Chapter 1
[Trinity]
Forty-one years old
There is something provocative about Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting Grey Lines with Black, Blue, and Yellow.
The obvious slit up the middle of the image.
The sliver of a petal pink center. The outward folds of blue and purple, distinct from the contrasting outer rim with a slash of yellow and green before the swollen plume of white and gray.
Dart said the image looked like a giant pussy.
But I no longer care what Dart Rivers thinks about art, especially the framed poster that hangs on my entryway wall.
A dozen years of marriage, swept away like petals falling from a wilted flower, followed by three years since our divorce.
His opinion on anything no longer matters to me. And I remind myself of this as I drop my keys in the glass dish on the slim table below the picture in my front hallway.
In the house I now own alone, without him.
The problem with fighting thoughts of my ex-husband is that looking at this picture reminds me of my own body part, long forgotten by him. A part of me he once loved. Said he couldn’t get enough of. The scent. The taste. The feel of me opening around him.
Ha.
He was a real piece of poetic work. And his best poem was titled: he left me.
“I love you, baby,” he said, his voice breaking.
The unusual sight of tears in his eyes. “But I can’t give you what you desire most .
. . not a family, not the life you deserve.
I hate the thought that I’m holding you back.
We’re both chasing dreams, feeling unfulfilled.
And I can’t give you the one thing you really want. ”
Trouble was, I’d only wanted him.
My older brother’s best friend had paid me no mind for years. Then one day his eyes seemed to open, and all he saw was me, until he was no longer looking.
Unfulfilled.
I ignore the dull ache that never leaves my chest, even after all these years.
He’d made a choice. It didn’t include me.
Shoving aside the loneliness that hovers over my shoulder like a shadow, I head toward the stairs leading up to my bedroom.
Book club is tonight. A weekly meeting of women from the Milton County area.
We call ourselves the Sterlets, starlets of romance reads and sexual treats, named for Sterling Falls, where we meet.
Self-fulfilling pleasure toys are sold by one of the older women in our community.
Although you wouldn’t be caught with a dildo in your hand, because she would not sell you one if you called Meredith Mulligan old.
“I’m just getting started,” she’d say about the sexual revival she had back in her fifties.
Meredith is my idol.
Loud, proud, and owning her sensuality.
I owned mine as well, because I’d been on enough failed dates in the past few years to prove no one satisfied me better than . . . me.
Still, I feel unsettled lately. Restless.
I get this way every spring, with racing season in full swing. When flowers, like my Georgia O’Keeffe painting, start to bloom. And the second quarter of the year means rebirth.
Babies recently fill the NICU—neonatal intensive care unit—where I work as a nurse.
The ache grows sharper when I recall another area where I felt like a failure. Even though I knew all the science behind why I hadn’t carried pregnancies to full term.
And I wouldn’t even be thinking of Dart and my situation except it had been a particularly harrowing day in the unit. A baby nearly lost his life. So small. So innocent. So helpless.
But he’d been a scrapper and made it through a difficult day.
Dismissing the near-loss from my thoughts, I focus instead on getting out of my head, and scrubs, and into a dress. One that is flirty and loose, flowing over my wide hips and hitting above my knees, flattering my short stature.
One that says spitfire, not forever.
As I run my fingers through my short, blonde waves and freshen up my lipstick, I hear the soft, elongated yelp of a cat. The stray tabby has been coming to my back door for a week, reminding me I fed him once, and he demands more.
Tonight, his cries seem especially loud and incessant, but I smile at his call.
“At least somebody loves me,” I mutter aloud as I make my way down the stairs and head for my kitchen.
The room is at the back of my shotgun-style house.
The place is narrow and long and was ramshackle when we bought it.
But there had always been something I loved about this two-story clapboard-sided home, just over the border of Sterling Falls, in Rogue River.
The whispery, willowy, elongated yowl sounds even louder when I enter my kitchen, flicking on the lights, before heading for the fridge.
“I’m coming, Oliver.” After several visits, I’d named the scoundrel still crying for me.
I pick up a low bowl set in the dish strainer after I washed it last night and fill it with milk.
Balancing the bowl in one hand, I twist the knob for the back door with my other one.
Then I fumble the bowl, hands suddenly trembling at the sight on my low stoop.
Milk spills over the rim, coating my numb fingers.
Because Oliver the cat isn’t on my back steps.
The high-pitched cry is coming from a bundle wrapped in a pink blanket.
A newborn baby in a laundry basket.