“I don’t really know them that—” She broke off. Was she going to say that she didn’t know Madison and Ellie very well? After what she’d heard in the last twenty-four hours? Not quite.
“Healing,” she said, the word popping out of her mouth. “One of them is interested in all things to do with medicine. And the other one . . .” Leslie hesitated. What was Ellie interested in? If it had been for someone other than Ellie, Leslie would have bought her a book on “meditations for women,” something calming, something to take the anger out of her. But Leslie could imagine Ellie scoffing at such a book.
Leslie gave the man a small smile. “You don’t have anything for someone who wants revenge, do you?”
The man smiled in return, as though her request weren’t in the least unusual. “Perhaps,” he said, then turned and walked through the stacks to the back of the store. When she reached him, he was standing in front of a small bookcase that Leslie was sure was Chippendale—real, not reproduction—and holding out a book to her.
Taking it, she looked down at the title. “A Life of Romance,” the title read. Puzzled, Leslie looked at the book. What did this have to do with either revenge or medicine? she wondered. But when she looked up, the man was gone and she was alone in the back corner of the bookshop.
“A Life of Romance,” she read aloud as she held the little book in her hands. It had a green cover, no dust jacket, and it felt old. The shade on the window behind her had been lifted a bit, so there was a ray of sunshine coming through. She could see dust motes dancing in the air.
The title of the book made Leslie think about her own life and whether or not her husband was having an affair with his young assistant. And she thought about what she was going to be forced to do if she did face the issue of his affair. Was she going to have to leave him? Or was the proper thing to do to throw him out of the house he’d come to love as much as she did? Rebecca’s words that the family was going to lose everything because Leslie wouldn’t fight came back to her.
Right now Leslie wished she’d stayed with the other women. At least listening to their problems made her forget her own. Or, if not forget, then at least shelve them for a while.
Maybe it was selfish of her, but Leslie thought that her problems were worse than theirs. They weren’t bound by the chains of love. They were haunted by what had been done to them by two truly horrible men, but they weren’t still pinned to the men by that much-over-used word, love. Ellie certainly wasn’t still in love with her ex, nor was Madison.
But Leslie was as much in love with Alan as she’d been the day she’d met him. Long ago, when she was a young woman, she’d known what awaited her if she married a man she loved as much as she did Alan. And, because of what she saw, she’d tried to break it off. She’d even tried to burn her bridges behind her by jilting him. She hadn’t consciously made a plan, but, now, with the wisdom that age gives one, she knew that she’d publicly humiliated him with the thought that she wouldn’t be able to return to him.
But she had returned. She’d gone to New York and discovered that she might be considered greatly talented in Columbus, but in New York, she didn’t have what it took to be a professional dancer. She had neither the drive nor the talent.
So she’d gone home, home to Alan, and they had married as though nothing had happened. And she had to give it to him, in the years since, he’d never thrown it in her face about what she’d done to him.
But, just the same, Leslie had been eaten with guilt over the years. “Why don’t you stand up to him?” her mother often said. “What is it that you’re afraid of?”
Leslie had wanted to scream, “I’m afraid of losing him. I’ve seen what life is like without Alan and I don’t want anything to do with it.”
But now she was sure that her life with Alan was over. It was only a matter of time.
She had been standing in one place, holding the little book, for several minutes now. Opening the book to the first chapter, she read, “I never married because I knew that love would place chains on me, and, above all else, I wanted freedom.”
Leslie snapped the book shut. The words she’d read were too close to her own life. Turning her head, she glanced toward the front of the store. She heard the tinkle of the little bell attached to the door, so she knew other customers had entered the shop. How had the man known? she wondered.
No, she told herself, he couldn’t have known.
She could hear the people quietly talking in the other room. She couldn’t very well march through the store and say to the man, “I told you I was interested in medicine and revenge, what they want. So why did you give me . . .” Why did he give me what I need? Leslie thought.
She waited a few moments for the other people to leave. She could hear them laughing, so they probably weren’t the kind of people to want to spend very long in a dirty old used-book store. But after several minutes the people were still there, so Leslie looked about her. In the corner, under a foot-high stack of books, was an old wooden chair with a worn-out cushion on it. Removing the books, Leslie sat down. She wasn’t sure why she just didn’t walk through the store and exit, but, somehow, she couldn’t leave. Not yet.
She opened the book and began to read.
“So what did you buy?” Ellie asked Leslie.
They were seated at a long wooden table at The Wharf, half a dozen containers of food in front of them. In the end, they had chickened out on trying sea urchins. “Fry it and it can’t be too bad,” Ellie had said, so in front of them now were three big, white paper containers full of fried seafood, plus three other containers full of slaw, potatoes, and corn.
Madison and Ellie had spent the time between ordering and the arrival of the food showing off their purchases. Madison had bought three sacks full of toys for the children of various friends. “I’m Erskine’s godmother,” she said, smiling. “It’s a rule in town that if you have a baby, then maidenly Madison must be the godmother.”
“They’re probably hoping that you’ll give the child a gift of beauty like yours,” Leslie said, making Madison laugh in a dismissive way but also making her blush with pleasure.
Ellie had bought the alligator lamp and, “a couple of other things that no one can see until tomorrow,” she said, smiling.
Only Leslie had no shopping bags full of purchases. She should have bought gifts for them and for her children and for Alan. And Bambi? she thought, then made herself look up at the others. They were waiting for her to show them what was inside her one little bag.
“Sorry,” she said. “I went to a used-book store with the best of intentions, but I—”
“Found some interesting old book and spent all the time reading it,” Ellie said.
Leslie laughed. “However did you know?” she asked facetiously.