The Art of Losing Yourself (14 page)

I had sprayed the window and scrubbed it clean, then moved on to the windows in the hospitality room, when the desk bell dinged. I stuffed the rag into the pocket of my Capri pants and headed into the front office.

Ben stood up front, a teasing smile curling up the corners of his mouth, his skin an even bronzer tan than when we’d first met two weeks ago.

“That bell’s supposed to be for guests,” I said.

“I was checking to make sure it worked.”

I frowned. Flirty McFlirterson would not charm me today, not when I had witnessed his hands on Barbie’s bare skin seconds earlier. I headed back into the hospitality room to finish the windows.

Ben followed. “Are you upset with me for ringing the bell?”

“I don’t care about the bell. I’m trying to get my work done.” I sprayed one of the windows with Windex. Blue droplets hit the pane and dribbled clear down the glass.

“Well, I need a break. It’s a scorcher out there.”

“Maybe you should take a dip in the pool. I’m sure Barbie would love it.”

“Who?”

“Sorry. Rachel, or whatever her name is.” I didn’t dare turn my back on my cleaning to observe Ben’s face when I pointed out the fact that I’d noticed the girl’s attention. Whether my jealousy entertained or annoyed or baffled him, I couldn’t say. I was too busy wiping the window clean and moving onto the last. I could say, though, that when he joined me near the trophy case, he looked amused.

“I have a hypothetical question for you.”

I raised my eyebrows—invitation for him to proceed.

“What would you say makes a great first date?”

No, I shouldn’t have been jealous, but I definitely wasn’t going to help him woo Barbie. I sprayed down the glass on the trophy case and resumed my wiping. “I don’t know. Dinner and a movie?”

Ben scoffed.

I stopped my work. “What’s wrong with dinner and a movie?”

“Nothing, I just expected something more original from you.”

“I’m sorry, but my idea of a great first date is probably not the typical woman’s idea of a great first date.”

Ben crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “See, now I’m intrigued.”

“A picnic in a boat, watching the clouds.”

“You mean the stars?”

“No, I mean the clouds.” The stars belonged to my dad. The clouds belonged to me. “They’re fascinating.”

His bluer-than-blue eyes twinkled and his lips practically puckered with the effort of biting back a smile. “Fascinating?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No, I’m not. I swear. I want to know why you find the clouds so fascinating.”

I thought back to little-kid Carmen, the girl who could sit on that pool deck outside and gaze up at the sky for hours. “When I was younger, I thought the clouds were like a crystal ball.”

Ben leaned in a little. It made my heart go
bump
. He had this way of making me feel like I was the most interesting person on the face of the planet. What I couldn’t figure out was whether he made every other girl feel that way too.

“If I could learn how to read them, then I’d always know if good weather or bad weather was on the way.”

“Carmen, the fortune-teller.”

“Yeah, well, reading the clouds isn’t as straightforward as I thought. They like to change. But that only makes them all the more captivating.” All of a sudden, I was keenly aware of the lack of space between Ben’s body and mine. Heat climbed up my neck as I cleared my throat and took a step back.

Ben didn’t move. “Will there be clouds tomorrow?”

“Lots of them.” I picked up the spray bottle and turned toward the supply closet in the back room to put the Windex away. Something told me Barbie would find cloud-watching boring, so my confession caused no harm.

“Carmen?”

I stopped in the doorway.

“Will you look at clouds with me?”

I turned around.

Ben wore that smile of his.

My eyes slowly narrowed. “Are you asking me on a date?”

He placed his hand against his chest. “In the smoothest way I know how.”

And that was that.

The next day, Ben borrowed a boat from one of his buddies and took me out on the water. We ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and drank bottles of lemonade and watched the clouds change shape as they rolled across the sky.

C
ARMEN

With the sun sinking into the west, I pulled into the driveway beside Ben’s car. The clock on the dashboard read 7:45. I never meant to stay so long at The Treasure Chest, but one window led to another, and before I knew it, I was at Lowe’s, figuring out how to remove spray paint from stucco. In the moment, the escape had felt necessary, as though my sanity hinged upon it.

Now, however, I realized that not only had I left Gracie alone after her first day of school, I’d left Ben on his own with Gracie. I imagined him coming home from practice to my absence and Gracie’s presence. Having to fend for themselves for dinner with no note or explanation from me. They deserved better.

I stepped outside to the chirping of crickets and katydids. My shoes barely made a sound as I headed up the walkway. Inside, the house smelled like pizza. And not just any pizza, but Bruno’s signature five-cheese shrimp scampi thin crust—a longstanding favorite of mine. My stomach let out a low grumble. The phone call from our social worker had stolen my appetite, which meant the last meal I ate was a boiled egg for breakfast.

Gracie sat on the couch with one knee pulled up to her chest, flipping through the channels on the television with a can of sour-cream-and-onion Pringles in her lap. She didn’t look at me when I closed the door and she didn’t look at me while I slipped off my shoes and set them in the closet.

I stepped farther inside. “Hey.”

She acknowledged me with a grunt.

“How was your first day of school?”

“Uneventful.”

“Did you get something to eat for dinner?”

“Ben ordered pizza. There’s leftovers in the kitchen.”

“Do you know where he is?”

She reached inside the can of Pringles. “Out back.”

In the garage. AKA, his man cave.

I stood in the entryway contemplating my options. I could grab some pizza and go upstairs, shower, change into my pajamas, and drift off to sleep without telling Ben about the new hoops we had to jump through. Another day come and gone with the gaping chasm between us. Or I could try something novel and attempt to bridge it. I could go outside and tell him about the phone call and all the accompanying feelings that came with it.

Perhaps it was the memories resurrected while working at the motel—of a Ben who took me out on his buddy’s boat to look at the clouds and wrote our fake initials inside a heart on the wall of wisdom. Or maybe it was the realization that eventually, Gracie would notice if my husband and I never talked. I had no idea why the second option became so urgent. All that mattered was that for the first time in a long time, I was determined to break this pill-bug posture. I took a step toward the kitchen.

“Were you at The Treasure Chest?” Gracie’s question stopped me.

I turned around.

She kept her catatonic gaze pinned to the TV.

“Yes.”

Her eyebrows twitched—a reaction that came and went so quickly I didn’t have time to translate its meaning. Gracie seemed to hate every second she was with me on Saturday cleaning up the front office. I had no reason to believe she would want to go out with me today, not when she was on such a mission to avoid me.

“I didn’t think you’d want to come,” I said.

“I could use the money.”

I paused there for a bit, unsure where to step with Gracie Fisher. It seemed everything I said was the wrong thing to say. “I’m going out tomorrow if you want to help me install some new windows.”

She fished out a thin stack of chips from the can. “Sure.”

It couldn’t be considered progress. Not really. Yet as I headed into the kitchen, I felt the smallest sliver of accomplishment. It fueled my resolve. Until I saw the bouquet of flowers and completely stalled out.

A dozen yellow roses had been carefully arranged inside a vase beside the Bruno’s pizza box on the counter. For one panicked moment, I thought I’d forgotten our anniversary. But no, that had come and gone this past July. I removed the small card propped inside the bouquet and opened it.

Thought these might brighten your day. Yours, Ben

I touched one of the stems. Buried my nose in the petals and inhaled the scent. Ben used to buy me flowers all the time. He’d bring them home from work or send bouquets to the station for no reason at all. Somewhere along the line, he’d fallen out of the practice. Seeing them here, abandoned and alone in the silent kitchen, squeezed my heart. I wasn’t the only one trying to bridge the chasm tonight. Ben had bought me a bouquet of my favorite flowers and a box of my favorite pizza, but I hadn’t been here to receive them.

I opened the sliding-glass door and stepped out onto the patio. I walked through the grass in my bare feet, toward an unattached two-car garage that Ben took over almost immediately after we moved in. I knocked tentatively on the side door, but with Van Halen playing so loudly from the opened window, I doubted he would have heard even if I’d banged. I pushed the door open.

My husband lay back on the bench press, sans shirt. As soon as he spotted me in the doorway, the weights clanked and he sat upright, beads of sweat trickling between his pecs. At thirty-two, he was no longer as chiseled as he’d been in his early twenties, but any woman with two eyes would appreciate his physique. He picked up a controller and Van Halen stopped.

The sudden quiet echoed.

My hands fidgeted—first with the hem of my shirt, then with the tendrils of hair that escaped from my ponytail. “Thank you for the flowers.”

“Yep.”

His curt response and the hard set of his jaw took a nasty slice at my sails. I didn’t want him to be upset. “You’re mad?”

“It would have been nice to know you weren’t planning on being home tonight.”

He was right. I messed up. I knew I messed up. So why was it so hard to squeeze out an apology? “I’m sorry.”

“Were you at the motel?”

“Yes.”

“So is this how it’s going to be from now on? You working out there while I’m here alone with your
teenage
sister?”

“Time got away from me.” And I had to go. After that phone call, I could barely breathe. Being there had given me my breath back. “I promise it won’t happen again.”

Ben ran his hands down his face.

It was a worn-down motion. An “I’m tired of this” motion. And you know what? So was I. Weary to the bone.

“Our social worker called.”

His body snapped to attention—a world of anticipation flooding his eyes—and in that infinitesimal unguarded blip of a moment, he showed me a glimpse of a heart I rarely saw anymore. Ben wanted to be a daddy. “And?”

“And we have to see a counselor.”

“A counselor? But I thought we were done with all that stuff.”

“She saw the video.” The words escaped devoid of emotion. In the wake of Ben’s disappointment, I had no more left to expend. “I guess when something like this happens, protocol is to take the couple off the waiting list until they can reevaluate the situation.”

“So we have to see a counselor?”

“Once individually. And once together.”

“Then what?”

“Then the counselor writes up a report and, hopefully, we get back on the list.” The whole thing had me feeling like a naughty little girl, desperate to show Santa I deserved so much more than a lump of coal. When Ben said nothing, I started to turn away, back to the katydids outside.

“Carmen.”

I stopped, a swell of desperation rising in my throat. If only he could find a way to break the dam that kept me from confiding in him. I closed my eyes. Wished a wish. Prayed a prayer. I didn’t know anymore.

“We’re having team dinner here on Thursday.”

“
This
Thursday?”

“Some of the moms cornered me about it tonight at practice. I couldn’t say no.”

Yes, he could have. But I was hardly in a position to say so tonight. I had no right to feel annoyed, but I couldn’t help it. Team dinners were exhausting. Not only would I have fifty-plus teenage boys milling about my house and yard, plus coaches and booster moms, I would have to play the part of hostess. Which wouldn’t be a huge deal if I wasn’t so mortified about the video.

Ben lay back on the bench.

I guess we were done.

I barely got two steps out the door before the sounds of Van Halen resumed.

I bypassed the pizza and headed straight for the shower, tucked myself into bed, buried my face in my pillow, and muffled the sound of my tears. They changed nothing, but they came anyway. Somewhere around eleven, Ben slipped between the sheets. I could smell the faint scent of his shampoo. He lay there for a moment, breathing into the silence, then ever so quietly, barely even a whisper, “Are you awake?”

I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I remained curled on my side, eyes long dry, blinking into the darkness as he set his hand on my hip, a touch so gentle it would never wake me. His palm was warm, but my heart was cold.