Things I Want to Say (9 page)

“I think she’ll be fine with her cousin.”

“It would give you a chance to get to know your handsome florist better.”

My heart fluttered, but I shook my head. “There’s no point. I live a thousand miles away from here.”

“No reason not to have fun for a couple of days. You said you wanted this trip to be an adventure, didn’t you?”

I stared at her. “Why would I want to start something with a man that I couldn’t stay around to finish?”

“There’s a lot to be said for loving them and leaving them. You’d probably both enjoy it.”

I shook my head. The words
I’m not that kind of girl
crossed my mind, but I didn’t say them. Some other time, with someone else, I might very well want to be that kind of girl, but I couldn’t see it with Martin. Not when one smile from him had me so flustered. Loving him and leaving him didn’t seem possible.

What was I thinking? Loving him at all was impossible. I didn’t even
know
the man. “I doubt if he’s interested in me at all,” I said. “He was just being friendly.”

“Trust me. I’ve known a lot of men. When they look at a woman the way he was looking at you, they’re interested.”

I shook my head, too afraid of what might come out if I tried to talk.

Ruth came running up to us. “She said to come right out to her house. She said I can come live with them, no problem.”

“That’s great.” I hugged her and we started back toward the truck. “This looks like a nice place to live,” I said. “I hope you’ll be happy here.”

She nodded. “I’m feeling a little better about my future.”

“That makes one of us anyway,” Alice said.

I glanced at her. I guess Alice was worried about what awaited her in California.

Me, I told myself not to think about the future. It was too easy for my thoughts to drift into a hazy daydream of some perfect day to come that was always just out of reach. Reality was never as lovely or easy as my dreams and the letdown all that much harder to take for the build-up I’d given myself.

Better that I learn how to be happy right now. Right. As if I could wave my hand and make it so. I had a feeling that
kind of contentment was one of those Zen things that was easier to accomplish when I thought happiness was a piece of chocolate cake or a top that hid my thighs.

We drove Ruth to the Sutlers’. Her cousin Mary turned out to be a petite twentysomething dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a blond toddler balanced on her hip. As soon as Ruth climbed out of the truck, Mary enveloped the younger girl in a hug. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “Let’s go inside and get you settled.”

Alice and I trailed after her. The house was small and neat and decorated in country-cute. Mary poured iced tea and we all sat around the kitchen table looking at each other. “Tell me everything,” Mary said.

Ruth told her story, including some details she hadn’t shared with us, such as the fact that her stepmother had already sewed Ruth’s wedding dress and a date had been set for the nuptials—the following Tuesday—hence Ruth’s haste to get out of town.

“We’ll have to call Uncle Samuel and let him know where you are,” Mary said. “Just in case he’s gone to the police.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Ruth said. “He wouldn’t want to get outsiders involved.”

“You’re probably right, but we’d better call anyway.”

Even this proved problematic, since Ruth’s father didn’t have a phone. In the end, it was decided to call the non-Amish neighbor—the one from whom Ruth had “borrowed” the jeans—and ask her to pass along the message.

Then Mary invited us to spend the night. After a meat loaf–and-mashed-potatoes supper, Alice and I ended up sharing a small guest bedroom decorated with a sunbonnet-girl quilt and blue-and-pink-plaid curtains. I wondered if this would be Ruth’s room after we left. I hoped she’d get to decorate it with something teen cool.

“This reminds me of the slumber parties we had when we were kids,” Alice said.

I smiled into the darkness. “I remember. One time we waited until everyone was asleep and sneaked down to your kitchen to make hot-fudge sundaes.” Such innocent daring had seemed positively wicked to us back then.

“We had good times, didn’t we?” Alice fell silent again and I imagined her smiling into the darkness.

Or maybe she wasn’t smiling. “How come we never stayed over at your house?” she asked. “It was always my house.”

“Your house was more fun. And you didn’t have a sister. We’d have had to include Frannie in anything we did at my house.”

“That would have been okay. I liked Frannie.”

I squirmed, trying to get more comfortable on the hard mattress. “I liked Frannie, too, but it was nice to have a friend all to myself sometimes.”

Her hand found mine under the covers and she gave it a squeeze. “I’m glad we met up again and you could come on this trip,” she said.

“Me, too.” A person couldn’t have too many friends in her life, and I was beginning to think that old friends were the best ones of all. My friends in California were more acquaintances—women with whom I had lunch or went to the movies or the races. They were fun to be with, but our relationship was all on the surface. They knew I was from Virginia and little else. I would never have felt comfortable confiding anything deep to them.

Alice was different. She was the keeper of stories from my
past and secrets we had shared long ago. She knew a version of me that was less nicked up by life, the unripe, unsophisticated self that only a parent—or a childhood pal—could really love.

We woke the next morning to raised voices. I pulled the covers up to my chin and stared, wide-eyed, at the closed bedroom door. Alice sat up. “Sounds like Ruth and Mary.”

The cousins weren’t yelling at each other, though. Apparently, they were arguing with Ruth’s father. Alice and I listened to the one-sided conversation in which Ruth, at first tearful, then defiant, refused to return home to marry her father’s choice of groom. “I’d rather stay here with Mary and never see you again than be sold off that way like livestock.”

Then Mary took up the cause, declaring Ruth was “too good and smart to spend the rest of her life slaving after some old man and his snot-nosed children.”

The words grew more bitter from there, and ended with an unbearable silence.

Alice and I dressed and gathered our things, making as little noise as possible. When we emerged from the bedroom, we found the others gathered around the kitchen table. Except for Ruth’s red eyes, everything appeared normal.

“Ruth is going to stay here,” Mary said as she set a mug of coffee in front of me. “She can enroll in the local high school, and she’ll be a big help to me around the house.” She smiled at her younger cousin. “I thought this afternoon we’d go shopping for some new clothes for her.”

“Thank you again for helping me,” Ruth said. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t stopped when you did.” She stared down at her half-empty bowl of cereal. “I was really scared.”

“Proves you’re no dummy,” Alice said gruffly. “We’re glad we could help.”

After breakfast, we said our goodbyes. I gave Ruth my address and asked her to write, then Alice and I piled back into the truck.

Instead of turning toward the highway, Alice circled back through town. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“I wanted to look around a little more.”

We drove past a red stone courthouse set amid a grove of live oak trees. A small white library sat next door, across from a gray brick city hall and the police station. In short order we passed the post office, American Legion hall, elementary school, Baptist, Methodist and Catholic churches, and were back on the town square.

“I haven’t lived in a small town since Frannie and I left Ridgeway,” I said as I admired the Veteran’s Memorial in front of the courthouse. “I’d forgotten how nice they could be.” All the familiar small-town institutions were straight out of a Hollywood set designer’s idea of middle-American warmth and friendliness. We were a long way from traffic jams and gang violence and urban decay.

Here was the life most of us—or at least
I
—considered ideal. Safe. Familiar. Welcoming.

“It would be nice for about three days,” Alice said. “Then I’d start to miss the shopping mall, the gourmet grocer and the ability to run errands without half the people in town knowing what I was up to.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “Always being anonymous can get old, too.”

“Do you want to hang around a little longer?” she asked. “We could stop by and say hello to that good-looking florist again.”

The mention of Martin sent a hot shimmy through my middle, but I sat up straighter and ignored it. “A man that
good-looking in a town this size probably has every single women for fifty miles after him.”

“Yeah, but he was interested in you.” She turned down the street leading to the florist’s.

“What are you doing?” I protested.

“At least go in and say goodbye,” she said. She parked and switched off the engine. “Give him your phone number.”

I stared at the little shop with its display of ferns and roses in the window. “Why should I do that?”

She looked at me as if I was an idiot. “So he can
call
you. Then you two can get to know each other.”

I looked at her, trying not to show how desperate I was feeling. While I’d been full of confidence and hot-to-trot for Marc, I felt completely out of my league with Martin. Marc had been a fun, wild fantasy. Martin felt too
real
. Too important. I was terrified of screwing up.

Of being hurt.

“What would I say to him?” I asked.

“Tell him you really enjoyed talking to him yesterday, that you have to leave town right now, but you’d love it if he called you sometime.” She nudged me toward the door. “Just do it.”

I stared at the flower shop. Through the front window I could see Martin working behind the counter. I remembered the way I’d felt when he’d looked into my eyes yesterday, as if he’d looked past my physical body and seen the
real
me. And still he hadn’t turned away.

I swallowed hard. “I can’t do it,” I said.

“Of course you can.” She shoved me again, but at that moment, the door to the shop opened and Martin came out. Smiling, he walked over to my side of the truck. I stared at him, feeling sick.

“Roll down the window,” Alice said.

I did. “Martin! Hello!” I said, as if I was surprised to see him.

“Is everything okay?” he asked. “I saw your truck sitting out here.”

“Everything’s fine.” I couldn’t wipe this stupid, sick smile off my face. God, he was gorgeous!

“We’re on our way out of town,” Alice said. “Ellen wanted to stop and say goodbye.”

“You’re leaving so soon?” His disappointment felt genuine.

I nodded. “We have to go, but…I really enjoyed talking with you yesterday.”

“Me, too.” He reached inside the truck and took my hands. My heart fluttered wildly. Why did excitement feel so similar to terror?

“Ellen wanted to give you her phone number, so you could call her.” Alice pressed on, relentless.

“I’d love that.” He let go of my hands and pulled a business card from his front pocket. He gave it to me, along with a pen. “Write it here,” he said.

I scribbled my name and number and thrust it at him before I lost my nerve. He read it over carefully. “This is your home number?”

“My cell phone. I won’t be home for a while.”

“Call anytime,” Alice said.

His eyes met mine again. Such a beautiful brown—like the richest potting soil. “I will.” He fished another card from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. “And here’s my number.”

I folded my fingers over the rectangle of cardstock, the corners digging into my palms. I felt as if I’d slipped into an alternate dimension where time froze and I hung suspended in air. I sort of wanted to hang there forever, enjoying the admiration in his eyes, and the way my skin tingled. If one look from him could do this to me, what would happen if we touched?

The bells on the door jangled as a woman and two little
girls entered the shop and the spell between us was broken. Martin looked over his shoulder. “I’d better go,” he said, but stayed right where he was.

“Yeah. We’d better go, too.”

“I’ll talk to you soon,” he said. “I promise.”

Promise.
The word itself had me feeling light-headed. A promise was a vow. A guarantee. As if I was already important enough to him that a phone call was sacred.

He finally turned away and started toward the shop, but stopped in the doorway to wave at me.

I waved back, fighting the desire to giggle. Thirty-eight-year-old women shouldn’t giggle, but I felt anything but mature when Martin was around.

“He’s going to call me,” I said, watching through the front window as he waited on the woman and her girls.

“That’s a good start, then.” Alice put the truck in gear and backed out into the street.

I put my hand on my chest, as if I could calm my fluttering heart. A start to what?

For once even my vivid imagination couldn’t come up with a fantasy grand enough to match the possibilities captured in those few words.

I took the wheel when we stopped for gas in Kansas City. I was paying the bill when I spotted a rack full of postcards next to the cash register. An outsize load of guilt slammed into me at the sight of Dorothy in her blue gingham dress and ruby red slippers with the legend Welcome to the Land of Oz arching over her. Before I could think too much about what I was doing, I put a hand out to stop the clerk from totaling out my credit card. “Wait. I need some of these postcards.”

“They’re three for a dollar. How many you want?”

I hesitated, the colorful cards a blur. “Just give me one of each.” If Frannie wanted postcards, I’d give her a whole scrapbook full.

When I shoved the plastic bag into the truck cab ahead of me a few minutes later, Alice looked at me as if I’d turned into a munchkin myself. “What could you possibly find to buy at a truck stop?” she asked.

While I buckled my seat belt, Alice dove into the bag and pulled out a handful of cards. “Planning on writing a lot of people?” she asked.

“They’re not for me, they’re for Frannie.” I started the truck and checked my mirrors. When I’d spotted the display I’d realized I hadn’t bought a single souvenir on this trip for my sister.

“She collects postcards?” Alice studied an illustration of a giant ear of corn.

“She doesn’t really collect them. She puts them in scrapbooks.” I pulled onto the highway and tromped down on the accelerator. The moving truck drove like a slug, taking forever to get up to speed. “She saves everything—postcards, newspaper clippings, ticket stubs—everything. She has books and books full of it all, going back to when we were kids.”

Alice put away the postcards and stashed the bag behind the seat. “I tried scrapbooking once. I ended up with a box full of stickers, fancy paper, hole punches, glitter and glue. I kept it on a shelf in the hall closet until I faced up to the fact I wasn’t the crafty kind and gave the whole lot away to Goodwill.”

“Frannie tried to get me interested in scrapbooking with her, but I didn’t care for it,” I said. “I guess I’m just not the sentimental type.”

“What about when you were a kid?” Alice asked. “Did you have any hobbies, like collecting stamps or troll dolls or anything like that?”

I shook my head and pulled out to pass a slow-moving VW bug. “I never liked having a lot of stuff around.”

“Dust catchers, my mother always called them.”

“Something like that.” I was distracted by a bright reflection in the rearview mirror.

About that time, I heard a siren wail and recognized the flashing as the blue-and-white strobe of a highway patrol car coming up fast on my rear bumper.

“Shit! Are you speeding?” Alice leaned over to check the speedometer.

My heart hammered and my hands shook so badly I could hardly flip on my blinker. I hit the brake and guided the truck onto the shoulder, numb.
Stay calm,
I told myself.
You haven’t done anything wrong.
Still shaking, I managed to roll down the window.

When the officer walked up to the truck, I had the impression of clean-cut good looks behind mirrored sunglasses. But he could have been Elvis himself for all the difference it made to me.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. May I see your driver’s license and registration, please?”