Keeping her eyes closed, she smiled in happiness.
Then, in the next moment, her eyes flew open. What if she wrote a story about—
Ten minutes later, she was writing the plot to a new novel fast and furiously.
Thirty-one
When Leslie entered her house, she stood in the entrance and looked into the living room with new eyes—and she saw many things that she didn’t like. How pretentious Alan’s untouchable antiques looked! He had made what should have been a comfortable family room into a room that one could only admire, certainly not use.
“Put them there,” she said to the man who was setting her luggage and shopping bags on the floor of the entrance hall. He was the same man who had driven her to the airport, the man who’d flirted with her a bit. She’d been flattered then, but now she felt that he’d just been trying for a larger tip. But, oddly enough, on this second trip, he’d been looking at Leslie as though he really was interested in her. And she understood why.
There was a woman at her church who wasn’t especially pretty and her figure wasn’t nearly as good as Leslie’s, but all the men watched her wherever she went. Of course she inspired a great deal of gossip and jealousy among the women, but Leslie had always wondered what it was about the woman that made men look at her. She’d asked Alan.
“I don’t know,” he’d said in that way that lets a woman know that he doesn’t want to analyze something. “It’s as though she expects to be looked at, so she is.”
At the time, Leslie hadn’t understood that, but now she did. Just days ago she’d been a girl again, with a girl’s body, and she’d remembered what it felt like to be desirable.
Had she punished herself all these years for what she believed she’d done to the man she loved? Or had she backed down in every argument because she had decided that she was a failure?
Whatever the problem had been, right now, as she entered the house, she knew that, inside, she was a different woman. “Thanks,” she said to the driver, then handed him a ten.
“Thank you,” he said, then gave her a look that let her know that he was available for further contact.
“Hi, Mom,” Rebecca said as she came down the stairs, walking past the luggage and many bags at Leslie’s feet. “You forgot to hand-wash my yellow sweater before you left, so I had to send it to the cleaner’s. Dad’s going to be mad about the expense.” With that she sailed past her mother and went toward the kitchen.
For a moment Leslie stared after her daughter. Before her trip to Maine, she would have whined to her daughter that she could have washed her own sweater, but now Leslie felt no such compulsion to say such a thing to her daughter.
Alan came in from the garden. He was wearing perfectly pressed trousers and a crisply ironed shirt. He barely glanced at his wife. “I thought you weren’t going to return until tomorrow,” he said as he looked through a stack of mail on the kitchen table. “You girls have a fight?” he asked, chuckling at his own joke.
He picked up a couple of envelopes, and as he walked past Leslie, he gave her an absentminded kiss on the cheek, then started up the stairs. He still hadn’t actually looked at her. “I’m going out in about an hour,” he said. “Bambi and I have to see a client.” At the top of the stairs, he turned into their bedroom.
In the next minute, Joe came down the stairs. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Glad you’re back.”
At that Leslie smiled, but then Joe told her he was hungry. “When’s dinner?” he asked as he went out the front door.
Leslie stood still for a moment. How long had her family been like this? she wondered. When had they become a bunch of strangers living in the same house, with each person caring only about his or her own needs and no one else’s?
She went into the kitchen, thinking that Rebecca would be there, but the room was empty.
“I don’t like this room,” she said aloud. It had cost the earth, but she still didn’t like it.
Going to the sink she filled the kettle with water and put it on to boil.
Isn’t this where I came in? she thought. Isn’t this what I was doing the last time I was in this house?
The water came to a boil and she made herself a cup of tea, then she stood at the window and looked out at the old summerhouse in the back. And as she looked at it, she remembered Millie Formund’s summerhouse. And Leslie remembered what
she’d learned in the last few days.
She put her half-finished cup down in the sink, went into the entrance hall, and gathered up six heavily loaded shopping bags, then carried them outside to the summerhouse. On the way back from the airport she’d had the driver stop at a local art and craft store, and she’d gone inside and nearly cleared the shelves of merchandise.
Outside the summerhouse, she put the bags on the grass; then she pushed open the door to the once-lovely house and went inside. With the eye of a woman who knew about construction, she looked about the place. Most of the damage inside was from neglect, and it could be easily repaired. There was a leak in the roof and water damage on one wall. But she could fix that.
No, she corrected herself, she could have that fixed.
She looked at what was inside the house. There was little that was hers in there. Alan had removed the upper shelves from the bookcase Leslie had refinished and put in a TV. Of course he’d had to cut a hole in the back for the cables; then the TV had been too deep for the shelf, so Alan had cut a bigger hole, until there wasn’t much left of her bookcase.
Joe stored all his old sports equipment in the summerhouse. There were at least three broken skateboards and an old wooden crate held discarded skates. Upon closer inspection, the crate turned out to be a pine washstand that Leslie had found at a flea market. Joe had put the table on its back, opened the doors, and filled the belly with his old skates.