Two days later, Phoebe still had not left her sanctuary. She’d stepped outside to check the mail, to breathe in the smell of rain coming—the weather channel had predicted an early winter deluge over the weekend—and had held the door open for the mustached man from the Cal’s Grocery who seemed surprised when he saw her, and had her confirm twice that she was indeed Phoebe Gustafson.
It was Cal Masters, himself, Phoebe learned after he introduced himself. The mom and pop grocery store did a thriving business in Midtown, partly because they had a website and offered home delivery, but then, so did several of the other big chain grocery stores in the area. What set Cal’s apart was the quality and speed of the service and the personalized care they gave each customer. They had a dedicated staff just for their home delivery service, so each order was processed as it came in, then immediately filled and delivered within an hour to Midtown residents.
Phoebe loathed grocery shopping and was a regular at Cal’s online—she’d only set foot in the actual store once so she could scope out the quality of their produce before ordering—and she hadn’t met Cal until today.
“Forgive me,” he explained after setting her order on her counter. His eyes politely scanned the open floor plan of her home, taking in the potter’s wheel, the photography corner, and the huge canvas mounted on an easel in the middle of her workspace. Behind it, several more canvases were lined up, side-by-side, pencil sketching on each giving evidence that they were all part of a series in its beginning stages. “You’re the artist.” He didn’t act flustered or embarrassed, just pleasantly surprised.
Phoebe smiled and held up her hands as verification of the fact. She’d been painting when he arrived, and she’d wiped them clean enough to pay for her delivery and put the food away, but her fingers were still splattered with the rust and cobalt hues she’d been using. She was intrigued by the fact that he knew her, though—although her artwork was in several different studios and businesses in Midtown and the surrounding metropolitan areas, she rarely received personal recognition outside the artist community she belonged to.
Cal crossed his arms and nodded thoughtfully. “Well, isn’t that something. We have a piece of your artwork hanging in our front entryway.” He seemed almost careful in his choice of words, which made Phoebe pay closer attention. “The painting means a great deal to my wife. It’s called Cerulean. It’s a pregnant woman.”
“Oh?” She smiled, hoping he’d say more. Her heart lurched when he told her the name of the piece. It was a painting she’d done when she’d turned twenty-five, when Lily would have turned nine, during a period when Phoebe especially missed her mother—and her daughter who was someone else’s daughter—fiercely.
A nearly naked woman with her arms wrapped around her distended abdomen, her face lowered, eyes closed in an expression of longing and serenity. She had dark hair like Phoebe’s that cascaded down her back, but her features were Theresa’s, the woman who had adopted Lily. Standing against a cinnamon and caramel textured background, her face and neck transposed from skin tones into swirling hues of blues and greens over her chest and limbs, the colors separating into landforms over the orb of her belly, so that it looked like she cradled the world in her arms. And instead of depicting the excitement of a mother-to-be, Phoebe had painted the swirling blue and green ache of uncertainty—am I woman enough to be a mother?—almost eclipsing the golden halo of anticipation and joy. There were times, like the woman in the painting, when it seemed to Phoebe like she’d been pregnant and waiting her whole life…just as there were times when the knowledge that the baby she’d given birth to would never be her own to hold. She would ache with cerulean longing; instead of a child, she felt like she carried the weight of the world in her arms.
She’d embraced the color as her own; she’d even matched the blue in the painting to the blue on her front door. Welcome to my cerulean world, it declared to any who would notice.
Creating the masterpiece—it was visually stunning, one of Phoebe’s best—had been cathartic, but it had taken so much out of Phoebe emotionally, that she’d auctioned it off through a local gallery, unable to bear looking at it. She’d donated the proceeds to the organization through which she’d met Jeff and Theresa.
Cal’s eyes lingered on the new painting she was working on, and when he didn’t speak right away, she added, “Thank you. My work is very important to me, so it does my heart good to know it has a good home.”
Cal cleared his throat, now a little abashed. “Would you mind if I told her I’d met you? She—well, she would be honored, I’m sure, as much as I am.”
Phoebe thought it an odd choice of words. His wife would be honored by the fact that Cal had met Phoebe? But she nodded agreeably. “Please do. I’m honored to have met you, too.” She grinned, and then added, “And not just because of the art. I’m glad for the chance to tell you personally how much I appreciate you and your store. Your service is stellar and the folks who deliver my groceries are extremely helpful and polite. I get a lot of stuff delivered to my home, and there are some I have to be…careful about, if you know what I mean. But your staff is always a joy to have in my home. And I love the fact that you, as the owner, make deliveries, too.”
“Thank you,” he said, a satisfied smile on his face. “However, I must admit that although I oversee the shopping portion of each order, I don’t usually get out on deliveries. I like to be on hand at the store at all times, but for some reason, we’ve had more delivery orders than usual today—and we’re short a few staff members because of a flu bug going around, so I’m helping them out. I’d like to think Providence has played a hand in things in allowing me to meet you. You’re a household name in our home.”
“Wow.” Phoebe felt bolstered by the man’s kind words, and although she didn’t have any plans to leave her home in the near future if she could help it, she handed him one of her business cards. “Perhaps one day I’ll have the chance to meet your wife. In the meantime, my email address is there if she’d like to sign up for my calendar updates or my newsletter. I know that seems rather impersonal, but most of the time, I don’t know where I’ll be until I tell my subscribers.” It was true. Phoebe’s schedule was mandated by her next showing, her next customer, her unpaid bills.
“Alice would love that. In fact, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t already on your mailing list, but I’ll certainly give this to her.” He hesitated only a moment before grinning sheepishly. “Would you mind signing the back of it for her?”
Phoebe smiled. “I’d love to.” She took the card back and scribbled her name across the card. “I can do you one better, too.” She had a stash of desk calendars that she’d ordered for Christmas gifts for the family—she made them every year with her own art, and she usually had a few to spare. She explained as much to Cal after signing Cal & Alice - From my heart to yours - Phoebe on the inside of the cover. “You let her know she won’t find this in any store or anywhere online, okay? It’s a ten-of-a-kind calendar.”
Cal accepted it with bright eyes. “You have no idea what this will mean to her, Ms. Gustafson.”
“Phoebe. Please.”
“Phoebe.” Cal picked up the plastic carton he’d carried her grocery bags in and headed for the front door. “This has been the highlight of my day.” He paused on the front stoop and cleared his throat. “I feel compelled to tell you something else.”
Phoebe stood in the entry and nodded.
“You might not understand at this moment, but I’m going to pray that God opens doors for you and my wife to meet one day. I want you to know that it might not be easy for either of you, but I have a strong notion that this meeting—” he waved a finger between the two of them. “—is part of a much bigger plan.”
Phoebe’s hackles rose a little. She didn’t need God setting her up to meet anyone. The last time she’d asked for his help, he’d left her high and dry. He’d stood her up in his own house, instead, making her deal with the likes of Trevor Zander.
Who is suddenly back in your life like a bad penny, a small voice murmured inside her head. A thought occurred to her. She gestured to her outfit, her hair she had swept up into a messy bun and covered in a tie-dyed scarf. “I hope you don’t think I’m one of those recluse artists. You know, the kind who stay locked inside their own homes and only talk to their agents and delivery people and wash their hands a thousand times a day.” She held up her hands again. “I’m messy and outgoing and I usually love meeting people, in case you’re worried about that.”
Cal chuckled and shook his head. “No, no. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind.” But he didn’t expound on why he thought it might be difficult, and Phoebe was finished trying to wheedle it out of him.
“Okay. Good. Thank you for the groceries. I’ll see you or one of your other guys in a couple weeks then. I shop about twice a month.” She snorted. “Or rather, I make you shop for me about twice a month.”
“It works well for both of us. You do what you do, and I do what I do, and everyone is happy, right?” He waved without waiting for an answer and headed down the walk to his van.
Groceries put away, she paused at her computer. She hadn’t checked her email since telling the family she was sick two days earlier. She knew there would be word from all of them, some conciliatory, others a little more demanding, but since none of it would change her mind, she hadn’t bothered checking. Nor had she bothered plugging in her phone to charge it. In fact, the longer she went without it, the more freed up she felt. Why did she have to be at that thing’s beck and call twenty-four-seven?
But now she was curious about Alice Masters. Was she on her mailing list already? And what was Cal being so cryptic about?
She checked her hands again to make certain she wasn’t going to leave any paint smears behind on her keyboard and sat down. Email first. Get it out of the way. Then she’d look for Alice’s name on her mailing list.
Her eyes widened when she saw email after email from her sisters, almost all of them with attachments. What was going on? Without really considering what was wrong, she opened the most recent one from Juliette.
Baby pictures. Image after image of a tiny round face with a thin thatch of dark curls on top, wide gray eyes slightly tilted up at the corners. A petite pink mouth, ten delicate fingers, boxy feet with button toes. Pictures of the boys gathered around Charise, Reuben holding her on his lap, Judah’s arm too tight around her neck. Pictures of Granny G nuzzling the baby’s neck. A darling image of Grandpa G in his easy chair, holding Charise in his big, gnarled hands, the two of them staring eye-to-eye at each other. The look on the old man’s face was beatific, and more than Phoebe could bear to see. She clicked out of the email without reading Juliette’s words and waited for her lungs to fill.
Before she closed out of her inbox to scan her email addresses for Alice Masters’, a name caught her eye and her hand froze. Trevor Zander?
No. No, she was not ready for whatever he had to say. From what Juliette and Gia said about him, it didn’t seem likely that he’d changed one iota from the man who’d all but run her out of church all those years earlier. Granted, he didn’t look the same anymore, but as she knew quite well, looks could deceive.
Phoebe opened her address file and did a search for Cal’s wife. Sure enough, there she was. She’d been on Phoebe’s mailing list since the very beginning, since shortly after she launched her website. In fact, it would have been right around the time she’d had her first showing at Expressions Studios in the Midtown Galleria downtown, a section of the old train station that had been converted into a variety of shops and restaurants. Phoebe had picked up several names from that event and although she couldn’t picture the woman’s face, it seemed like Alice Masters might just be one of her oldest fans. And the fact that she had Cerulean hanging on her wall helped ground Phoebe a little.
She put on some Julien Dore, sashaying slowly back to the easel as the smooth boy-next-door voice crooned in French from the speakers mounted on the wall above her work station. He begged her to tell him about summer, about her long absences, about the emptiness that destroys. The French words wrapped around her, comforting her even as they made her suffer.