Love Shadows

SARAH PARKED HER car in her assigned space, gathered her portfolio and purse and exited the car. She went around to the front of the building and entered through the double glass doors.

Just walking into the reception area of Environ-Tech Design still gave her chills of pride after almost two years. Charmaine Chalmers had carefully laid out the space with the expertise of one of the most illustrious Black Hat Feng Shui Masters in Chicago. The serenity and peace that clients felt walking in the doors was planned, purposeful and dramatic. It was a breath of urban class in a small town, and Sarah loved it. The walls were painted a burned taupe with glistening white crown molding and trim. The floor was bamboo hardwood covered with ancient Persian rugs in muted browns, reds and golds that looked as if they had been dragged through the Sahara to gain their patina. Tall African jars held white bird-of-paradise stalks that Sarah knew attracted aphids like crazy, but Charmaine spritzed the leaves with soapy water and wiped them down one by one on Saturday nights when she had nowhere else to go.

The conversation area was centered with an ink-black mahogany coffee table that glistened like glass and had never once been allowed to display the first fingerprint or speck of dust. The front-desk receptionist, Lou Ann Hamilton, made certain that Charmaine’s specially manufactured and painstakingly imported Samoan table was pristine at all times.

The Asian-inspired seating was actually Italian in design and constructed south of Milan, but no one in the office was allowed to give out the name of Charmaine’s highly talented, grossly underpaid furniture designer. Charles Vesa was fifty years old, divorced, and other than when he wandered into the Environ-Tech offices unannounced with rolls of design paper under his arm, few people ever saw the man. When Charles showed up, Charmaine always dropped everything she was doing, sat in her conference room and studied his drawings as if they were bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Sarah went into her cubby-hole-size office, which was only slightly larger than the other offices up and down the hallway. The building, built before the First World War, still had interior doors with walnut bottoms and frosted, “pebbled” glass on the upper half of the door. No one could see in or out. It seemed rather odd to Sarah that, despite Charmaine’s intense desire to create a Feng Shui atmosphere in the front of the office and the conference room, the rest of the building felt like the back rooms of an old county recorder’s office. The offices were certainly not conducive to creative thought.

Sarah went to her frosted, double-hung window and lifted the sash. A warm, fresh breeze with a hint of lilacs drifted past the sill. She inhaled deeply and sighed.

Just then, her phone rang. She looked at the blinking light. It was Lou Ann at the front desk.

“This is Sarah.”

“Charmaine wants to see you in the conference room. Do you want some coffee?” Lou Ann asked sweetly, with a hint of the Southern accent she’d brought with her when she and her husband moved here from Tennessee.

“Sounds lovely,” Sarah replied. “I’ll be there.”

Sarah hung up, looked down at her portfolio and crossed her fingers for luck. Mom, I know you’re up there pulling for me. You, too, Daddy. If this goes right today, I could finally get a promotion.

She looked around her office and grimaced. Okay. That’s not likely. But, she thought, sticking her finger in the air with a bit of anticipation, landing the client myself would be a huge feather in my cap.

With one last glance heavenward, Sarah picked up her portfolio and left her office.

* * *

CHARMAINE CHALMERS WORE a spring-green, silk sweater set with light beige crepe slacks and low-heeled, leopard-print designer pumps. Today, her jewelry was simple, for Charmaine— a pure gold, diamond-studded chain around her neck and chocolate diamond hoop earrings. She wore no wedding rings, having never been married, and had a man’s alligator-banded antique Hamilton watch on her wrist.

No one knew where the watch came from, but Sarah guessed it had belonged to Charmaine’s wealthy Miracle Mile entrepreneur father who disinherited his daughter over thirty years ago when she moved to Indian Lake to strike out on her own.

Sarah’s eyes squinted together as she watched her boss peer over her drawings for far too long before sharing her assessment.

Charmaine was the kind of person who, if she liked something, would be instantaneously effusive.

There was nothing coming out of Charmaine’s mouth this morning that remotely resembled pleasure—or even mild acceptance.

“You don’t like it,” Sarah said. If she stated the obvious, maybe the rejection wouldn’t cut so deeply.

She was wrong.

“I don’t,” Charmaine said too bluntly and too quickly. “The reception area is the focal point of all our commercial designs. This is the first impression customers or patients receive. Look here. The counter is much too angular. We have always prided ourselves on our Feng Shui design, and I see none of that here. The client expressly requested that this back wall be a lighted glass block, not this bank of file cabinets and shelves. Also, your color boards don’t have the spark I’ve come to expect from you. Where’s your inventiveness?”

Sarah looked at her color boards with their earth tones of tan, brown, camel and brick. Charmaine picked up a swatch of Aztec sun-gold brocade with turquoise and jet beads and tossed it over the color board. The other colors instantly came to life and radiated energy.

Sarah smiled. Then sighed. “I see what you mean.”

Charmaine’s expertly made-up eyes glistened with a sheen that Sarah suddenly realized were tears. “I don’t know how to say this, Sarah.”

Sarah thought she’d quick-frozen her emotions when her mother died two months ago. She was wrong.

Loss and grief had no boundaries.

They just kept rolling on with a vengeance, unmindful of the human hearts in their path.

“Say...what?”

Charmaine exhaled a long, yogalike breath. She folded her hands in front of her, on top of Sarah’s drawings. “I want you to know that I hold you and your talent in deep regard. I couldn’t love you more if you were my own daughter. Nevertheless, we have to face something here, Sarah...”

“Which is?” Sarah could barely swallow. She looked down at her drawings and for the first time saw them for what they were. Mediocre. She cringed. She felt as small as the tiniest spec in the universe.

“These past months have been difficult for you. No, its more than that. They have been hell. First your father died two years ago, then your mother got sick. You’ve been her support all this time. I don’t know how you’ve managed to do it, quite frankly.”

Sarah couldn’t take her eyes off her drawings. “Apparently, I haven’t done it.”

Charmaine reached out and touched Sarah’s hand. “Yes. You have. You do so much. But this—” she swept her hand over the papers “—this just isn’t your best work.”

“It isn’t,” Sarah said flatly. She supposed despair would set in later, but for now, she looked up at Charmaine. “You’re absolutely right. It’s not coming together for me.”

Charmaine moved a bit closer to Sarah. “I want you to listen to me. Don’t say anything until I’m finished.”

“Okay,” Sarah replied, her mouth going dry.

“I want you to take a leave of absence. Take a couple of months off.”

“What? Now? I can’t leave now.” A burning sob grabbed Sarah by the throat. Without her work, she would be nothing. Without a project to wrestle with the grief she felt every waking minute of the day, she knew beyond a doubt she would go insane. She was at Charmaine’s mercy more than she’d realized. She couldn’t imagine not coming to this office every morning and seeing the rest of the staff. The idea was ludicrous. She wanted this job. She needed her work. “You don’t understand, Charmaine.”

“Yes, I do,” Charmaine said softly. “I’m not firing you. On the contrary. I think you have more talent than anyone I’ve ever met. Given a bit more flair, you could be me.” Charmaine tried to laugh, but Sarah’s face was stone.

“Okay,” Charmaine continued. “Let me tell you a story. A long time ago, I was lost. Truly lost. I had no one. My family had turned their backs on me. I’d lost the one person I thought I loved, but he didn’t love me back. I lost my job in Chicago and I thought the world had come to an end. Then I spent a month—maybe more than a month—walking the beach here at Indian Lake. I stood on the shore of Lake Michigan at the beach in New Buffalo and looked across at the Chicago skyline and asked myself what I wanted. Not what my parents wanted for me, which was to live in a mansion on the North Shore and join the Yacht Club and the Sheridan Golf Club. They wanted me to marry an heir to an even bigger fortune than theirs. But I would have been miserable. That’s when I decided to pursue my design business right here in this little town. I didn’t know anyone except old Hop at the Phillips gas station, who filled my red Mustang tank every Saturday morning. I had to start over. I had to make my own life. And I’ve never regretted it.”

“And you think that’s what I need to do? Maybe move away from here?”

“I think you need to decide a lot of things, and that’s one of them. No one can go anywhere around here and not see your mother’s stamp. Heck, it’s her red velvet cake recipe that Maddie Strong uses at her cupcake shop, for heaven’s sake.”

“I forgot that.”

“See what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sarah. These are big shoes to fill, and you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You could...”

“Go back to Indianapolis?”

“Well...” Charmaine shrugged. “You were well on your way to an excellent future with Harper Architectural Design when you came here. Maybe you would be happier in a big city.” Charmaine touched her gold Cross pen. “Maybe you’re only grieving right now. Maybe that’s all it is. But I want you to have the opportunity that I had, Sarah. I want to give you the time you need to discover yourself.”

“Myself,” Sarah repeated, wondering what that meant, exactly.