Chapter 20 The Eyes of a Formerly Beautiful Woman
The Eyes of a Formerly Beautiful Woman
The Longest Day of the Year
The sun rose on the longest day of the year, just as it always did. Elliot had left early for his run, so Lainey woke by herself in cabin one.
Stopped by Flo’s Fro-Yo and Cell Phone Repair this morning, read a note on the kitchen table. Flo was able to repair your screen and dropped it off while you were out. She threw in free cinnamon frozen yogurt (in the freezer). Over at FB unloading the stone. Call if you need me.
After a nice long shower, she threw on a pair of jean shorts and a tank top and walked over to her old house.
The sun was fully up, the air hot and thick after the rain.
Elliot’s truck was parked in the driveway, the tailgate down and the bed empty.
When she climbed up the porch and swung open the door, Elliot was splayed out over a tarp in front of the broken hearth.
“Good morning,” she said. There was music playing, a male voice singing about yearning with melodies that swept across the tile floor like a warm breeze on a back road.
Elliot looked up, smiling at her like she was sunshine. “You look like you’re feeling better today.”
She smiled back just as wide, relieved she hadn’t had to tell Elliot about her momentary lapse in judgment with Larry.
She’d fixed it, and though she was new to marriage, surely spouses weren’t expected to confess every instance in which they’d almost done something wrong.
Ninety-three percent of her conscience felt very comfortable with that logic, and the other seven percent that stewed over this minuscule lie of omission could atone via masonry.
“I am. But you don’t get to mess with my hearth. You don’t know what you’re up against. Up.” She flicked up her palm.
He stood and gave her room to take his place next to a bucket of freshly mixed mortar. “Do you want my gloves before you completely take over?”
“I do.” She tilted her head to him, grinning. She took a moment to get the lay of the land and then dove in. These types of projects went better with an appropriate amount of blind faith and hubris. The stone could sense fear.
He leaned against the hearth, his arm stretched high, pulling his shirt taut at his chest. “I thought I’d gotten it closer to the color.” He frowned at the tan stone. “Maybe I should have brought you to Milwaukee after all.”
“No, you nailed it,” she assured him. She liked the press of his curious eyes on her neck and shoulders as he peered over her. “Stone has natural gradations. I’ll get it to blend. It’ll all look perfect by the time I’m done with it.”
He dropped his arm, his shoulders relaxing. “So is this the kind of sculpting you used to do? Before the trees?”
She shook her head. “This is masonry. I was into large-scale ceramic sculpting for a while—like shaping and carving clay—but it was too expensive after I graduated and didn’t have access to my high school’s supplies.
When I ran the kids’ program at the retreat, I convinced them to get a kiln, but when they shut that down, I had to pivot.
And dead trees are free.” She gave the mixture another good stir.
He sat on the tarp next to her, his knee connecting to hers. “You know, in France, they have public art colleges that are really affordable. You’d have to establish residency for a little while, but you could go to school and try sculpting like that again.”
“You’ve been researching art schools in France?” she asked, smirking.
His cheeks pinkened. “I was trying to figure out the allure.”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess the allure is that I’ve wasted too much time being resentful about the things I haven’t even tried to do.
I want to do something bold. For once.” Her voice wavered, the truth of it ringing in her ears.
She’d spent so long telling herself there would be another time, another place.
For years, her sole focus had been on getting by.
At some point, her life had felt set in stone.
She hadn’t made an itemized list of everything she wanted to achieve from life, because what was the point?
Now she could finally picture something she wanted: to be someone new in someplace new.
To see if there was a world where that woman fit.
To feel confident not only in her ability to figure things out but also in her ability to accomplish things that scared her.
For now, it didn’t have to be more complicated for her than that.
He nodded, as though this explanation made perfect sense to him, too.
“I was thinking…” His fingers played with a loose thread at the hem of her shorts. “Whenever you get over to France—”
“Or Italy or Spain or Belgium, even. We haven’t met Jet-Setter Lainey yet. Who knows what shenanigans she’ll get into,” she demurred with a small shake of her head.
“I could go with you,” he finished. She didn’t look at him right away. His palm was resting on top of her thigh, and her pulse was in her throat. “For a little while,” he hedged. “If you’d like that.”
She turned to face him. If she didn’t know him so well, she wouldn’t have noticed the nervous smile he was trying to pass off as coy.
“I’d love that,” she said, her voice thicker than it had been a moment ago.
His smile came alive. She wanted nothing more than to revel in it, but a thought needled at her.
“Would we still be married?” she asked. “I mean, I’m assuming we’d be mostly long distance, you know, with your job and the resort.”
She wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to be.
“Once you move, it would probably be the most logical choice to get divorced. You know, logistically.”
Her limbs ached to run, and the dread at the base of her skull that’d been waiting for the moment he realized she wasn’t worth all this trouble—that she was too much, too messy, too everything—gripped her chest. But this was Elliot—her Elliot.
She couldn’t allow herself to withdraw at the first sign of difficulty. She was different now.
“But I’m not saying…” He closed his eyes.
She could see himself editing in real time.
“This is real to me.” She froze, the word real wrapping itself tightly in the folds of her brain like something indispensable.
“Like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I want this so badly, Lainey, but I don’t feel good about the way we started. ”
She closed her eyes and exhaled. The room got quiet, as though the music had stopped even though she knew it hadn’t. Her body was listening only to Elliot.
“I know you’ve told me you don’t feel trapped in this arrangement, but if, down the line, we’re back here again, I want to know you chose this.
I don’t want to marry you on a random weekday at Benihana while our officiant makes fried rice.
I want to kiss you when we make vows and not end the night with a running list of all the ways I’d wish I’d done this differently. ”
Emotion pressed behind her eyes. “Our wedding wasn’t so bad.”
“I think we can do better.” His hand found her chin. “And I hear the French Riviera is really nice.”
“It does have that reputation.”
“Then we’ll go,” he replied simply, like adding milk to a shopping list. And she wondered if there’d ever been a more romantic divorce proposal in all the world or if Elliot Hodges was a true original.
Then a car horn blared outside and ruined everything.
His head dropped to her shoulder with his boyish groan. “I was worried this might happen.”
“What might happen?” Fear of unknown origin tickled her stomach.
He pushed himself off the stone fireplace. “That some random people might show up. I’ve been careful not to post the exact date the bridge connects on any listings or press, but people have figured it out. I mean, Larry did, so…”
The floor dropped out beneath her feet.
“Elliot.”
His neck muscles tightened. His eyes were all over her. “What?”
She tried to word an explanation. Her throat clenched. Her eyes burned with the threat of hot tears.
“Lainey, what is it?”
When you were in Milwaukee—racing home to be with me—I did something awful. She imagined speaking the words, but they wouldn’t come out.
“Just say it. You’re scaring me,” Elliot demanded. Another car honked. He took two steps to look out the front window. “Holy shit.”
Her head snapped to where Elliot was staring. His face was frozen in shock.
Because it wasn’t “a couple of random people.” It was a hoard.
A swarm. Three camper vans were parked on her lawn, all in a tidy, neat row, with an RV pulling in to join the party.
Half a dozen cars were parked along her private drive with slightly less precision, people pouring out of them like clowns in a circus.
“How…?” Elliot couldn’t form words.
“I’ll tell them to leave,” she assured him. Cortisol shot through her body. In an instant, she jumped up from the floor and bolted for the door.
“Let me go with you. We don’t even know who they are. Lainey, wait,” he called after her. “You’re not wearing shoes.”
She took a breath, her hand resting on the doorknob. Lainey’s work wasn’t done, and as much as she wanted the family of ten piling out of the midsize Subaru to be random locals who’d figured out tonight was the night, the Georgia plates said otherwise. This was undoubtedly her mess to fix.
“I know who they are,” she told him.
His eyes darted all over her face. “Who are they? Just tell me.”
“I know you. The second I say it, you’re always going to imagine the worst of me.”
“I wouldn’t…” His sentence drifted away as he took her face in his hands.
She felt so safe, which made her feel even more rotten.
“When it comes to you, I’m different. I see all of you.
The good parts. The complicated parts. And still I can’t help but hope for the best possible outcome.
It’s been like that with us since the very beginning. ”
Hope. The word fell on her heart with a physical weight. With her, he had hope, and for Elliot, there was nothing he could have said that was bigger than that.
She felt her resolve strengthening. She had to trust him a little more. Just to see.
“They’re the group Larry set up.”
She watched his face process this information. “Are you saying he went behind our backs?”
“No…I told him yes, two days ago.”
His face twitched. “Wh-what? How did you talk to Larry two days ago?” He was no doubt remembering the state of her the other night. She’d been in no shape to conduct business meetings.
“He was at the pharmacy. When I couldn’t find my meds, I biked there to talk Ernie into an early refill—which he wouldn’t do—”
“You biked there? In the rain?” What sounded like a decommissioned ice-cream truck pulled in playing “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” over the loudspeaker.
“I didn’t have a working car, then my phone broke, and my refill was on its way to a stone supplier in Milwaukee, so what else was I supposed to do?” Her apology came out more defensive than she’d intended it.
Also, it wasn’t precisely an apology in a technical sense, or in any sense, really.
“I don’t get it. Why would you risk our permit for a little bit of money?”
“Maybe because fifteen thousand dollars isn’t ‘a little bit of money’ to me.
” She closed her eyes, wishing she had the power to unsay it.
She’d lost any moral high ground the moment she made financial arrangements in a pain-induced bout of insanity.
She wasn’t going to win this one, and she didn’t deserve to.
“That doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I said that.
I’m sorry about all of this. Yesterday, I tried to fix it. I told him to take down the post.”
“That doesn’t seem to have worked,” he commented, his voice flat.
He looked between her and the people spilling onto her lawn as though debating where to begin.
“Help me get these cars out of here so we can barricade the driveway.”
Clearing out the array of architecture enthusiasts, eclipse chasers, and other miscellaneous wayward souls proved impossible. With every group they’d remove, another Jeep would come rattling down the way with a VW Bus following close behind.
“Don’t worry, we have cash.” A large and preternaturally friendly man burst through the window of a Holiday Rambler. “Your associate was very clear on that. Where should we park?”
Lainey shook her head. “It’s not about the cash, it’s—”
A lavender-haired woman appeared in the window from beneath the man’s armpit. “Are you the owner? Did you know your house is featured in the Lady Goddess Cult HBO doc? Lady Goddess channels it! But according to her, it’s less of a place and more of a spiritual realm—”
“Laurel!” another female voice yelled from inside. Did every vehicle on her property contain the population of a small principality? “Don’t tell her that her house is possessed by a cult leader. It’s rude.”
“So it’s not just architecture nuts and eclipse chasers on my lawn, but also cultists,” Lainey interjected. It wasn’t a question. As evidenced by her surroundings, every restless wanderer from niche corners of the internet had descended upon her home, all eagerly awaiting the sun to set. “Perfect.”
The floppy-haired driver of the camper shrugged apologetically. “So where can we park?”
She had trouble picturing the people in this single camper lying out comfortably on her deck, let alone crowded among swarms of other people. “I’m sorry. There’s been a mistake. This event is canceled. We’re asking everyone to leave.”
“The sun is canceled?” The woman looked puzzled.
Lainey’s freshly fixed phone vibrated angrily in her hands. “I’m really sorry,” she repeated, answering with a tap and running to the next car. “Bree, I’m sort of in the middle of something.”
“That’s what I’m calling about. We’re getting a bunch of walk-ins looking for rooms, and they’re saying you’re turning away architecture enthusiasts because your ‘campsite’ is overrun with ‘hippies and the unwashed.’ My source for that particular tidbit was literally the worst man I’ve ever met, so thank you for that. ”
“That’s an exaggeration,” Lainey replied, much more self-righteously than the moment called for.
“Is that supposed to be the bridge?” a man in a crop top shouted at her through cupped hands. “It’s just a deck.”
She covered the receiver. “It’s an architectural element on a two-bedroom house! What exactly were you expecting?” She was already missing the occupants of the Holiday Camper, who she’d sent on their merry way.
“Good,” Bree responded to Lainey’s earlier denial. “Because he told me I have ‘the eyes of a formerly beautiful woman’ so I’d like to dismiss everything he said on principle, but I’m getting a similar story from other people as well.”
“There was a miscommunication, but we’re getting everyone to leave.”
“They’re flooding the other resorts and campgrounds, so there’s a lot of angry people spreading around this story, and eventually it’s going to get back to you-know-who.”
As if summoned, sirens whooped down her dirt drive. Through the trees, her eyes locked with Elliot, who’d been evacuating tents.
“Bree, I have to go. The sheriff’s here.”