“And what do you feel like now?”
“I feel . . . a little scared. A little surprised. But brushing my teeth is the farthest thing from my mind.”
He gave a smile that was quickly spirited away by the gravity of what had just happened, the call of their bodies for more, the near certainty that this was only the beginning. They sat as they were, with the house’s emptiness beating around them, their food forgotten, studying each other in an elaborate silence.
Finally Christopher pushed his chair back and said, “I think I’d better go.” His voice sounded like someone else’s, throaty with suppressed emotion. He rose and threaded his arms through the sleeves of his jacket, fitted the zipper together and raised it to pocket level. He took out his gloves but held them without putting them on.
She sat on the edge of her chair, tipped forward from the hip, her hands spread on the tight thighs of her blue jeans, looking up at him.
“Thanks for the cobbler,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t finish it.” He looked down at his gloves, then back over at her. “Well, to be honest, I’m really not that sorry.”
She grinned timorously and rose as he turned toward the front hall, navigating its length with dilatory footsteps. At the door, he turned back to her.
“Do you want to do something . . .” His pause might have been a shrug. “Whenever? It’s hard right now. Our schedules are pretty conflicting.”
“Let’s just wait and see,” she said. “Things are going to get busy at the shop and we’ll be staying open evenings between now and Christmas. I think we’re going to put on a couple of temporaries for the season, just to clerk for us, but still, my hours will be uncertain.”
“Sure,” he said, understanding the need to progress cautiously.
“Well,” he said, opening the door. “I’ll call.”
“Yes, do that.”
Their belated caution kept them from considering a goodbye kiss. What had happened on the kitchen chair was enough to send him, if not scuttling, most certainly retreating to give thought to what they had initiated here tonight.
11
SECRECY came hard for Lee Reston. What she had done surprised and shocked her. She needed desperately to talk about it with someone she could trust. She ran through the list of possibilities. Sylvia? Sylvia was, for all her dear qualities, a staunch prude. She never talked about anything regarding sex. She and Barry were the kind of couple who rarely touched in public and generally demonstrated so little affection for one another Lee had often wondered what they did in their bedroom. Mother? Mother was so totally out of the question it was absurd to consider her. Propriety was the ultimate force in Peg Hillier’s life, and discussing straddling a man fifteen years your junior on a kitchen chair during a first necking session would have drawn only a metaphoric standing in the corner from the older woman.
Janice? Oh, mea culpa, mea culpa. What Lee had done, when measured against Janice’s confessed feelings for Christopher, was reprehensible. Merely thinking of Janice made Lee feel like the town harlot. What kind of mother was she anyway?
What about the women who worked for her? She felt it was inadvisable to blur the line between employer and employee with offhours friendship. It made leadership difficult in negative times.
If only Joey were older. Unfortunately, Joey was at the age where he thought snapping a girl’s bra was foreplay. It would be many years yet before she could talk about the birds and the bees with Joey.
Lloyd? She nearly succumbed to the idea that Lloyd might be a guiding light in this impasse, but she felt awkward broaching the subject with the father of her late husband.
Ironically, the only one she could possibly trust with such intimate stuff was Christopher himself, and right now she felt it wiser to keep her distance from him. She had discovered that something he’d said Sunday night was too true for comfort: going as long as she had without kissing a man was unnatural. Now that she’d broken the fast, she was tempted to gorge.
She became distracted at work. On the day after her date with Christopher she and Sylvia were discussing the price of red carnations, which always shot sky-high at holiday time. Sylvia had said she wished they’d pre-booked more the previous month, when the best discounts had been available.
Lee came out of a fog to realize Sylvia had asked her a question.
“Oh, sorry. What was that?”
Sylvia was studying her with a pucker between her eyebrows. “Lee, what in the world is the matter with you today?”
“Nothing. What did you say?”
“I said, do you think we should hire a couple of high school students to cut up Christmas greens and put them in plastic bags?”
“Of course. Good idea. Why pay designers’ wages for work like that? Oh . . . and, Sylvia?” Lee paused, giving her full attention to her sister in an effort to erase the frown from her face. “Order a lot of incense cedar, will you? You know how I love the smell of it.”
Sylvia said, “Do you feel all right today?”
“I feel fine.”
“Then pay attention to what you’re doing. You just put those evergreen boughs in the cooler with the carnations.”
Lee looked and, sure enough, she’d done exactly what Sylvia had said. There sat a bucket of boughs which, if left in the same cooler, would put the carnations to sleep.
She took the evergreens out and said, sheepishly, “Sorry.”
She had been daydreaming about straddling Christopher’s lap and kissing him till her jaws ached.
TWOdays went by and he didn’t call. Her shop was on Main Street. The police department was a block off Main on Jackson, meaning the black-and-white cars drove by constantly, coming and going on calls. She seemed to have developed sensors that lifted her head every time a squad car rolled by. Most times there was a smattering of greenery between her and the window, impossible to see through, but sometimes she caught a glimpse of a squad car through it and imagined him behind the wheel. Other times the cars went out on flashing red with their sirens shrilling, and the sound would quicken her heart. A week after Thanksgiving she was watering some plants in the window when she caught a flash of black-and-white, looked up, and there he was, cruising past on duty. He waved. She waved . . . and stood with the watering pitcher forgotten in her hand, her heart doing a circus act against her ribs while she watched the police car roll down Main Street out of sight.
Only minutes later the phone rang beside the cash register at the rear of the store.
“Lee, it’s for you,” Sylvia called.
“Thanks.” Lee set down her watering pitcher and went to the back counter. “Hello?”
“Hello,” Christopher said. “You look pretty good in that front window.”
She had no idea what to say, so she said nothing, just stood there like a dummy trying to keep her face pale.
“Oh, somebody’s there, right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever get days off in the middle of the week?”
“Sometimes. Now, during the Christmas season when we’re open nights, we stagger our hours a little more. What did you want?”
“Some help with a Christmas tree. I’ve never had one before but I thought I’d put one up this year. Will you help me pick out some decorations?”
Sylvia asked, “Who is it?”
Without covering the mouthpiece, Lee said, “It’s Christopher. He wants me to give him a little advice on buying tree ornaments.” Into the phone, she asked, “Isn’t there any chance of doing it in the evening?”
Sylvia interrupted. “Lee, just a minute.”
“Just a minute, Chris.”
Sylvia’s expression said she felt guilty for what she was about to ask. “I need a day off, too, to do some Christmas shopping. Go ahead and make your plans. I’ll fill in for you if you fill in for me. We’ll both go nuts if we don’t get away from here a little.”
Lee asked Chris, “What day did you have in mind?”
“Any day. I’m off next Tuesday and Wedn
esday though, if you wanted to make a day of it.”
“Tuesday?” she asked Sylvia. When her sister nodded, she said, “Tuesday’s good, Chris.”
“I’ll pick you up at your house at ten.”
“Fine.”
When Lee had hung up, Sylvia lamented, “I don’t know how I’m going to get everything done before Christmas. It’s the same thing every year. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about a day off, but things have been so crazy around here I felt guilty to ask.”
“You’re right though. We’ll both go bonkers if we don’t get away now and then.”
Lee realized something that afternoon that had not struck her before. People were unsuspicious of her comings and goings with Christopher simply because they saw him as a boy, not a man. Because it was inconceivable that a woman of her age would be engaged in any kind of romantic liaison with a man of thirty, their antennae never went up. Furthermore, he had been her son’s friend. They saw him, perhaps, as he’d been at the beginning: a son figure who got along well with the family and had been adopted by them because he had none of his own. The concept was simple: familiarity as camouflage.
* * *
SHEfound it difficult to digest the fact that on a workday morning in the middle of the week, she was playing hooky from the shop, dressing in play clothes and waiting to go off on a lark with a man who had filled her thoughts with adolescent musings for the past two weeks. Yet she was. There was her very own reflection in the bathroom mirror looking brighter-eyed than usual, her cheeks with so much color she disdained blusher while putting on her makeup. It had been so many years since she’d felt this exhilaration at the thought of being with someone, since she’d examined her mirrored image with some male’s projected opinion guiding her judgment of what she saw: a middle-aged woman, reasonably trim, reasonably pleasant-looking, with plain, plain hair, wearing black stretch pants and an aqua-blue turtleneck beneath an oversized thick-knit cotton shirt done in blocks of black, yellow and aqua. She spent a brief worry over whether or not the outfit was too coedish; nothing looked sillier than a woman her age trying to look as though she were eighteen. Giving herself approval on all but the color spots in her cheeks, she shut off the light.
He arrived promptly. Because she feared her reaction to meeting him the first time after their tryst on the kitchen chair, she was slamming the front door behind her while his Explorer was still bumping over the end of the driveway. He managed to get one foot on the ground while she was halfway down the sidewalk, and waited there in the lee of the open truck door as she reached the other side and got in.
He got in, too, and smiled her way. Dear God, she thought, don’t let him lean over and kiss me right here in broad daylight with my neighbors home up and down the street.
He didn’t.
He put the truck in reverse and said, “Where we going?”
She said, “Lindstrom, Minnesota.”
“Lindstrom, Minnesota?” It was an hour away.
“If you want to.”
“What’s there?”
“Gustaf’s World of Christmas. Two charming turn-of-the-century houses, side by side on the main street of town, where it’s Christmas all year long. I haven’t been there for a long, long time, but as I recall, it incites the child in you, plus they have Christmas decorations from all over the world. I think you’ll enjoy it.”
He shifted to drive, and she felt his eyes linger on her as the truck began rolling down the street. She flashed him a smile, which seemed to be what he was waiting for before settling into his duty as driver.
The day suited their purpose. It was dove-gray with crystal etchings. Overnight, hoarfrost had formed and was drifting from the trees in glisteny falls. On the boulevards snow piles stood knee-high; toddlers with scarves over their faces slid down them on sheets of blue plastic. Christmas music was playing on the truck radio, and the heater threw out a steady current of warm air.
They left the city behind and bore east into open country.
Christopher said, “I need to buy a Christmas tree. Do you think I should get a fake one or a real one?”
“A real one. Those fake things are abominable. Besides, they don’t have any smell.”
“So you like the smell of pine?”
“I love it. This is my favorite time of year in the shop because it smells so intoxicating. Just about every arrangement we make has evergreens in it, and we get in a new batch nearly every day. They come in huge boxes and they have to be snipped into usable lengths, and when you’re cutting them—especially the incense cedar— there’s nothing else like it in the world. Incense cedar has a real lemony smell mixed with the pine. And it stays fragrant forever.”
“I never heard of incense cedar . I wouldn’t even know what it is.”
“You would once you smelled it. We buy lots of other varieties though, too—white pine, balsam, fir, arborvitae, juniper. Juniper is the worst to work with. It really makes a mess of your hands.”
He glanced down at her hands, but they were covered by gloves.
“Sylvia just flat refuses to work with it. But Sylvia doesn’t do as much arranging as I do. She’s the businesswoman. I’m the arranger.”
“Did she say anything about your going with me today?”
Their eyes met briefly before he returned his attention to the highway. “No. All she said was that she needs a day off, too, to start on her Christmas shopping.”
No more was said on the subject.
Christopher said, “Tell me more about what you do every day.”
He was the rare person who asked a question, then listened to the answer. As she talked about her shop, she realized that in her life as a mother of three busy offspring, years had gone by since she’d been around anyone genuinely interested in her day-to-day affairs. With Joey and Janice, she was expected to be interested in theirs, but the truth was they rarely asked about hers.
She described an ordinary day in the florists’ business: waiting on customers, designing arrangements, throwing out old stock, scrubbing buckets, getting in new flowers, stripping their lower leaves, the various ways they needed hardening before being used in arrangements. She told him that half their flowers came from South America, where pesticides were used more liberally than in the States, and that she occasionally worried about the amount she was absorbing through her hands. Hands, she said, absorbed them more readily than you’d think. He glanced at her hands, but she still had her gloves on.
She described the boxes that came from Colombia by way of Miami, where agents ran metal rods through them, looking for cocaine, so the cartons arrived looking as though they’d been shot full of bullet holes. She told him how much fun it was going to trade shows, and that her next one was coming up in January at the Minneapolis Gift Mart. She said business was very good this winter: they’d just gotten a standing order from a Methodist church for twenty dollars’ worth of loose flowers every Saturday, and orders like that were bread and butter because they didn’t cost any arranging time, and the bill always got paid. She and Sylvia would have to hire a new designer soon, she said, because Nancy was pregnant and going to quit. He asked how you know a good designer. She replied that you can always tell a good one by her hands: good ones never wear gloves and work with a Swiss army knife instead of scissors. Christmas time, she said, was especially hard on the hands because of the sap in the evergreens and all the turpentine it took to get rid of it.
He said, “Let me see your hands.”
She said, “No.”
“You have a thing about your hands, but I’ve never noticed anything wrong with them.”
“They’re always a mess.”
He said, “A new side of Lee Reston—self-conscious about her hands.”
She said, “That’s right.”
And he didn’t ask again.
The yard at Gustaf’s was decorated with life-size wooden reindeer wearing willow wreaths around their necks, trailing red-and-green-plaid ribbons.
Inside, it
smelled of mulberry. Lights twinkled everywhere. Christmas carols tinkled forth in myriad tones: Swiss bells, carillons, jingle bells and chimes. Ceilings, walls and floors were Disneyesque with holiday trimmings for sale. Balls and bells, toy soldiers and tinsel, tree lights and yard ornaments and a room with so man miniature painted wooden trinkets it felt like walking into a shop in Oslo. Dolls with porcelain faces sat in miniature rocking chairs. Santas of all descriptions beamed upon the colorful array with rosy cheeks and mischievous eyes. A clerk dressed like one of Santa’s helpers smiled and said, “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” they replied in unison.
“Ask, if I can help with anything.”
“We will.”
They explored every magical room of the old house.
Christopher found a Santa beard and hooked it on behind his ears. “Ho ho ho,” he boomed in his best basso profundo. “Have you been a good little girl?”
“Not exactly,” she replied, giving him a saucy glance. The words slipped out before she realized how flirtatious they were.
He took off the beard and put it back on the wall, and she knew he was going to touch her shoulder, say something intimate about what had passed between them the last time they were together. To forestall him, she slipped into another room. He came right behind her, hustling around the corner to find her facing the doorway wearing a white mobcap, holding a stuffed white teddy bear to her cheek, singing, “All I want for Chrith-muth ith my two front teeth.”
Moments later she discovered him holding up a personalized stocking at least two feet long, pointing at it with his eyebrows raised. Across the top of it was printed CHRIS.
She found a pair of the ugliest earrings in the world, shaped like red electric Christmas lights, and held them up to her ears. “Would you believe they actually light up?”
They laughed and she put them back where they belonged.
The next time she turned around he’d found some mistletoe and was holding it above his head, wearing a rowdy smile.
“Oh, no,” she reprimanded. “Nothin’ doing. Not in the middle of a public place.”