The All You Can Dream Buffet (26 page)

He joined them and held out a long-fingered hand. “How are you? Noah Tso.”

“Ginny Smith.”

“You missed Ruby’s great shepherd’s pie, you know.” He swiveled his gaze toward her, and everything in his demeanor shifted, as if he were shaped of iron shavings drawn irresistibly to the giant magnet of Ruby, who stood there glittering and glowing and smiling secretly at him.

“Sorry to hear that,” Ginny said, hiding her own smile. “Maybe I’ll get another chance.”

In the end, Lavender was convinced to drive them to Portland. They all piled into her van: Valerie up front to help navigate, Ginny and Ruby in the middle seat, Hannah in the very back, earphones and cell phone effectively insulating her from everyone. Her appearance was less aggressive this morning—hair straightened and hanging down her back, eyes lined to emphasize their tilt, and beaded bracelets, feathered earrings, a choker made of wooden beads and shell.

It was a relief not to drive after so long a trip. She and Ruby chattered all the way in, about Ginny’s blog and the reaction to her absence, about Ruby’s blog and her ambivalence about it lately. All the while, Ruby held her hand over her belly, protectively covering the baby inside her. Ginny remembered that feeling. For all that she’d given up, Christie’s arrival had been worth it.

She also remembered that Ruby had asked for advice about Liam. Touching Ruby’s hand over her belly, she asked, “How are you feeling? Still throwing up?”

“Not since yesterday morning! But look at my face.” She gestured to a zit on her chin. “It’s like I’m a teenager again.” She glanced back over the seat. “No offense, Hannah.”

Hannah pulled the earphone away from her left ear. “What?”

“Nothing.” Ruby moved her hand out and pressed it lightly on top of Ginny’s. “Do you feel her?”

The faintest sensation of movement fluttered under Ginny’s palm. “Yes. Isn’t that the most amazing thing?”

Ruby put her other hand on the other side of her belly, her gaze focused inward. “It really is.” She gave Ginny a sudden, winning grin, revealing dimples. “I tend to be all about amazing, anyway, but this takes the cake. Honestly, I’ve been grumpy and strange, for me. Do you think that’s just being pregnant? Or having a broken heart?”

“Maybe both. Pretty soon, I bet, you won’t be thinking as much about your heart and more about the baby. That’s kind of how it works—the baby will insist you focus here.”

“That’s helpful.”

Hannah leaned forward over the seat. “You have a broken heart?”

From the front seat, Valerie said, “Hannah! That’s none of your business.”

Hannah popped her gum. “She said it. I was only asking.”

“It’s okay.” Ruby turned sideways. “I broke up with my boyfriend nine months ago and he’s getting married to someone else.”

“How long were you guys together?”

“Six years. I met him in New York.”

“And he doesn’t even want the baby?”

Ruby half-smiled, looking right at Hannah. “Apparently not.”

Hannah studied her face. “Are you the one who had leukemia when you were a kid?”

“Hannah!”

Ginny couldn’t help it—she smiled and reached for Valerie’s hand over the seat.
It’s okay.

“I’m curious!”

“Val, we’re good. Just watch the road and leave us alone, all right?” Ruby turned her attention back to Hannah. “I’m the one.”

“What if you get it back and the baby has no mother?”

“That would totally suck for me, but I have a dad who is the greatest father in the world, and he’d take care of her.”

“It’s a girl?”

“I hope so. I’d like that. I never had a sister, and it would be fun to have girl energy.”

Ginny carefully kept her eyes on the road outside, feeling the air around them grow cold suddenly.
Moment lost,
she thought.

But Hannah said, “I had two sisters. You know that, right?”

Ruby nodded. “I knew your mom when it happened. I went to the funerals. Lavender and I both did.”

“Not you?” Hannah poked Ginny’s shoulder.

“No, I didn’t go.” A waft of something moved over her chest—regret, maybe. Shame. Or both. “My husband was very much against it, and at the time I didn’t—” She broke off. “Never mind.”

Hannah chewed her gum. “It was terrible. Not as terrible as having leukemia, though. At least it only lasted one day. Leukemia lasts a long time, right, and you have to have chemo for ages and lose your hair?”

Valerie turned around in her seat, but before she could say anything, Ruby repeated, “Val. We’re good.”

“Let them talk,” Lavender said quietly.

“I was sick for seven years, off and on,” Ruby said. “I lost my hair and once I had to be in the hospital nearly all the time for about three months.”

Ginny had a vision of a tiny, frail Ruby, all blond hair and big eyes, and her heart ached.

“And now you’re okay completely? How do you know?”

Ruby lifted her shoulders. “You don’t ever know, I guess, but I haven’t had any cancer for twelve years, so that pretty much says they finally got it all. I had a bone-marrow transplant when I was fourteen, and that did it.”

“Did you know kids who died?”

“Yes,” Ruby said simply. “Lots of them.”

“Does it really hurt to die that way? I read that it did, that cancer chokes your whole body so that everything hurts a lot.”

Ruby paused, her crystally-blue eyes on Hannah’s face. She didn’t flinch away from the direct eye contact but instead gave it all of her attention, something Ginny would have found difficult. Hannah stared back, popping her gum as if she didn’t care.

Clearly holding Hannah’s challenge, Ruby said, “Yes, it hurts. Sometimes for a fairly long time before you finally die. It’s a pretty cruel way to go.”

For a long moment, Hannah was silent. Her hands hung over the seat, her nails painted with black polish that had chipped in several places. “I used to worry that my sisters hurt a lot at the end, but somebody told me it happened so fast that they probably didn’t even know it happened.” She paused. “That they died.”

“I don’t know about plane crashes, but that sounds true to me,” Ruby said.

Hannah shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know.” She flung herself back into her corner and plugged in the earphones.

Ginny glanced at Ruby, who also met Ginny’s gaze without guile. They both leaned back in the seat. Ginny could see the side of Val’s face, where tears dripped silently from her jaw.

The first stop was the phone store, where Ginny replaced her drowned unit for a hefty fee. She carried it to a bench outside the store, and while she waited for the others, who were browsing in the shops along the strip mall, she checked her voice mail.

There were twenty-seven messages, which for her was a tremendous number, even for a couple of days. When she clicked on them, thirteen were from Matthew.

She frowned. He hadn’t called her at all before she lost the phone. Had something gone wrong?

A heat of resistance welled up against listening to the messages. Even if it was trouble, she just didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to ruin the day with his voice.

The other messages were a mix—a handful each from Valerie, Lavender, and Ruby, two from her daughter, one from her mother, and one from a Boise number she knew would be the backblogger who now hated her.

There were also three from Jack. One was from two days ago. “Hey, Ginny.” His voice was deeper, richer on the phone, pouring right from the speaker into her ear, as intimate as if he’d licked her earlobe. The sound struck her so hard that every inch of her skin turned a bright hot red, the color steaming invisibly into the air, and she had to close her eyes to hide the lust boiling in them.

“Listen,” he said, “I looked up your phone number from the contact information on your website. There is a big fire up here in Idaho. They’ve closed the interstate and there’s a traffic jam that’s causing all kinds of trouble. Hoping maybe I’ve caught you before you get too far down the road. You can detour up through Idaho Falls and Montana, which is what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll see you along the way. Take care. Give me a call when you can and let me know you’re all right, will you?”

The next was clearly a response to that crazy text she had not sent. “I got your text and I’m headed back to find you. Wish you’d pick up—pretty worried.”

For a moment she looked over the parking lot, frowning. How could she
possibly
have sent a text from a dead phone when she was passed out on the floor with a fever of God-only-knew what? She’d have to throw this puzzle out to the others and see what they made of it.

The third was from right after breakfast yesterday, after the kiss. “Jesus, Ginny. I know you can’t get this message right now, but maybe you’ll hear it eventually.” A pause. She could hear him breathing quietly. Could hear some sounds in the background, maybe his engine.

Ginny bent around the phone, as if to create a private room. His voice rolled down her skin, the ragged edges somehow rousing every cell in her body, pricking elbows and wrists and throat and belly and the soles of her feet. She pressed her finger against her other ear to shut out everything else and closed her eyes.

“I’m having trouble thinking of what to say,” he said at last. “I just keep replaying that kiss, the way you tasted, the sounds you made, and all I want is to do it again. Kiss you. For about ten years without stopping. That’s probably a totally idiotic thing to say and you probably think I’m a crazy stalker, but, I
swear, nothing like this has happened to me in twenty years on the road.”

Another pause. Long, with the engine and a song playing in the background. “I want to see you again. Please.”

Ginny pressed
end
and held the phone in her hand, feeling it burn her palm. Her skin itched as if it were about to sprout vines and flowers.

And yet.

There were those thirteen messages from a man she had promised to love, honor, and cherish forever. He cherished her, or at least he wanted to keep being married to her, which might or might not be the same thing.

“Wow, that’s a pretty intense scowl,” Ruby said, sitting down. She had a bag in her hand. “Bad news?”

Ginny looked at Ruby. On impulse, she said, “Listen.” She pushed the message from Jack, the last one.

Ruby bent her head and a twitch touched her lips, then her eyes widened. “Whew,” she said. “That’s one killer voice.” She handed the phone back. “Do you want to tell me more about it?”

“He’s a trucker I met the second morning. He was at the rest stop and wanted to pet Willow. And then I kept running into him. And then—this weird thing happened—which I haven’t figured out yet, but I want to get everybody’s feedback—and he kind of rescued me when I was sick, and then the next morning …” She took a breath, trying to keep the kiss safely corralled, away from the incendiary points in her body. “I kissed him. Or he kissed me. Or something. And I want to feel guilty, but I don’t, Ruby. I don’t! What’s wrong with me?”

“You have a bad marriage, that’s all.”

“Why do you say that?”

Ruby made a quizzical face. “You’re not really asking that?”

“I didn’t think I talked about it all that much.”

“Oh. Sorry. Maybe I misunderstood.”

Ginny sighed. “No, you’re right. It’s miserable.” The word weighed a thousand pounds, and she bent over to put her face in her hands. “Miserable. I have been miserable for ten years. Twelve. More! That’s why I started the blog. That’s why I bought the trailer. That’s why I’m here. I really, really, really want to leave him, start over, find out what the rest of my life should look like.”

Ruby put a hand on Ginny’s back. “And that’s why you kissed a man who has a voice like a rock god.”

“This isn’t about men or sex or falling in love. I need to figure out who I am, without being somebody’s wife or girlfriend.” Ginny shook her head. “But I’m very, very, very attracted to him. It’s wrong. I know that.”

Ruby’s hand moved in a circle, smoothing the prickly skin. “I have faith in you. I know you’re going to make the right decisions.”

Ginny looked up at her young friend, into her serene expression. “Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

She straightened. Looked at her phone and the thirteen messages from Matthew. “I have to make a couple of phone calls. I’ll be done in a few minutes.”

“No problem.” Ruby dropped her hand back into her lap. “I think we’re going to grab some lunch as soon as we finish at the theater, so you don’t have to get all wrapped up. Just let them know you’re safe.”

Which was the easy way out. Ginny called her daughter, whose voice mail picked up. “Hi, sweetie. I wanted to let you know I’m safe and all is well in case you tried to call me. I dropped my phone in the dishwater and ruined it, then got
caught in the Idaho fire and had to detour around it. But I am now safely in Oregon with my friends.”

She paused, her eyes focused on the tree-covered ridge directly to the west of where she sat. “Thanks for the encouragement, Christie. I have discovered so much about myself on this trip, and, honestly, I never want to go back to Kansas again.”

The messages from her friends she could skip, and she’d listen to the one from her mother later. There was only one thing left to do, so she clicked on the first voice mail from Matthew, left Thursday afternoon at 3:12
P.M.

“Hey, Ginny, we have a problem with the air conditioner. Do you know where the paperwork is?”

At 5:04: “Hoping to get in touch with you today about that paperwork. You’re probably driving. Call me later.”

At 8:45: “I’m going to bed. Don’t bother to call me.”

At 6:00
A.M.
yesterday: “This is getting weird, Ginny. What are you doing that you can’t answer your phone at six o’clock in the morning? This is crap.”

At 7:00
A.M.
, 9:42
A.M.
, 11:23
A.M.
, 1:50
P.M.
: “Call me.”

At 5:25: “I’m going out with the guys. Don’t bother to call me, not that you’ve bothered. Jeez, Ginny, I keep hearing that there’s a fire in Idaho, and you’re being so independent. How the hell do I know if you’re okay?”