this week, with the anniversary of Carl’s death. She’ll be alone that day. It’ll be like a photo album in her mind, turning the pages, remembering when, smiling, crying a little too, trying to find some way to hold on to what she has of Carl, and Ashley. Of holidays and birthdays and kitchen talks and snowy nights and Sunday dinners. Some way to put white corners on pictures of her life, close the album and take them with her. It is necessary to go through this. It is the only way to know if she can ever leave it all behind. To know if she can walk out of this life and into Michael’s.

But mostly, it is to say a last goodbye to Carl.

Chapter Twenty-Four

W
hat is he
doing?
” Jen whispers to Kat on Sunday afternoon. They watch Tom taking Sara Beth’s hand on bended knee. “I thought I was going to help him wax the car. He said he’d pay me extra allowance.”

“Wait! I think he’s
proposing
!”

“To Mom? Eeew.”

“Shhh!”

Tom catches his daughters watching through the sliding glass door and motions for them to come outside onto the deck. “Stand over there and don’t talk,” he tells them. “You’re witnessing history.”

“Tom, what is going on?” Sara Beth asks. She’s sitting in the shade of the deck umbrella.

Tom reaches into his cargo shorts pocket and pulls out the velvet box. “Now this one’s temporary. Until we figure things out.”

“What have you done?” Sara Beth lifts her sunglasses and studies him.

He turns and winks at his daughters, then raises the box to Sara Beth. “Exactly what you’re thinking. But if you
lose
this one, if you get my drift, it’s seven hundred dollars, not seven thousand. I need you to wear a ring. So,” and he opens the box for her, “with this ring, we thee wed.”

Sara Beth looks from the ring, to Tom, to their daughters who quietly inched closer.

“We?” she asks. “We thee wed?”

And he points out the three round diamonds in the center, “Jen, Kat and Owen,” then the two tiny oblong diamonds on either side. “Me,” he says, touching one. “And your mom. Okay?”

“Tom,” Sara Beth stops him, her heart breaking with love and guilt at once.

“So I’ve got everybody in your life covered.”

“Well.” And Sara Beth wonders about it, her mother in the ring, and how she still hasn’t told Tom that if things were different that day, maybe her mother would’ve made it. And yet here he is, trying to keep her mother alive.

“You’re getting married
again
?” Kat asks, stepping closer and looking at the ring.

“Kind of,” Tom says. “We can do things different now that we’re forty. Help me put this ring on Mom’s finger.”

So when Sara Beth extends her left hand, three hands wrap around the ring and slip it in place.

“Aren’t you going to kiss the bride?” Kat asks.

Sara Beth stands and watches Tom, his frameless glasses low on his nose, his hair freshly buzzed. At this point, she doesn’t know what to expect.

Tom reaches for her hand. “Yes, you’re worth three days. You’re worth an antique shop, or whatever you want. I’m not abandoning you.”

“I didn’t abandon you guys,” she whispers.

“I know that now.”

Suddenly she feels very much alone with him, aware of his chest rising with each breath, of his eyes not leaving hers, the heat some wavering curtain around them. When he pulls her closer, she rises on tiptoe and kisses him hesitantly. The beauty of it is, he kisses her back and doesn’t stop, his hands cupping her face, taking her in like he is on one long inhale needed to live. She’s never felt so necessary.

“Gross,” Jen whispers behind them.

The next day, Sara Beth glances at the ring while her hand is on the steering wheel. The diamonds glimmer in the sunlight in a way her old ring never did. Her mother will always be in this ring now. The spontaneity of Tom’s gesture so moved her that she decides to do the same. Before taking Katherine and Owen to see their new kitten, Slinky, at the carriage house, she takes a spontaneous side trip down Rachel’s street. With such a great idea, they have to start talking again. Rachel’s car is backing out of her driveway so Sara toots the horn, parks at the curb and hurries over.

“I’m glad I caught you!” she calls out. She wishes she could tell her Tom’s agreed to look at the house, but that will come tomorrow night, if Rachel agrees to her invitation.

“Is everything okay?” Rachel quickly rolls down her window.

“Yes! Listen, I won’t hold you. Tom’s got a business dinner tomorrow. I thought we could try a girls’ night out and catch up with each other. We’ll take the kids to the bandshell, pack the cooler?” As the words come out, she catches sight of Rachel’s suitcase in the back seat. “Oh. Maybe not, then.”

“Sorry. I’m on my way to see Ashley.”

Something Sara Beth noticed when they talked recently were these awkward moments, the ones aching for what they used to have, when they didn’t have to ask
How is she?
In artwork, a cast shadow is the shadow that falls from one form onto another. Their lost New York weekend is that cast shadow.

“She misses you and her dad, doesn’t she?”

Rachel puts her sunglasses on top of her head. They still find the old nuances. Like right now. Nuances that make them both want Rachel to jump out of the car, pull Sara Beth over to the garden bench and tell her about Ashley calling and emailing every day. Instead she checks her watch. “I miss her too,” she says.

“I’ll bet,” Sara Beth answers, knowing all about missing someone. All about being miles and miles apart. If they can take a few precious minutes and talk about the kids, trying that tactic to find each other again, the miles between them would lessen. So much in her life seems to be almost in her grasp, this friendship included.

Rachel puts her car in gear. “I’m late. Ashley’s car needs brakes and she asked me to come and help out. You know, drive her to class, that kind of thing, while it’s in the shop.”

“At least that’s what she says, right? It gets her mom there?”

“Maybe she’s too far from home. I don’t know. But I’ve really got to go. She’ll be waiting.” She starts backing out. “Sara? How’s Katherine’s arm?”