Love Shadows

“You are your own self. Not Ann Marie. Not Paul Jensen. Not even your Aunt Emily. You are you.”

Sarah felt a pang a grief shoot through her and it terrified her. “Can I come by and see you? I mean...just to talk?”

“Of course, my dear. I’m not abandoning you. I promise. I just think you need this...time.”

Sarah steadied her eyes on her boss. “But you don’t want me to work...on this?” Sarah pointed at her drawings.

“No. I’m giving it to Susie. She’ll take over.”

A knife whipped across the universe from some dark, wicked place and cut a deep, permanent slit in Sarah’s heart. “I see.”

Charmaine’s eyes were intractable and purposeful.

Sarah knew instantly that the conversation was over, so she placed a smile on her lips and rose from the chair. “Thank you, Charmaine. I appreciate your candor and...support.” Sarah held out her hand for her boss to shake.

Charmaine did not leave her chair as she held out her hand and shook Sarah’s firmly. “You’re welcome.”

Sarah left the room and did not realize how great her shock was until long after she had gathered her purse and belongings from her desk, gone to her car and turned on the engine. She drove out of the parking lot and got as far as the county courthouse, where she looked at the clock tower and saw that it was not even ten in the morning.

She pulled her car into an empty parking lot across from the Book Nook and Java Stop. Her hands were shaking as she turned off the engine and covered her face. She cried into her hands so that they could keep her sobs from escaping the car.

What will I do for the rest of the day?

She looked at the clock tower and saw the minute hand advance a single notch.

What will I do with the rest of my life?

CHAPTER FOUR

SARAH TURNED THE hundred-year-old doorbell crank in the middle of Mrs. Beabots’s heavy wooden door, making an odd, sour, tinny sound. Sarah remembered this particular bell being one of her favorite sounds when she was little. Back then, Mrs. Beabots always baked fresh peanut butter cookies for her. The second the cookies were out of the oven, Mrs. Beabots would call her mother and ask her to send Sarah over immediately to enjoy the warm cookies with the cold milk she had delivered to her front door. Sarah had many memories of Mrs. Beabots, and they were all good.

“Is that you, pumpkin?” Mrs. Beabots asked as she slowly approached the front door, peeking through a smooth section of leaded and beveled glass in an intricate Victorian pattern.

“It’s me,” Sarah answered. “Are you ready?”

The door swung open with a bit more force and movement than Sarah would have expected.

“I am. I don’t like to keep Father Michael waiting on my account.”

Sarah bit her lip to keep from smiling. She knew that their priest was a real stickler for starting Sunday services on time. He didn’t wait for anyone.

“Oh,” Mrs. Beabots said and stuck her arthritic forefinger in the air. “My pocketbook.” She turned around and walked over to a marble-topped Victorian entry table where she’d left her purse next to a tall crystal vase filled with white and purple lilacs. The flowers’ scent wafted over to Sarah.

“Your lilacs are marvelously fragrant this year, Mrs. Beabots.”

“Cow pucky.” Mrs. Beabots smiled as she exited the house and locked the front door behind her. “Got it from Angelo Barzonni. He’s got plenty on his farm. Manure always makes flowers more fragrant.”

“You hate to drive. Please tell me you did not drive out to the Barzonnis’.”

Mrs. Beabots took Sarah’s arm with her left hand and held on to the black, wrought-iron railing on her cement steps with her right. “Good heavens, Sarah, I wouldn’t do that. Angelo had one of the boys deliver it.”

Sarah exhaled and dismissed the frightening vision of her less-than-five-foot-tall neighbor behind the wheel of her old Cadillac. It was easily the size of a U.S. Navy destroyer. “The next time you need something like that, I’ll be more than happy to pick it up for you.”

“Oh, you have enough to do, what with your job and all. I see how late your lights are burning, and I know you’re working. Aren’t you?”

Not anymore, Sarah thought, but didn’t want to get into the subject of her forced unemployment. This was Sunday, and she wanted to enjoy the sunshine and the beautiful day. “And just how would you know how late I’m up, if you’re sound asleep like you should be?”

A warm gust shot across their path as they walked north on Maple Avenue toward St. Mark’s. Mrs. Beabots reached up to hold her black straw hat on her blue-rinsed white hair. “I should have used my hat pin,” she mumbled.

Sarah chuckled to herself. No one on earth still used a hat pin but Mrs. Beabots. Every Friday morning at eight-thirty, Mrs. Beabots had a standing appointment with the hairdresser to have her chin-length white hair washed, colored with blue-rinse, set on rollers and dried under the drier. It was eight blocks to Curls and Combs and no matter what the weather, rain or snow, Mrs. Beabots made the trek—even if she had to dress in rain gear and galoshes.

Sarah had given up trying to drive Mrs. Beabots to the grocery store, hairdresser or the post office. Mrs. Beabots was a walker. In her younger years, she used to ride a bike all over town and even out to the farms to buy whatever vegetables were in season. However, at seventy, Mrs. Beabots was told she had osteoporosis. She was warned that, should she ever take a spill on her bike, her injuries could be serious. Mrs. Beabots chose right then and there to walk. She bought a rolling grocery cart and hauled it up and down Main Street. What she couldn’t carry home, she had delivered.

“You look very pretty today, Mrs. Beabots,” Sarah said with a smile. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this dress.”

“It’s new. I got it at the Goodwill for a dollar. My guess is that the pink rosebuds and apple-green buttons aren’t quite the cup of tea for today’s fashionable types. But it suits me just fine. One should always wear flowered dresses in the spring and summer.” Mrs. Beabots nodded, more to herself than to Sarah. She glanced over at Sarah’s ice-blue silk skirt and double-breasted jacket. “You look lovely, as well, dearie,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Mrs. Beabots looked up at Sarah’s face, frowned and then focused her eyes on the sidewalk.

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, if you must know, I don’t much like your lipstick shade.”

“My what?” Sarah touched her finger to her lips reflexively.

“Well, maybe that isn’t it, after all,” Mrs. Beabots retracted.

“It’s not the lipstick?”

“It’s you, dearie. I’m very worried about you.”

“Why?”

“You’re too young to look...well, careworn.”

“I look...” Sarah felt the prick of tears at the corners of her eyes. She had no idea her sorrows and fears were this evident.

Mrs. Beabots had always possessed a certain crafty wile. As sweet as she’d always been to Sarah, loving her like a grandmother, she had no qualms about delivering a sucker punch when she felt it necessary.

Sarah was silent.

Mrs. Beabots squeezed her arm. “I think you should take a vacation,” she said with conviction. “Always does a body good to get away from the office. Mr. Beabots often said those very words to me.”

Sarah rolled her eyes heavenward. “How did you know?”

“Know what, dearie?” Mrs. Beabots stopped dead in her tracks, and with more strength than Sarah believed the elderly woman to have, she yanked back on Sarah’s arm, causing her to stumble a bit. “You aren’t sick, are you? Real sick? Not like your mother, are you?” Mrs. Beabots asked, fear flinging itself through her words.