3
Leah sat on the motel bed buttoning her blouse.
It had started innocently enough. Of this she was sure.
Billy had brought the revised site plan straight from the printer to her house late one afternoon. The planning board’s monthly meeting was that night; and Green Ways needed to make their proposal, complete with these plans, or delay their park renewal—their signature project for this year—by another month and that much deeper into the scorching summer season, brutal on both the workers and the plants they’d be setting out. The project had been slated to start in the spring, the best time of year to plant in Atlanta. But Leah’s unplanned absence combined with the landscape engineer’s missed deadlines had pushed the start back into the early summer. Then late last week the plans had arrived with several unacceptable errors. So then back to the drawing board for corrections made over the weekend then e-mailed to the printing service with a rush stipulation (and added cost) for Billy to pick them up at 5 PM just in time to deliver them to the night’s 7 PM planning board meeting.
Billy could and would handle it all, including the presentation to the board. But he’d found out just that morning that Leah, as acting president of Green Ways, had to sign the plans for them to be accepted by the board. “But she’s signed the proposal,” Billy had pleaded to the board’s chair but to no avail. Leah had offered to drive into town to meet him at the printer; but he said no, he’d run them by her house on his way home before going to the meeting. It wasn’t that far out of his way and would save her a trip in rush-hour traffic.
She’d fretted that his stopping by would disrupt her dinner preparations till she finally solved that concern by running to Whole Foods and buying dinner from their take-out counter. Then she fretted over what if anything to offer Billy when he came. It would be too late for tea but too early for dinner; and in any case they’d have to wait for Whitfield, and he wouldn’t be home till later. But when would Billy get dinner, with the meeting at seven? Knowing him, he’d probably microwave a frozen burrito and eat it running out the door and what kind of meal was that? The hour would be right for drinks and some heavy appetizers that could double as dinner—she had tried and true recipes for a tasty olive and herb focaccia or an easy spanakopita. But what about the drinks part? She couldn’t send him off to the meeting half-drunk now, could she? And besides they’d barely have time enough to unroll the plans and sign them let alone linger over drinks and appetizers.
So she settled on making him a bag lunch that he could eat in the car on the way or at his house if he had five minutes to spare. She mixed up a chicken salad from last night’s leftover baked chicken—adding her signature chopped pecans and dried cranberries to the diced chicken, celery and mayo—and put the mixture between two slices of seven-grain bread. She baked a batch of white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies (she was planning to make a batch for Whitfield anyway), put some kettle-cooked chips in a zipper bag, and washed some seedless grapes then wrapped them in a paper towel. She added a bottle of imported water and fit everything into a colorful small bag with handles she’d saved from a Golf Club picnic lunch earlier that spring. She set the bottle of water to one side then carefully added grapes, sandwich, cookies and chips in that order and hoped the grapes didn’t get squished. She placed the bag in the refrigerator to keep the chicken salad properly chilled. The cookies would be better warm but you couldn’t have everything perfect in a bag lunch.
She showered quickly and changed into a bright summer sundress that was not too low cut. She added a light sweater to cover her bare shoulders and slipped on some navy-colored canvas flats. She didn’t like the pale color of her legs but hose were out of the question. She reminded herself to start using tan-in-a-bottle, but not today. The attire was a little nicer than she’d typically wear for dinner but not that much so. Whitfield probably wouldn’t even notice; and if he did she’d say it was compensation for the take-out dinner necessitated by Green Ways business. He’d supported Green Ways when Jasper was involved, but lately had begun to grumble that it was demanding too much of her time and his money (she used charitable donations from their household account to shore up the organization’s finances).
She expected Billy at five-thirty. At five-forty-five he still wasn’t there, and she began to worry that his stop would overlap with Whitfield’s arrival home, not that she had anything to hide but the necessary explanations and courteous small talk would be time-consuming and tedious. Then Whitfield called to say he’d be late (again) as he had to finish some paperwork for a big closing scheduled for tomorrow. That freed Leah from her worries about an overlap, but now she started to worry about Billy. Had something gone wrong at the printer’s? Had he been in an accident? She considered calling him but decided that would be too presumptuous. She’d learned patience in dealing with Jasper’s occasional tardiness, a patience she’d dusted off from dealing with Brooke’s constant tardiness when they were growing up. Why had that patience abandoned her now?
A little before six, her phone chirped a text alert and she opened the message—Traffic nightmare. Finally moving. Five minutes. Sorry. She weighed different responses (the one she felt most strongly was the one she certainly wouldn’t send—Why didn’t you call sooner? I was worried to death!) or not responding at all (it was only five minutes, or so he said) and finally settled on Thanks. True to his message, Billy swung his blue pickup into their drive five minutes later and strode down the curved walk with a controlled briskness in his khaki shirt, jeans, and work boots. He had this way of moving that managed to be simultaneously resolute and graceful. She waited for him on the covered entry stoop.
“Sorry,” he said as he reached out and shook her hand.
His handshake was not new, but the apprising gaze he cast over her body was, at least to her notice. “No apology needed. Thank you for going out of your way.” She hoped her words masked not exposed her giddiness.
“You look very nice,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress.”
“Really,” was all she could manage before turning to hide her fluster. “Come on in,” she said as she led him through the front door and down the hall to their dining room where he unrolled the plans on the table.
She gazed at the top copy, trying to focus on the details and corrections they’d requested.
Billy leaned over her shoulder from the side. “I haven’t had a chance to check them out,” he said quietly.
Though he somehow managed not to touch any part of her body, she was acutely aware of his closeness. That proximity made her study the plans even more intently. Then she spotted it—a willow oak designated for the bottom of the hill, not the flame-red maple she’d requested for its early spring leafing and its late fall brilliance. “They didn’t fix the oak!” she cried, pointing at the spot near the center of the site plan. Both her finger and her voice were trembling with an unusual emotion.
Billy laughed.
“It’s not funny! That’s the one tree in the whole park I care about!”
Billy apologized. “I wasn’t laughing at you but at the incompetence of the landscaper’s draftsman. It’s the last time we’ll be using him.”
“But the plans are wrong, Billy!” Leah said without looking up, her finger still on the mismarked tree. “Now we’ll lose another month.”
Billy reached his hand out to cover hers in what was surely intended as reassurance, as echoed by his words. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Monroe. I’ll change that in the field. They’ll never notice the difference; and if they do, I’ll make up a good explanation—‘Maples do so much better in well-drained Triassic soils, don’t you know?’” he said in a trial run of his excuse.
His hand remained gently atop hers throughout that short speech, the details of which Leah didn’t hear, only the rhythm and cadence of his deep voice that seemed perfectly paired to his callused but somehow soft touch. She wanted to close her eyes and maybe she did for just an instant to inhale his outdoor scent and masculinity. The net effe
ct of her subliminal actions is that she willed his hand to remain atop hers for some seconds longer than was needed for reassurance, some seconds past his employee’s indulgence of a boss’s small tantrum. Though their eyes never met in that moment, something changed. And the rest became inevitable.
Billy withdrew his hand and took a step back. “I’ll fix it,” he said again, though with some distraction.
Leah faced him with a newfound clarity of purpose, the schoolgirl giddiness gone. “So what do I need to do?”
Now it was Billy’s turn to blush. “About what?”
Leah smiled. “With the plans. Where do I need to sign?”
“Oh. Right here.” He pointed to a space beside the words Approved by for the contractor’s signature.
“Just the top copy?” she asked as she picked up the pen she’d put out earlier.
“Sign all five, to be safe.”
She did so quickly, flipping up the corners rather than moving each copy to the side. When she’d finished, she rolled up the entire batch and slid the rubber band back over the cylinder. “Here you go,” she said, handing him the roll. “Better keep moving or you’ll be late for the meeting.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Monroe,” he said, already starting to move toward the door.
“Leah,” she corrected, following closely.
He opened the door then turned. “Thanks, Leah. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”
She nodded. “Good luck,” she said.
They were just a few inches apart. A redo of the earlier handshake would’ve been an appropriate and neutral parting gesture. But both felt such an action inappropriate to their new sharing. Yet anything more, or less, would’ve been risky in its ramifications.
Leah broke the stalemate. “Oh, I almost forgot. Wait here.”
Billy stood in a stunned silence as she disappeared down the hall then reappeared a few seconds later carrying a colorful bag.
“I made you a sandwich for dinner,” she said with a growing confidence of purpose.
“That looks like more than a sandwich,” he said with a grin, both touched by her gesture and relieved by the change of focus.
“And a few other goodies,” she said. “I figured you wouldn’t have time to make yourself something, and that was before you got held up in traffic.”
“I can eat it on the way.”
“So I thought,” she said as she handed him the bag. Their fingers brushed in the transfer.
“Thank you,” he said with the slightest hesitation at the end.
“Leah.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.” Then he turned and rushed down the walk, a little faster than when he’d arrived ten minutes before.
Leah watched from the shadowed doorway till he got in the truck and backed out the drive and disappeared down their quiet residential street.
Later that night she was lying in bed reading, or trying to, when her phone signaled an incoming text. It wasn’t all that late, just a little past ten; but she and Whitfield retired early these days. Normally she had her processors off by now, but she’d left them in on the possibility that someone might try to contact her. She glanced to the other half of the bed. Whitfield was on his side facing away, his shoulders rising and falling easily, already asleep.
She picked up her phone off the nightstand and opened the “new message from Billy’s mobile”: Victory is ours. B.
She quickly tapped out and sent her response: Never doubted it.
Not even for a minute?
Not with you in charge.
Not even for a second?
Congratulations, Billy. Now get some rest.
Yes, ma’am. You too.
Leah.
Leah.
“Who was that?” Whitfield asked without rolling over.
Leah flushed but held her voice steady. “Billy. We got approval for the Harris Park upgrade.”
“Calling kind of late.”
“Texting.”
Whitfield didn’t respond.
So Leah added, “The Planning Board meeting ran late. He just got out.”
“Still late.”
“I didn’t have to take it.”
“But you did.”
“I wanted to know.”
Leah waited through a few seconds of taut silence before shutting off her phone, removing her processors, and turning off the light.
Late the following week Billy called to say he had some bids to go over for various parts of the Harris Park project. She offered to meet him at the Green Ways one-room office in a strip mall south of town. But he suggested they meet for lunch at “the best barbecue joint this side of Memphis” which was just a couple exits down the interstate from Harris Park. “I owe you one,” he said.
At the small restaurant that was all booths and floor to ceiling windows looking out on a gravel parking lot toward a two-story chain motel across the road, the barbecue was indeed delicious though with a tomato-based sauce that Leah found inferior to the vinegar-based sauces from her childhood in the Carolinas. Billy was especially animated, as he brought her up to date on progress at the three jobs currently in progress, then shared with her the numbers and the particulars of the subcontractors submitting the bids. She said little during the meal, mostly nodded and smiled and reveled in the almost childlike enthusiasm of her companion across the table.
When they’d finished their lunch, topped off with fresh banana pudding that was as good as that recalled from her childhood, the two sat in a moment of silence as they waited for the beehive-hairdo waitress to return with their check. The silence was not awkward or tense or due to a lack of any words to share. It was quite the opposite—a moment of intimacy and pleasure that didn’t require words, was fully complete without them.
Then Leah noted the motel sign over Billy’s shoulder and said something utterly unplanned yet bearing the full force of her desire and need. “If I rented a room in that motel, would you join me in about fifteen minutes?”
Billy hesitated a few seconds, but his eyes never left hers. The waitress dropped off their old-style handwritten check then rushed to a booth with some screaming children at the far end of the restaurant. In the breeze of her departure, Billy said quietly but clearly, “I’d be honored.”
Leah couldn’t help but laugh—at his words and solemn expression. “If you say ‘ma’am’ I might rescind the invitation.”
Billy smiled then. “I’d be honored, Leah.”
“Just be on time,” she laughed then leaned over and whispered, “And park a few spaces away, just in case.” Then she stood and grabbed the check instinctively.
He grabbed it back. “My treat, remember?”
She’d released the check. “Thank you,” she’d said before turning and racing out of the restaurant to drive across the road to her appointment with a new future.
And now he’d left her to get dressed alone, at her own pace, heading back to the job having just screwed the boss. Her processors were still laying on the nightstand. After she’d undressed to her underwear and slipped between the sheets, she’d taken them off to avoid an awkward or embarrassing moment once he’d joined her. But that action also had the effect of transporting her into the soundless and slightly fantastic world of her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, when she felt somewhat separate from reality and its harsher strictures. That escape served her well now.
But it had also prevented her from hearing Billy’s light then firmer tapping on the door. She’d finally texted him Where are you? and he’d texted back Outside #115. Where are you? She’d laughed out loud at her oversight (and his politeness—she’d assumed he’d let himself in) and texted Inside 115! The door is open! Once he was inside and his eyes had adjusted to the dim light from the sun pushing through the thick drawn curtains (and spotted her waiting and smiling from the room’s big bed), she pointed to her processors on the nightstand then braved a few unheard words, hoping they weren’t too loud or clumsy. “Speak to my eyes. I can still read lips
.” He’d smiled and nodded but said nothing, then began to undress. Their actions inside this room would not require spoken language.
She paused at the memory, paused at the third button down on her blouse and left it undone. Then she put on her processors, returned herself to the real world.