Whole Latte Life (12 page)

“Are you sure about all of this?”

Summer nods. “Doesn’t it make you mad?”

“Oh, it did.”

“Did? You knew?”

“I knew a little,” he let on.

“Who told you? Auntie Lena?”

“Lena knows too?”

“Never mind,” Summer says. The phone rings and she stuffs the last bite of muffin into her mouth while he talks.

“Slow down, Barbara. She’s right here.” Michael eyes Summer and whispers the words,
Don’t move
. “She didn’t tell you she’d be here?”

Standing and listening to his ex-wife, he’s very much aware that Summer leaves the kitchen. She’s standing at the paned picture window in the living room looking out at the street of modest homes. He can’t imagine his daughter not living right across town, knowing this old house and perfect street are only a bus ride away. He watches from the kitchen as Lena walks past the house, a silky scarf tied around her head. Honey prances along beside her, her nose to the cool morning air. From behind tears that Michael guesses she can’t hold back any longer, his daughter waves and waves until the motion catches Lena’s eye. Lena turns up the walk toward the front door.

“I can’t come in,” he hears Lena say when Summer opens the door. “Honey’s paws are muddy from the puddles.”

“Then I’m coming out, Auntie Lena.” Summer pulls her robe tighter and slips out the front door. She bends to scratch the little collie-shepherd’s ears.

They stand close on the front stoop. Summer’s back is to the door so she doesn’t see Michael hang up the phone, push her chair in to the table and clean off her muffin plate. Breakfast with his ex-wife is not what he planned for this morning. They have to talk this move out, and already it’s a problem. Barbara would not agree to the last minute breakfast until he threatened a custody battle.

He had to. This is his whole world. Summer’s chatting to Lena about the dog or the weather or her life. Whatever the topic, he can’t hear through the door. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the ease and familiarity and comfort with which she moves and speaks on the front step of her lifelong home. It says that this is her world, too.

Sara Beth looks up from the computer terminal. Here, in the hotel lobby, computer stations for the customers’ convenience. When she rereads the email, it hits her how her mother did go away. As she restored their farmhouse, she delved deeply into its stories by journeying into old newspapers and town records and journals. So she has that now. An answer.

Back at The Plaza, Rachel has to get used to the stillness. The room should have been filled with dishes and silverware and pots of coffee and telephone calls and reservations and plans and talk. Especially talk.

For over twenty-five years, they talked when they passed notes in school and clung to the telephone in the evening, then started letter writing in college until they were living in the same town again. Then it was face to face over coffee, in the car, at their weddings, in their new homes, throughout pregnancies, at Whole Latte Life. They talked everywhere from online to Ferris wheels to Carl’s wake, where Sara Beth spent the entire time fixed leaning forward in her chair giving Rachel a hushed commentary on the flower arrangements, the visitors, the greetings, eliciting a smile every now and then with a fashion comment or an almost unheard “Oy Vey.”

So it’s all wrong that she drink her coffee alone now. Is this how their girls’ weekend out, and all that it means, will end? She really can’t accept that and when the telephone rings, lunges for it.

“Sara?” A beat of silence ticks.

“Rachel?” Tom asks.

“Tom. Oh gosh, I thought you were Sara Beth.”

“Why would I be? She’s with you, isn’t she?”

“Hold on a second.” Rachel walks quickly to the window, looks pointedly down at Manhattan. People walk, cars drive past. Sara Beth might be there, right below. She returns to the telephone believing that.

“Okay, sorry to keep you waiting.” Sara is just down in the courtyard, maybe glancing up before turning in to The Plaza. That’s what she’ll have Tom believe. “What’s up?”

“What’s going on Rachel? Where’s my wife?”

“Well, that’s why I thought you were her.” She could be in the elevator right now, nearly back in the room. “I think she’s downstairs at the desk.”

“The desk? Put her on. I know she’s there.”

“No, really.” Stranger things have happened; her key might be slipping into the lock as they speak. She turns to the closed door. “Not right now, she’s not.”

“And do you happen to know why she hasn’t called home in two days?”

“Well, didn’t she?” Okay, she’s digging in her purse for the key. “When we got here Wednesday night.”

“She hasn’t called. Would you put her on?”

Rachel turns back to the door, watching the knob carefully. “Didn’t she leave a voicemail?”

“No. And if you don’t put her on right now, I’m coming to New York on the next train.”

“No, wait. Tom. Listen.” She looks around the room. It is coming, right now, reality. Like the Acela, it’s coming so fast, just a blur, knocking her off the tracks. “She’s really not here.”

“What?”

“Oh cripe. I don’t know where she is.”

“Jesus Christ, if you don’t start making some sense, Rachel—”

“Tom.” She sinks into the chair.

“What do you mean, she’s not there? Was she ever there with you?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Well where the hell is my wife now?”

“Listen.” She presses the phone to her ear with both hands. “Please. Don’t talk. Just listen.” Then she closes her eyes and waits. When he says okay, then okay again softer, like he already knows, she tells his wife’s story.

“You mean she walked out of the restaurant alone? By herself?”

“Apparently.”

“What’s wrong with this picture?” His voice rises. “It’s been two days and you haven’t called me?”

“I
know
something’s wrong, but for some reason she didn’t want you to know. She asked me for this personal time. In her note.”

“Her
note?
She planned this?”

“I don’t really know.”

“And you obliged her.”

“Well. Yes. And no.”

“Come on, already. She’s fucking disappeared!”

“Wait! Now wait a minute. I didn’t sit around. I went to the police right away.”

“Well thank God for that. Have they found her?”

“Not exactly. The thing is, that note bought her some freedom. There’s not much they can do with no criminal act.” What happens next scares her. It makes her press her fingers to her temples against a headache. Tom doesn’t talk. She’s not sure if he is even still on the line.

“You knew this?” he finally asks. Well. She’s never heard that tone before and doesn’t care if she never does again. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“Hey I’ve been
looking
for her. Constantly. And she caught me off guard asking this favor, you know? To keep it secret.”

“She went over the line with that. Way over,” Tom says. “And so did you.”

“Me?”

“You should have called me right away. What’s wrong with you?”

“No, no stop it. It’s what’s wrong with your
wife
! You live with her, didn’t you see this coming? Don’t try to pin this on me and tell me what I should have done. Not after what I’ve been through. You’re not here, seeing what I
have
done.”

“But I don’t think you should be making serious decisions for Sara Beth.”

“I
didn’t
make them! Sara Beth did! It’s in her note.” She closes her eyes. “Tom, please come, okay?” she asks. “You need to be here. I need help.” She hears him take a breath, changing gears, working past his anger.

“I’ve got the kids.”

“No kids. No. Just you.”

“Just me. Right. Then what?”

“Well I don’t know. This is what I’ve been doing. I follow our itinerary in case she shows up somewhere we planned to go. Really, I can’t imagine her not coming back. I mean, she’s got to come back.”

“My God,” Tom says. “Where are you going today?”

“A few boutiques in the Village. Then the Empire State Building. I’ll call you all day, I promise. Every hour.”

She imagines Tom pacing, laying out some rescue plan in his head, as if you can plan for this. Like stockpiling bottled water and canned goods and extra batteries on a cellar shelf. What could you put on the shelf for this emergency? Cell phones and Kleenex, photographs maybe, favorite ones, where you are sitting at a kitchen table, laughing, relaxed, the sunlight falling like tatted lace across the linoleum, photographs to lay down and say See? Don’t leave. Nursery school Mother’s Day cards maybe, made with blue construction paper and white paste and glitter, sitting on the shelf next to the Kleenex. Ticket stubs from great concerts, when the music lifts you for an evening. Old silent 8mm home movies from a walk on the beach when you wore that big straw sunhat, during a summer vacation when you stayed in a little white cottage, flower boxes filled with scarlet geraniums and snow white petunias, a film you’d run through a projector and watch with a teary smile.

“I can’t believe this. I’ll get my bag packed and call Melissa,” Tom is saying. “Maybe she knows something.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

He gives her his cell phone number. “I’ll be waiting for your calls. And Rachel? If you find her? Or if she shows up?”

Two days of tears streak her face now thinking of a whole life of 8mm home movies.

“Just tell her we miss her. The kids, too. And to call. To just God damn call.”

“Okay,” she says softly, nodding. Before he can say more, she sets the phone in the cradle.