She Loves Me Not Page 2

“No. It’s for me,” he told her.

  Watching her carefully wrap his purchase in layers of pale blue tissue paper, he amused himself by imagining the look of terror that would cross her bland face if he told her his plans.

  “You know, most of my customers are women,” she said, handing him the package. “It’s nice to see a man who cares so much about preserving memories.”

  Yes, he thinks now, with a self-satisfied grin. He cares very much about preserving certain memories.

  As they walk down the steps of the day-care center, Rose counts each one aloud with Leo, reminding him to hold the railing. It’s freezing out here, unusually cold for Long Island. A few inches of snow fell yesterday, much to the children’s delight. If it sticks, she’ll take them sledding over the weekend.

  Leo pokes along. It would be faster to carry him, but those days are long gone.

  Together, they trudge along the freshly shoveled path leading away from the low brick building, past the snow-covered playground toward the Chevy Blazer. The only other car in the parking lot is a dark green Nissan that must belong to Gregg Silva.

  “Come on, Leo, climb in,” Rose says, opening the door and helping him into his car seat.

  “I’ll do the stwaps,” he protests as she pulls the harness around his shoulders.

  “No, Leo, that takes too long. I’ll do it.”

  “No! I can do it!”

  Rose sighs and stands by, shivering in the chill as her son struggles with the straps of his seat. She’s tempted to push his fumbling little hands aside and do it quickly herself, but Toddler Tyme’s philosophy is to teach children autonomy. Most parents think that’s a terrific thing. Rose does, too, ordinarily.

  Tonight, she’s too tired to stand here indefinitely while Leo figures out how to insert the metal buckles into the slots. She’s about to do it for him when she hears a click and he looks up triumphantly.

  “See? I did it!”

  “You did do it, sweetie.”

  Relieved, she climbs into the car.

  “Good-bye, Todd-wo Tyme,” Leo chirps as they pull out of the parking lot.

  Rose smiles, glad he’s happy at the day care, which originated in the basement of Blessed Trinity Church a few blocks away. This new facility was built two years ago to accommodate Laurel Bay’s burgeoning year-round population.

  More and more working parents are willing to trade cramped, pricey city apartments and post-terrorism urban jitters for a long commute and the small-town serenity of eastern Long Island. In fact, the local school board has been holding meetings to address the influx of families and avoid overcrowding.

  Driving along Center Street, Laurel Bay’s commercial drag, Rose brakes for a stop sign and automatically glances at Bayview Books on the opposite side of the street. She can see her co-worker Bill Michaels standing by the register just beyond the brightly lit plate-glass window. His shift doesn’t end until five o’clock. She admires the display of romance novels she arranged herself on a drape of red satin in honor of Valentine’s Day. Perhaps, if the store’s new owner doesn’t already have a March display in mind, she can do the same thing for next month, with green satin fabric and books by Irish authors. Or perhaps just books with green covers . . .

  But Luke Pfleuger, the store’s new owner, will undoubtedly have his own ideas for the window display. He only allowed her creative control over the Valentine’s Day window because he came down with bronchitis right after the holidays and was forced to take a few days off.

  As Rose continues along Center Street, she notices that every one of the diagonal parking spots is taken, even at this late afternoon hour. People traipse along the sidewalks, popping in and out of the local businesses.

  There was a time, as recently as when Jenna was born, when Rose recognized most pedestrians’ faces, and most of the cars she passed when driving this route. Not anymore. Lately, the town seems filled with strangers.

  Even the familiar businesses on Center Street are changing. It isn’t just that the hundred-year-old hardware store, diner, and bait-and-tackle shop have received much-needed face-lifts.

  Peking Panda has sprouted a kimono-clad hostess and a sushi bar. The new menu at Pizza Village is printed on leather-bound ivory parchment rather than laminated card stock, and includes Tuscan appetizers starting at $7.95. Belizzi’s coffee shop has been replaced with an upscale cafe—albeit not a Starbucks. Not yet, anyway. But there isn’t a doughnut to be found in the new place, much to Leo’s chagrin. He isn’t big on hazelnut biscotti.

  She glances into the rearview mirror as she brakes to let a dog-walking stranger cross the street, doing her best to ignore her own haggard reflection: the off-center, crooked part in her long, bark-colored hair, the brown eyes free of makeup and underscored by dark hollows, the wide mouth that would benefit from a soothing layer of lip balm.

  Gazing into the back seat in the mirror, she sees that her son is sound asleep in his car seat. Poor little guy. A full eight hours of day care is rough on him, especially when he hasn’t been sleeping well at night.

  Guilt seeps in, as always . . . along with weary rationale.

  She has no choice about working full-time at the bookstore. Sam’s meager insurance policy barely covers the essentials. Without her salary, she would have to sell the house.

  They’re driving toward the outskirts of town now. The speed limit has risen to forty-five miles an hour. She stops at the last traffic light in Laurel Bay. Almost home now.

  Waiting for it to change, she tells herself, as she always does, that selling the house is out of the question.

  Forty-eight Shorewood Lane is all she has left of Sam, and that fleeting, happy time.

  No. That isn’t true. You have the kids.

  And after all they’ve been through, the kids need a safe harbor even more than she does.

  Lifting her foot from the brake, Rose pulls the car forward, driving another half mile or so before slowing gradually. The roads are well salted, but lately this corner has been especially slick. Must be some kind of water leak someplace. Ice.

  Her hands clench the steering wheel.

  The tires grip the icy pavement as she makes the turn.

  She’s not sliding through the intersection.

  But the thought that it could happen upsets her every time she drives through here when the temperature is below freezing.

  The truth is, Rose knows it’s not just the threat of a fender-bender that sends waves of trepidation through her in cold weather.

  Ice makes her think of that night. Of Sam’s death.

  Filled with longing for spring, yet cognizant that even its arrival can’t possibly banish the constant reminders of the freak accident that robbed her of her husband, Rose heads south down Shorewood Lane.

  The block is lined with unremarkable Victorian-era homes, most of them shingled in brownish-red cedar, with white trim. The houses are small, some little more than cottages, others angled by recent, tacked-on additions whose much darker or much lighter shingles sharply contrast the mellow, salt-burnished tone of the original exteriors.

  It’s been nearly a decade since she and Sam bought the small Queen Anne–style home on a quiet side street only blocks from the bay. They had such big plans for the place. Sam, after all, was a contractor. But business was booming; he was so busy with the city people renovating local homes that he never got around to much more than replacing the sagging front steps and starting the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases she always craved for the tiny nook off the living room.

  The outer shells are there—eight-foot rectangular wooden alcoves standing against two walls. Sam promised he would get to Home Depot for the brackets and wood for the shelves that weekend . . .

  That weekend.

  It’s been more than a year, and still, there are times when she can’t quite grasp the finality of it.

  They had a conversation about death the year before, when Rose was so sick. She told Sam that if anything happened to her, she wanted to be cre
mated. Sam shuddered.

  “Don’t ever do that to me, babe, he said. When I die, I don’t want to be shoved into an oven and burned. I want an open casket like my grandparents had, so that everyone can take one last look and give my hand a little good-bye pat before they stick me in the ground.”

  That didn’t happen. He wasn’t cremated, but the burn marks on his face were so bad that the mortician advised a closed casket. She never got to touch his hand and wish him a safe journey.

  It’s all a blessed blur to her now, and was even as it unfolded. The crowded wake. The funeral at Blessed Trinity, where Sam was once an altar boy. The stirring eulogy by his oldest friend, Scott Hitchcock, who said Sam was the main reason he had moved back to eastern Long Island only a few months earlier, and who vowed to watch over his family. The burial, beneath a weeping gray sky, in the cemetery across town.

  Rose hasn’t visited his grave since last Father’s Day, when she brought the children. The experience frightened them, and it saddened her.

  She didn’t feel Sam’s presence there, anyway. She doesn’t feel it anywhere, except in her heart. A heart that spent three decades beating in another woman’s chest before finding a permanent home within Rose—only to be broken.

  The pipes groan as Leslie Larrabee turns on the tap at the kitchen sink, but at least they aren’t frozen. The first spurts of water are rusty brown. She leaves it to run, then walks through the chilly, eerily empty rooms to do the same thing in the hall bathroom, between the bedrooms that once belonged to her and to Sam.

  As she runs water in the unfashionable gold porcelain tub, Leslie can almost hear her brother’s fist banging on the door, and his newly masculine adolescent voice calling, “You’re not going to take another one of those two-hour baths, are you Les? Because I’m late for practice . . .”

  Oh, Sam. What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and see you again . . .

  She sighs and leaves the bathroom behind, the tub and the sink running freely. Dad said to open the taps for at least five minutes a day in cold weather. Mom, perpetually on the other extension during their twice-weekly long-distance phone calls, promptly told Leslie not to worry about it.

  “She has other things to do, Doug,” she scolded her husband. “She’s working full-time at the gym now, and she’s planning a wedding. She doesn’t have time to go running over to the house to turn faucets on and off all winter.”

  “It’s no problem, Mom, really. I don’t mind,” Leslie lied.

  The truth is, she does mind. It isn’t easy to return to the deserted ranch house, with its haunting memories and its unfamiliar scent of abandonment. She wouldn’t tell her father, but there are cold days when she skips the visits altogether.

  Today, she couldn’t do that. She had to shovel the walks and the small rectangle of driveway in front of the attached garage, to make it look as though somebody were home when nobody has lived here in well over a year.

  She wanders back to the living room, which is just the way they left it, complete with framed family photos on every spare inch of wall and table. There are Olan Mills baby pictures and yearly school portraits from Leslie and Sam’s childhoods culminating in graduation caps and gowns, and a number of formal photographs from Sam and Rose’s wedding. And of course, there are countless photos of Leo and Jenna, the cherished grandchildren. But none are more recent than the ones taken two summers ago—the last summer her parents spent at home.

  Before that they spent only winters in Florida, ever since the year Sam was married. Leslie remembers that very clearly, because the wedding was in November, and her mother complained that they would be arriving in Boca at least a month after the other residents of the retirement complex. She wanted to drive down in October and fly back up for the wedding, but Dad said it would be a waste of money. He won, as usual, but Mom never let him hear the end of it.

  “Please shoot me if I ever start to sound like her, Sam,” Leslie once begged her big brother, who inherited their father’s easygoing temperament and quiet strength.

  Gladly, Les. Where’s my shotgun?

  Sam liked to tease her that she was just like their high-strung mother. Leslie has to admit, she does share a few of her more frustrating traits—like not always thinking before speaking, and assuming that everybody needs her help whether it’s requested or not . . .

  And yes, being prone to impulse buys, she acknowledges as her gaze falls on the piano crammed into one corner of the room, between the wall unit and Dad’s recliner.

  Out of the blue one day, Mom used two weeks’ worth of grocery money to buy the upright monstrosity at a tag sale so that the kids could take lessons. Dad hit the ceiling, and Sam flat-out refused to lay a finger on it, saying piano lessons were for sissies. Leslie was forced to endure three years of lessons with Mrs. Helwig, the halitosis-plagued organist over at Blessed Trinity.

  Now, she idly raises the lid and runs her hands over the keys. The piano is badly out of tune, but she manages to pick out the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fur Elise. Maybe, if Mom and Dad decide to sell the house instead of leaving it in indefinite limbo, Rose can take the piano so that Jenna can learn to play.

  Wouldn’t that be nice, Sam?

  Leslie finds herself picturing the imaginary piano recital her brother will never proudly attend, and tears fill her eyes.

  She abruptly turns away from the piano and finds her way back to the streaming faucets, eager to leave the lonely house, with all its memories, behind once again.

  Rose sighs heavily as she rounds the last corner onto Shorewood Lane. Their house, a cedar-shingled Victorian two doors down on the right, is dark against the purplish-black winter sky.

  There’s no sign of Brittany’s mom’s car in the driveway. Good. At least Rose beat Jenna home. Last Thursday she got here five minutes after Brittany’s mom did. Jenna was waiting in the car with Brittany, Brittany’s younger brother, and Lori, their mom, who is pregnant and due in a few weeks.

  Rose doesn’t know Lori well—the family just moved out here from Huntington when the school year started. Jenna and Brittany bonded quickly. Lori seems nice enough, and she certainly didn’t seem to mind Rose being late.

  But Jenna minded.

  And Rose minded, too. She wants to be here for Jenna. She wants her daughter to feel secure about that, at least.

  She pulls into the driveway and turns off the engine. Leaning against the headrest, she closes her eyes and groans softly. Her entire body aches. What she wouldn’t give to go inside, run a hot bubble bath, climb into it with a good book . . .

  “And never come out,” she says softly.

  Instead, what lies ahead is the cupcake dilemma. Helping Jenna and Leo address, sign, and seal four dozen Valentines between them. Deciding what to do about dinner—which the kids will undoubtedly want immediately. Figuring out what, in the meager grocery stash, can be packed into lunch boxes for tomorrow. Helping Jenna with her inevitable homework, which Mrs. Diamond uses to encourage parents and children “some together-time” each evening.

  Her eyes snapping open, Rose sits upright and groans again. Loudly this time.

  Leo doesn’t stir.

  Rose opens her car door and swings her feet onto the snowy driveway, shooting a glance at the curbside mailbox.

  Should she bring Leo inside before she runs back out to get the mail?

  Should she get the mail now, before she gets Leo out of his car seat?

  Just another daily domestic dilemma, complicated by sheer exhaustion.

  The mail first, she concludes. Give Leo another minute to sleep—and stall the cloud of crankiness that will most certainly descend and linger until bedtime.

  “Toddler PMS,” Sam used to call it when Jenna was small and prone to late-day tantrums.

  Sometimes, Rose and Sam actually laughed about it. Now, as a solo parent, Rose finds nothing amusing about the challenges that lie ahead tonight.

  Breathing the pleasant scent of wood smoke wafting in the frigid air, she trudges
to the foot of the driveway, the rubber soles of her ancient L.L. Bean duck boots making a squeaky crunching noise in the packed snow.

  The sound always sends shivers down her spine.

  Sam used to tease her about it—called it her “wince-able,” in that unique way he had of coining phrases. The translation—wince-able: the everyday thing that makes you wince. According to Sam, most people—himself included—shared winceables. Like a fork scraping on a blackboard. Like Styrofoam squeaking.

  Not snow crunching.

  “Most people consider that a pleasant sound, Rose.”

  “I can’t help it. It bugs me, Sam.”

  She stops in front of the domed plastic mailbox, noting that the black metal post is still wrapped in the red velvet ribbon Leslie insisted on twining around it the weekend after Thanksgiving. Sam’s sister also brought over a boxwood wreath for Rose’s front door. It, too, is still there, shriveled and browning at the leaf tips.

  Rose really should take it down and get rid of the mailbox ribbon, too. But another day won’t hurt. Besides, red velvet ribbon isn’t just suitable for Christmas, she thinks wryly. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

  And my valentine is gone. Forever.

  A lump rises in her throat.

  Oh, Sam . . .

  She flips through the mail to distract herself. Pennysaver, telephone bill, credit card application, school board newsletter . . .

  And a rectangular red envelope with a typewritten label addressed to her.

  The kind of envelope that might contain an invitation, or a greeting card . . .

  Or a Valentine.

  Yeah, right.

  Rose flips it over, looking for a return address label.

  There is none.

  Curiosity surging through her, she slips off her brown knit glove and slides her finger into the gap in the envelope flap. She rips it open, expecting to find a card.

  There isn’t one.

  Frowning, Rose presses the outer edges of the envelope to peer inside.

  At first, she doesn’t see it. In the fading afternoon light, it blends in against the red paper envelope.