Bob at the Plaza (3 page)

I paused in my walking for a second to consider what Katie really asked with her question, then resumed pacing. “It looks like he will. He’s going to pick up some extra hours at the winery to help out with the costs.”

“Speaking of costs, are you getting enough work to be able to pay for this? Bill and I could help out.” Katie’s voice drifted off, probably worried that she might offend me with her kind offer.

“Are you kidding?” I shot back, with more emphasis than I needed. “You with a daughter in college? Don’t be silly, Katie. If I can’t figure out a way to pay for it, I won’t go.” I paused for a second, then continued. “I might take you up on your offer to stay at your place, though. I’m still trying to think through all my options.”

“Just let me know what we can do.”

“I will, once I figure things out.”

My phone stroll ended close to the microwave, so I warmed my coffee before ascending to my office. There, I double-checked each detail in the Topco entry and packed up the dummy binder for the overnight mail. Good thing I’d caught up on my shoveling. My afternoon promised a rare drive into Avondale.

After a quick, late lunch I bundled up, trudged out to the car with my heavy carton of competition materials, and said a quick prayer as I cranked the ignition. After only two tries the frozen battery turned over, and I skittered the ten miles into town along salt-bleached roads.

A winter mid-afternoon in Avondale. Piles of dirty gray snow lined each sidewalk, and sprinkles of sand crunched underfoot with every step. Cars and trucks lumbered like prehistoric mastodons down the middle of First Street. Layers of salt and grime covered every vehicle with a gray powder that brushed off on your coat each time you wandered near it. Pedestrians hunched against the bitter cold, the weight of their winter coats and sweaters, and the knowledge that weeks more of weather just like this might be on the way.

Bright red and yellow shovels, de-icers, and car window scrapers decorated the front windows of the hardware store. From the apple shack wafted the alluring fragrance of frying cider doughnuts. I added a stop there to my mental to-do list. After I schlepped my large box up the post office stairs I emerged, ten minutes later, an unburdened woman with a big chore checked off her list.

I hesitated for a minute at the top of the post office stairs, determined to have a little fun before I returned home to dig into my Ohio client’s entry. What next? A no-brainer. Fresh cinnamon-sugar cider doughnuts from the apple shack. Do stores like this exist anywhere but the northern states? Tiny seasonal places that sell mostly apples and apple products, like cider doughnuts and cider, and maybe some locally made cheeses and maple syrup on the side. Until I’d moved to New York, I’d never realized how many kinds of apples you could buy: McIntosh, Empire, Jonathan, McCoun, Delicious, Granny Smith, Crispin, Gala, and Cortland, to name but a few. And my latest favorite, Jonamacs.

The variety of apples available from the apple shack amazed me.  When I’d lived in cities, I guess I’d always just, unthinkingly, picked up a bag of Macintoshes or Empires whenever I wanted the fruit. A few months ago, faced with a dozen different varieties in the apple shack, I’d had no idea what my favorite apple was. So, I decided to do some apple taste-testing. I selected and individually bagged and weighed eight different apples that day in the store, much to the amusement of the woman at the check-out counter. Every afternoon I’d try a new apple for a snack and take notes. (Do I sound like a woman who lives by herself in the country with, perhaps, a tad too much free time on her hands? Hell, yes.) Turns out I didn’t like too-tart apples or grainy yellow-fleshed ones, or super crisp, aggressive, squirty varieties. My favorite fruits were ladylike, gentle apples, mildly sweet, moderately juicy, with dainty white flesh. In short, Jonamacs.

Like a dedicated knight on a quest, I now pursued Jonamacs whenever I could find them. I suspected I’d be desolate when they went out of season. And I wondered about other people, who’d eat whatever apple they could lay their hands on. Would they be considered apple gourmands? Apple Don Juans? Consuming enthusiastically, indiscriminately, unthinkingly, whatever random, willing apple came their way? (Yes, undoubtedly, a tad too much free time on my hands.)

After a quick visit to the apple shack, now the proud owner of ten Jonamacs and a dozen fresh cinnamon-sugar cider doughnuts I definitely didn’t need, I braved the cold to stroll the length of First Street, getting some exercise while I checked out the advertisements posted in the store windows. Nothing much new or exciting. Same ol’, same ol’. It seemed like the more jobs that left our rural county, the more fund-raising benefits that I’d see plastered in the windows, all of them involving food somehow. Spaghetti dinners, pig roasts, fish fries, and chicken barbecues. Very scary, and fattening, times down here at the bottom of the economic ladder.

After reading my third fish fry advertisement, I gave up and drove home. Better to be working than to be worrying about the poverty level in my new home county. With avoiding bankruptcy as a fresh motivation, I put in a solid four hours on Knobox’s entry.

Days passed in a blur of work, phone interviews, writing, snow, and shoveling conversations with Stan. Somewhere in there I made a pot of stew. Another time David tore himself away from his lucrative overtime and came over for a couple of hours of television. But mostly I focused on meeting my self-imposed late-February deadline. With a sigh, I overnighted the completed Knobox binder on February 20
th
, hitting my goal.

The worrying kicked into high gear on the drive home from the post office. Winter still reigned everywhere I looked, but now I had virtually no paying work to keep me busy in my igloo of a home. No phone calls with clients or Skype interviews. No writing, little email. Nothing ahead but those solitary snowbound weeks I’d been dreading since the day I moved into my isolated lake house last autumn.

My daily shoveling exercise hadn’t been enough to work off my worries that day, so I decided to take a walk. No iPod this time, no sweaty hillwalk. Ruts of ice along the borders of the road made it too messy for a serious workout. Instead, I took a slow meander down the temporarily plowed street that ran past my house and along the lake.

When I set out, all my troubles buzzed frantically around in my brain. Fretting over every penny, I’d paid my deposit to Stacey a few nights ago to hold a quad bed in the Manhattan hotel. That money came out of the meager savings I’d put aside to cover my household expenses for the spring, since I knew from experience my hours with Topco and Knobox would drop off until summer, when we’d start planning the autumn Community Chest campaigns. If I didn’t figure out how to replace those funds, this could get ugly, I thought to myself as I trudged along.

Little money, no work, no Bob, Manhattan expenses . . . My litany of problems kept time as I walked. For the first few minutes, I could think of nothing but my troubles. But as I wandered, my boots crunching on the grit in the road, I gradually noticed my surroundings. No cars passed. I heard only the branches creaking under the weight of a winter’s snow and the ice on the lake, screeling and screeching as water currents underneath pushed against it. The lake sounded like a quartet of one-noted cellos, or a zoo populated with alien animals. Martian birds, maybe, yowling away. Occasionally I’d notice vibrant crimson pods weighing down the tips of a bush, or catch the red flash of a cardinal darting from branch to branch out of the corner of my eye. All the tiny hairs in my nose froze and became crisp, so I started breathing through my mouth as I paced.

How about, I thought to myself, you stop whining and consider your blessings for a while, instead of your troubles? It might make a nice change. So I listed my blessings as I walked. Such a long list, thank God. Pop, Milly, Katie, Bill, Amy, Angela, her husband and children, David, Bob, my health, the fact that I actually had a tiny nest egg to worry about, Stan, chorus, a couple of decent bill-paying clients. My ability to walk. My ability to think. My abilities to see the snow-covered branches and to hear the otherworldly screeching of the ice.

By the time I’d strolled for forty-five minutes, I’d reminded myself how I truly was one of the most-blessed people I knew, with love and well-wishes surrounding me, even though much of it might come from a distance. I wrapped up my pity-party for the day and walked home, cheered with positive energy and buoyed by remembrances of all the closets, bookshelves, kitchen cabinets, and cellars that needed cleaning and organizing, taxes requiring preparation, and new casserole recipes begging for a try. As long as I could stay busy and productive until my paying jobs picked up again, I’d be fine.

Switching gears, making changes, always challenges me. I’ve often said that ‘Transitions are a bitch.’ So going from ‘billable hours’ busy to ‘household-organizing’ busy wouldn’t be easy, but once I made the revised commitment in my mind, I was usually fine.

Chapter 3

The Inevitable: Cleaning . . . and Taxes

Over the next few weeks my house became cleaner and cleaner while my freezer burst at the seams with future meals. In a rare whirlwind of energy, I emptied closets and lined and organized every drawer. I finally donated items to the Salvation Army that should have been given away months ago before being hauled to New York when I relocated. Really, where was my head when I planned that move? Panic must have discombobulated me so much that I packed up everything in my Nashville home, with no culling, no sorting. Some of the items I moved from Nashville weren’t even good enough to donate to the Salvation Army. Muffin tins black with years of baked-on accumulations of who-knows-what and barely usable roasting pans with scratched non-stick coatings. I couldn’t give them to Salvation Army because, as I mentioned to Katie, “There’s helping the poor, and then there’s insulting the poor,” and these items definitely fell into the latter category.

Katie and I had fallen back into our old relationship. I’ve never been good at holding grudges, especially against the handful of people who genuinely love me, like my sisters. I know Katie plotted with Angela to get Bob out of my life, but I also know both Katie and Angela love me very much. They may not understand me or my perspectives or needs very well, but I truly believe they love me and, to me, that compensates for a multitude of sins.

Loving or not, though, Katie and I butted heads during our next phone call. Katie telephoned to let me know Cousin Terri would be borrowing their lake house for Easter, taking Katie up on an invitation she’d unthinkingly extended last year. Cousin Terri set my teeth on edge but “at least,” I told Katie, “I’ll be in Manhattan for most of her visit so I won’t have to deal with her.” Famous last words.

Then I mentioned I was trying to figure out how to get Bob back.

“You have
got
to be kidding, Roz!” Katie sputtered.

“No, I’m not,” I replied calmly. “I just haven’t found the right way to contact him. But when I figure it out, I’m going to try to persuade him to come back. This place just isn’t the same without him. He was a fun person to have around.”

“He wasn’t a person at all,” Katie ground out from between clenched teeth. “He’s a ghost, remember? After everything Angie went through to get rid of him you’re trying to get him back? Why? Isn’t your life nice and peaceful without him? Aren’t you having a good time with David? Roz, you’re freaking me out here.”

“‘Nice and peaceful?’ ‘
Nice and peaceful?
’” I sputtered. “Try ‘boring,’ Katie. I’ve spent the past few weeks cooking and cleaning like a crazy person. David’s so busy at the winery I hardly ever see him. So much for your theory!”

“David’s working to make extra money so you two can have a good time together in New York. I swear, Roz, sometimes you can be so dense.” Katie took a few deep breaths to calm down. I could hear them over the phone.

“Besides,” she continued, “how would you even find Bob? He could be anywhere in the world on another assignment. How are you going to get to him?”

“I don’t know, Katie. This morning I noticed a mist swirling on the lake at dawn so I thought there might have been a ghost ball going on. I went to the lakefront and yelled his name for a while but nothing happened.”

This time there was such a long pause on the phone I started to worry. “Katie? Katie? Are you still there?”

The tightness in Katie’s voice told me she still spoke through clenched teeth. “Let me get this straight, Roz. You saw a mist on the lake when you got up this morning so you went outside at the crack of dawn and started screaming for Bob?” She paused to take another deep breath. “Just help me understand why you would yell for him in the fog?”

I repeated patiently, “I thought it might have been a ghost ball, like the one Bob and I went to last Christmas.”

Katie continued in her deadly serious, calm voice. “I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned the ghost ball to me before, Roz. What’s a ghost ball?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” I sighed. “I thought I’d already told you about it. Sometimes, when the fog settles in on the lake, you can see columns of mist swirling around inside it. Those are ghosts, dancing. The balls don’t last very long, because the fog burns off, but Bob took me to one last year. Fred and Ginger danced, and Glenn Miller conducted the orchestra for a while. Katie, it was the most perfect time of my life. I even met the ghosts from Brebeck Winery, but we didn’t get a chance to talk much. Things kind of dissolved after a while.”

“Roz, you’re killing me here,” Katie moaned. “How could you do something like that?”

In retrospect, I realize that Katie was asking a theoretical question. At the time, though, I thought she wanted an explanation. So I said, “Well, Bob and I went together, for one thing. And he gave me this ring . . .” My voice faded. Huh? The ring. I hadn’t thought about that ring for months. What happened to it? Did Bob have it?

“Hey, Katie, I just remembered something I need to do. I’m going to run, but I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

“What?” Katie squawked in protest. “What do you have to do? Roz, what’s going . . .?” Her voice faded as I pulled the phone from my ear.

“Love you!” I shouted at her, just before I disconnected. “Now where the heck could that ring be?” I muttered as I hiked up the stairs to my bedroom. “This is where I remember having it last,” I said, slowly twirling in a circle as I looked around my room. I sank into my easy chair, the same chair I’d woken in the morning after the ghost ball. Stan had been banging at my front door, I recalled, asking me to help with Mary, who had died during the night. What else? I poked at my memories. I’d been naked.
That
I remembered, of course, since I’d been wearing nothing but moonlight at the ball. In my mind, the different silks and satins I’d worn that night slithered around my body again. Oh, yes. It started to come back to me. The tiara, my dresses, the music, the dancing . . . How perfect it had been.

I shook myself.
Roz, focus! You’re trying to remember the morning after, when Stan banged at the door.
I had a vivid image of me wrapped in my quilt, sleeping in this same chair. “I know I never had that ring when I woke up,” I muttered to myself. “It was too big. Maybe it fell off once I came back?”

I jumped out of the chair and ran my hands in the cracks between the cushions. Nothing. I pushed the chair around and got down on my hands and knees to check the carpeting underneath. Nothing. I continued on all fours around the room, patting the carpet everywhere.
Maybe I vacuumed up the ring during my cleaning frenzy? Would it still be in the vacuum bag?
Forty filthy minutes later, hands as black as a coal miner’s, I knew the messy answer: No.

After a thorough wash, I headed back to the bedroom. This time I tore the bed apart—linens, mattress cover, dust ruffle—and examined everything minutely, and then threw it all in a corner. Finally, after two hours of ripping the bedroom and my vacuum apart I saw, between two slats on my empty bedframe, a dull glistening from the air-conditioning vent underneath the bed. I stretched through the bedframe and wiggled the vent. The ring rolled out, as if it had just been sitting there waiting for me. I snatched the gold band eagerly and studied it, somehow reluctant to put the circlet on.

Rosy gold blossoms peeped from beneath hand-carved leaves of green gold. Tiny diamonds twinkled in random, unexpected places. Heavy for its size, this ring carried the weight of centuries of owners, and I remembered how I’d had to curl my fingers to keep it from falling off. Now that I had the ring, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so I put it on the dresser where I could glance at it while I put my bed, and my bedroom, back together.

For some reason, without Bob next to me, I didn’t want to put on that ring. I didn’t like it. Which struck me as odd, because I’ve almost never met a piece of expensive jewelry I didn’t like. This one gave me the creeps though, even if it might eventually lead me to Bob. So instead of wearing the gold band, I put the ring in an empty jeweler’s box, put the box in my pocket and, after reassembling my bedroom, went downstairs for dinner and a glass of wine.

The phone rang as I defrosted a chicken tetrazzini dinner. Liz, a bubbly blond and one of my three Manhattan roommates-to-be, wanted to know if I’d like to join my other roommates for cream tea at The Plaza.

“We’re making reservations for three o’clock on Friday, before we spend the weekend in rehearsals. Can you join us?”

“Sure,” I said, checking my dinner in the microwave as I talked, “count me in for The Plaza.” Now that I had committed to this weekend, I’d do it right. No pinching pennies moping in the hotel room for me.

“Don’t forget your bottle of wine for the room,” Liz reminded me.

“No way. It’s the first thing I put on my packing list,” I responded. “I’m thinking I’ll bring some of my favorite Royal Egret semi-dry riesling. Sound good?”

“Perfect. I’m looking at a reserve gewürtz myself. And I’ll bring a corkscrew. How much fun! Every night we’ll have cocktail hour in the room with a different wine.”

Liz’s effervescence infected me. “We’re going to have one heck of a fun weekend, aren’t we?”

“Sure are. I’ve got to get dinner on the table for the kids, so I’m going to run, but I’ll see you at chorus Monday.”

“You bet. Have a nice weekend.”

The microwaved beeped just as I disconnected, so I flicked on the radio and sat down to my reheated casserole. This money situation was getting serious, especially now that I’d committed to adding a few fun options to my weekend. Tea at The Plaza. A Broadway show. The opera. Dinners out. Yikes. Maybe I could sell something? I scanned the kitchen and the living room while I picked at my uninspiring dinner. Not much in the house with any special value, except to me. And I doubted I could make enough money at the winery even if a job did come through. Dismal thoughts preoccupied me as I washed up my dishes, wiped down the counters, and gave the floor a quick sweep.

To add insult to injury, guess what I had on the agenda that evening? Figuring out my income taxes. Yup, me and Uncle Sam would be dancing the taxpayer tango tonight. I gathered all the tax documents I’d collected over the past weeks and headed to the computer. First assignment: Find a tax program that would let me file federal taxes for free. After a little online research, I found a reputable site and settled in for a long night. I’d have to pay to file state taxes in Tennessee and New York, but it didn’t look as if they would cost too much. Now the big question: Would I have to pay taxes? Since I tried very hard to be conscientious about paying estimated taxes on my freelance income, I hoped I’d break pretty close to even, maybe even get a miniscule refund.

Hours ground by as I sifted through tax documents, charitable and business expenses, plugging numbers into the software. Slowly I saw the ‘estimated refund’ number in the upper right corner of the screen grow. Could it be? Would I actually get a refund this year? And maybe even a refund large enough to pay for my New York weekend?

Even though I know I’m a very blessed person, I don’t seem to get a lot of lucky breaks when it comes to money, so I doubted the refund number as I saved my work and called it a night. I wouldn’t let myself get excited about it until I’d rechecked all my calculations in the cold hard light of morning.