Jan arrived home just before noon. After realizing she was going to be away more than just two or three days, she'd called an elderly neighbor and asked him to pick up her mail and newspapers. She found everything neatly sacked in two plastic bags in the garage.
She unlocked the back door, kicked off her shoes, and stood at the tiled kitchen counter flipping through the pile of accumulated mail. Advertisements, magazines, bills. All her business mail went to the office, and nothing here appeared interesting enough to bother opening in a hurry.
She looked around the large, airy kitchen with a vague feeling of having walked into some stranger's house. The air had a nebulous scent of disuse, as if she'd been gone much longer than ten days. She'd been too busy at the real estate office at the time they had the house built to fuss with details, and an interior decorator had taken care of everything: white-oak cabinets, the open space above lined with antique teapots selected by the decorator and placed with artistic grace among twining vines of artificial green ivy. Another artificial touch of homey brilliance was gleaming copper-bottomed pans, never used, hanging on the wall. And nearby, spice racks filled with every conceivable spice were also seldom used. An arched doorway opened onto a family room done in warm wood and earth colors, where glass doors opened to a patio surrounded by perfectly trimmed, perfectly fertilized grass and perfect yellow daffodils.
Alfredo had been doing his job well.
All very lovely, and yet...
She smiled wryly, suddenly struck by the incongruity of one lone person with a family room. It wasn't just incongruous. It was ... sad. Determinedly, she brushed away an unexpected gathering of tears and checked her answering machine for messages. She listened to a parade of business matters, the lone personal call from a woman she'd known when Mark was in law school, now just passing through and calling to say hello.
She turned off the machine in the middle of something about a pending sale. Urgent, the caller insisted, and perhaps it was, but somehow this brand of urgency now seemed vaguely overstated. Urgency was finding her grandchild ... and she'd failed.
Tomorrow she'd get back in the swing of things, put aside this feeling of weary melancholy, tackle all the piled-up problems, soothe all the ruffled feelings, sell more houses, maybe even pull a coup and sell that rundown minimall that had been on the market for months.
But today...
Today she was going to start at the beginning of Tim's journal and read it all again. She opened a can of tuna to make a sandwich and carried the sandwich and a cup of orange- cinnamon tea to a chair in the family room.
The phone rang a couple of times while she was reading, but she merely glanced at it, took another sip of tea from the cup beside the uneaten sandwich, and let the machine pick up. Yet when it rang a third time, around four o'clock, and she heard Mark's voice leaving a message for her to call him, she snatched up the phone. Had he heard something new about Stardust after she left the motel?
She interrupted a little breathlessly. "Hi, I'm here—"
"I guess I should be flattered that you picked up to answer my call," he said wryly, "when my instinct tells me you're probably ignoring some other calls."
She didn't bother to tell him his instinct was right. "Did something happen after I left?"
"The waitress gave me your note. And then I packed up and came home too."
"Oh." She tried not to feel let down.
"I just called because I wanted to make sure you got home okay."
"Yes, I got home fine. No problems." She hesitated briefly, then asked, “You?" She was only asking to be polite. It had nothing to do with the fact that she didn't want to break the connection with his voice.
"No problems. Everything okay there at the house?"
'Yes. I'd called old Harry to come over and take care of my mail and newspapers. And Alfredo has been here on his regular schedule."
He didn't need to know all that. Okay, so she was dragging this out. Next, she'd be going all helpless and telling him she broke a fingernail or the refrigerator was making an odd gurgling noise.
"Old Harry is still around, huh? Still turning down all offers to buy his little place?"
Some people considered Harry Warren's little house a neighborhood eyesore and would like to see it torn down and a more appropriate house erected on the prime bit of property. But Jan admired his stubborn determination to live and die in the home he had shared for over fifty years with his now dead wife. He and the house somehow celebrated a lifetime commitment that was lacking in the lives of most people she knew ... including her own.
"Still turning them down." She was about to add that he'd recently had the place reroofed, but then she realized the ridiculousness of prolonging this conversation with meaningless chitchat. She brought it to a brisk conclusion. "You'll let me know if anyone contacts you about Stardust?"
'Yes. Of course." He hesitated, as if he wanted to add something more, but finally all he said was, "Take care of yourself, Jan. It was good being with you for a few days."
“You too."
***
A week went by. Two. A month. The daffodils withered and the two varieties of lilacs bloomed, the blend of pale lavender and deep purple a living monument to Alfredo's eye for dramatic effect. Jan lost her brief enthusiasm for doing some gardening herself. Petunias and marigolds could wait another season.
Mark borrowed Tim's journal for a few days, and after he returned it, she took it up to Tim's old room where it seemed to belong and put it away in the drawer of his nightstand. She wouldn't read it anymore. Standing by his old bed with the green and yellow jungle-print spread he'd chosen, she promised herself that someday soon she'd get around to sorting through and getting rid of things.
Mark called several times, once suggesting a musical event at the college, but she refused, giving him some excuse. Sometimes she thought about what she'd told him she'd think about, how Jesus had died to cover the sins of each and every one of them. Sometimes it also seemed as if God—if there really was a God—was working on her in odd, almost sly little ways. Accidentally tuning her in to a Christian radio talk show about Bible prophecy and current events that she found so intriguing she started listening to it regularly. Making the music and words of a praise song she heard on the same station run through her head with annoying regularity. Our God is an awesome God... Going into the yard one evening to cut some flowers for her office desk and being struck by the unique beauty of each one, the incredible attention to each tiny detail of petal and leaf that proclaimed the work of the Creator.
Yet even as she felt some strange, not quite identifiable pull, she resisted it, instead giving herself over to the mundane matters of daily life.
She conscientiously tried to eat regularly and take care of her health. She had some out-of-town clients over for dinner. A man to whom she'd earlier sold a condo asked her out, and, nagging herself that she needed more of a social life, she accepted. It was a pleasant enough evening although she learned far more than she ever wanted to about the plumbing business. He didn't ask her out again, and she was relieved.
She sold the mini-mall and received enthusiastic praise from her boss. An earlier client wrote a glowing letter of appreciation for her inventive financing, which had clinched the sale of his property. She got several listings through referrals from previous clients.
Yes, she should definitely make top salesperson this year.
Yet somehow the satisfaction she'd once felt with such triumphs didn't rise to the surface in exhilarating bubbles as it once had. Why not? she wondered one evening as she stood looking at Mt. Hood off to the east through the window of the seldom used living room. The city was in shadow, but sunset still lingered on the mountain, blushing the snow to a faint pink. Why was she feeling like this, all restless and fidgety? The glossy evidence of success was still all around her. The house, the mountain view people always raved about, the Mercedes, the fresh deposit in her bank account. But somehow it all felt like a shell, hollow and empty inside. Or maybe a trap...
She knew the feeling was partly because her sense of failure more than offset any success. Failing Tim, failing his baby. She sometimes wondered if it was also because Mark was absent from the equation of success equals satisfaction. Early on, they'd gleefully shared every success, his or hers. They celebrated his getting a new client or winning any case, even the barking dog one, with hugs and kisses. Their finances in slightly better shape, they celebrated her passing the exam to get her real estate license with dinner and dancing, and splurged on a local Alan Jackson concert when she made her first sale.
Even after their relationship had begun to sour, Mark had been a part of her satisfaction because she could always feel a triumphant "So there!" gratification when she made a sale or received recognition. It proved she was competent and successful ... that he couldn't look down on her from his hottest-attorney-in-town heights.
Because by then another subversive element had entered their relationship. Earlier, when they were both struggling so hard just to get Mark through school and survive, she'd felt no deficiency in herself. She didn't compare herself unfavorably to women in his college and law school classes. But later, after he started climbing up in the world, she was painfully aware that she, unlike his associates and their wives, and Mark himself ... and the smart, attractive, educated women who flirted with him as if she were nonexistent ... had no education or sophistication.
They had fancy degrees; she had a diploma from a high school in a logging town slowly fading out of existence. They did things such as backpack across Scotland, dance in Paris, bargain in Hong Kong. She went to the Space Needle in Seattle on high school Senior Escape Day. They knew what clothes to wear and when, what to serve at dinners. She was painfully aware of too often being over or under dressed, of serving what was "out" to guests.
So each sale, each glossy thing she acquired, proved her competence, her worth. She might not be able to discuss the art in some London museum, but she could buy her clothes at the most exclusive stores, have her hair done at the best salon, and buy the advice and assistance that gave her knowledge on what was "in" and what was "out" at a social gathering.
She could also keep up the payments on this house and buy the Mercedes. She sold houses to Mark's associates or sold their houses for them; they came to her because they knew she was good. And now that Mark had dropped out of the legal profession, Jan was reasonably certain she had more assets and a larger income than he did.
She knew something else, too—something that sometimes puzzled, sometimes frustrated her: Mark didn't care. The rewards they worked so hard to acquire no longer mattered to him. He had his faith.
Well... how did I get onto all that?
Exasperated, Jan turned away from the window, where the pink blush had turned to icy blue on the mountaintop. Yet even as she determinedly switched her thoughts to the subject of a client she should contact, something that had never before occurred to her intervened.
Why didn't Mark have more assets than he did? She got the house, but she certainly hadn't cleaned him out financially in the divorce. He had almost two high-flying years at his law firm after the divorce before he abruptly abandoned his legal career to go back to school and then start teaching at Linhurst. Shouldn't he have more than he apparently had, which, as far as she knew, was just the middle-aged Honda and a modest house near the college?
Which brought up other unexpected thoughts. Did he clean that house himself? Wash his own clothes? Cook his own meals? Was he dating these days? Seeing someone regularly?
The sudden stab of pain brought on by that last question made her clamp down hard on her wayward thoughts. None of that was any of her business; furthermore, she didn't care. Not about his finances, his housekeeping, his meals, or his love life. What she needed to think about at the moment, she decided briskly, was her own dinner, which turned out to be another tuna sandwich because, when nothing looked appealing at the supermarket, she always shrugged and threw in a few cans of tuna.
She was eating that sandwich at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, idly thumbing through a brochure put out by another real estate office, when the phone rang. She almost let the machine pick up. If she had to talk to that breathless Sanderson woman again, to whom she'd already shown five houses today, the last one rejected because the door of the master bedroom faced the wrong direction and interfered with the proper feng shui of the room—
She shrugged and picked up the cordless phone on the counter. Catering to clients' peculiarities, feng shui included, was her job.
"Hello."
"Jan, this is Mark. Stardust is here."