As the evening progressed, Gorilla Man Doug evolved into Doug Merrill from Carlsbad. He was a thirty-two-year-old, self-made, successful entrepreneur who was in town for the Outdoor Recreational Expo. He had a six-year-old daughter, Bethany, from a past long-term relationship. Her mother lived in Las Vegas, and he didn’t get to see Bethany very often. He’d had to push straight through from California to get to the expo, but he hoped Bethany’s mother would let him see her on his way home. He was definitely into bodybuilding; he also liked deep-sea fishing, rock climbing, and four-wheeling. He planned to be in town until Sunday, and Natalie, ever the pushover, sacrificed her Saturday morning and agreed to go four-wheeling with him. They arranged to meet early because she still had her commitment to clean for Adele Mason in the afternoon, and Adele would be a wreck if the promised cleaning edged too close to party time. Natalie said she’d provide a picnic brunch, and Doug put himself in charge of pulling a few strings to have the four-wheelers ready. He also paid for her cab ride home that evening.
He showed up punctually the next morning in long, baggy shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He had a small trailer hitched to his Jeep Cherokee, with a couple of hot little four-wheelers on it, and they spent the morning barreling up Mineral Fork, drinking in the mountain scenery, and eating cold fried chicken, fudge brownies dripping with frosting, and a few fresh peaches, all thanks to the deli section of the twenty-four-hour grocery store near Natalie’s home. Natalie brought along her old digital camera and snapped up the vibrant autumn colors: the auburns and scarlets of the oaks, the aspens fluttering their gold coin leaves like gypsies, the deep Navajo turquoise of the September sky.
When their adventure ended, Natalie asked Doug for his e-mail address. “I got a few great shots of you,” she said as he walked her to her front door. “I’d like to send a couple of them to you. Maybe you can give one to Bethany.”
“I’d like that,” he said. “Very much.” Then he held up his forefinger, gesturing for her to wait a moment, pulled his cell phone from his pocket, and punched in a number. “Ron,” he said. “It’s Doug. I’m good; thanks for asking. Hey, I heard through the grapevine than you may have been receiving death threats lately.” He glanced at Natalie with a twinkle in his eye.
Natalie choked back a laugh.
“Uh-huh,” Doug continued. “That’s what I heard. Anyway, I thought you’d be happy to know that the coast is clear. The lady in question has given you a stay of execution.” He paused. “Let’s just say my blind date didn’t turn out to be what I was expecting. I’ll see you in a few hours, buddy.”
He ended the call. “I meant what I told Ron, Natalie. This blind date wasn’t at all what I expected it to be. It was much better.” He leaned in and kissed Natalie on the cheek. “You take care, honey.”
* * *
Hiking and four-wheeling with Doug had turned out to be a plus. Grinding the gears on her four-wheeler, spitting out dirt, and chewing up the terrain had worked out kinks she’d avoided acknowledging. The wind had blown her worries from her mind as easily as it had whipped her hair around her cheeks. She’d found some great old boards from a long-forgotten fence, gray and weathered, that would make great frames for some of the pictures she’d shot in the canyon.
After Natalie had said good-bye to Doug, she’d hurried over to Adele’s house, where she then spent the afternoon helping her clean for her big dinner.
Now, Natalie thought as she tossed her keys on the kitchen counter, she was ready to relax and immerse herself in her latest crazy art project.
The weekends the girls were with their father were hard on Natalie, so she usually spent them doing what she called her “crazy art”—therapy in the form of creativity, recharging herself and preparing for the damage control that lay ahead. Natalie knew Emma and Callie needed to spend time with their dad, but she worried. They seemed to grow more distant from their father the more time they spent with him. Emma often returned home on Sundays in a brittle mood, and Callie was usually withdrawn. Natalie always spent the next couple of days talking brightly and making the girls’ favorite meals. By midweek, she was emotionally exhausted, but the girls seemed more like their old selves.
The particular crazy art Natalie had planned for this evening involved an old lamp she’d rescued from an estate sale the week before that had grabbed her visually and hadn’t let her go. It was a Tiffany knockoff, not great as it was, but Natalie had seen dual potential in it. The base was a dark bronze, a rough, knuckled sculpture that reminded Natalie of roots or fists. She could envision it perfectly next to her bed on the nightstand. The bedroom furniture, a large arts-and-crafts-style, woody, and welcoming set that Wade had actually allowed her to keep after their divorce had been her favorite furniture, so she’d been content. The lamp would blend in well with it after she found a different lamp shade for it. She would either get one cheap somewhere—something simple that wouldn’t detract from the strong lines of the base—or she’d find an old one at a thrift shop and refit it with a new covering. Maybe she’d do something funky with it. She’d follow her muse.
It was the original stained-glass lamp shade that now sat on the worktable in her garage that held her full attention. It was a huge garish thing that had even overpowered the amazingly strong and sturdy base. But Natalie had seen beyond the lamp shade itself to the potential it offered for her to create something entirely new. She had seen colors: greens from the many Tiffany-styled leaves, blues and purples from the pansies that flourished around the rim, butterflies and dragonflies that could be taken apart for their pinks and deep golden yellows. The ugly lamp shade on the table was already transformed in her mind into a wonderful, abstract flash of brilliance that would adorn the arched transom window above her front door. She had briefly dabbled with stained glass years earlier in high school, and she had kept the tools and the few supplies she had purchased at the time. She had also harvested interesting glass from previous thrift shop finds.
She picked up the lamp shade and ran her fingers back and forth over the images, then slid it carefully over the narrow strip of plywood she had clamped to her work board. The first step was to cut the individual pieces of glass carefully from the solder holding the lamp shade together, salvaging as much of each piece as possible. Natalie had studied the shade carefully, determining which pieces to remove first. She put on her safety glasses and picked up her glass cutter. The thought crossed her mind that maybe what she was doing was a waste of time. Wade would have thought so, would have told her so in no uncertain terms. But she always found she felt better and was more focused when she’d had a chance to create something from nothing. Or recreate something from something else. A silk purse from a sow’s ear, her mother would say when Natalie would present her with her crude little bits of handiwork as a child.
She remembered a particularly awful T-shirt she had decorated for Mother’s Day when she was nine. Natalie had seen a book on modern art at the library and had been fascinated by the boldness she’d seen reproduced there. Works by Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky had leaped off the pages. She hadn’t understood what she was looking at, but the images had gripped her. She had done her own Pollock interpretation on the front of a big old yellow T-shirt she’d found in her bottom drawer, using acrylic paints she’d purchased with allowance money. The result was less than spectacular, but her mother had exclaimed it was the best gift ever and had worn it all day long. Of course, after that, Natalie thought with a wry grin, her mother had worn it to weed the vegetable garden. Still, her mother’s enthusiasm and encouragement had outweighed her diplomatic handling of the worst of the pieces. Natalie’s creative efforts had improved since then, she believed. She’d even sold them occasionally, usually to friends. They knew she needed money, she figured. Well, it was true. She did. And there was always another mad creation, another art piece waiting to spring to life in her hands, so she parted with most of them easily enough.
Natalie worked carefully, cutting each glass shape from its soldered bond. When she eventually pulled off her safety glasses and wiped the sweat from her forehead, she realized her stomach was growling. She pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to look at her watch. Nine thirty. No wonder she was hungry. The time had flown by. She quickly sorted the glass pieces into small boxes and cleaned up her glass-cutting tools.
Natalie fixed an easy dinner of leftover picnic chicken and tossed salad and then washed her dishes. A quiet soak in the bathtub would be relaxing and help her sleep, she decided, so she grabbed her old chenille bathrobe from the bedroom closet and headed for the bathroom. She poured a generous amount of her favorite bubble bath into the rushing tap water, its steamy fragrance immediately filling the small room. She breathed in deeply, then rounded up a few extra candles and added them to the few she kept on hand in the bathroom already. Money was admittedly scarce, but a candlelit bubble bath was a treat she’d decided she could afford—and deserved—occasionally. So in celebration of surviving the Lisle-twin disaster and the most unusual blind date she’d ever had, not to mention her run-in with Wade, she allowed herself to indulge. Candles now lit, she turned off the light and stepped into the hot bubbles that frothed to the rim of her old tub. She slid in up to her chin and let the soothing heat seep deeply into her aching muscles. She was used to sore muscles; she didn’t take on the physical challenge of heavy housework day after day and not expect to have them, but today she also noticed a pull in her lower back and thighs and a tightness in her arms that came from matching wills with a four-wheeler. She closed her eyes and sighed heavily, breathing in the lavender fragrance from the bubbles as they blended with the vanilla scent of the candles.
She lifted a leg above the bubbles and soaped it from thigh to toe. It always surprised her to see some definition in her calves and quads. It was ironic, really. She’d never been athletic. In fact, after marrying Wade and having the girls, she had put on a little weight. While she had referred to it jokingly as baby fat, Wade had bluntly told her it was unattractive. Dieting and exercising were hard enough under normal circumstances, but after Emma’s birth, nursing had made her ravenous, and exercising had been next to impossible in her sleep-deprived state, between the baby’s regular nightly feedings and keeping a then-four-year-old Ryan out of mischief during the daytime.
Still, she’d tried hard to diet and exercise as soon as her doctor gave her the okay. But Wade had already begun to lace their conversations with subtle digs about her appearance, and though she hadn’t consciously realized it at the time, she’d allowed the weight to remain as a deterrent to Wade. She’d discovered the hard way that a handsome man could actually be rendered unattractive by virtue of his behavior and comments.
By the time Callie had been born, the comments had expanded to include all of her general inadequacies, of which Natalie apparently had an overabundance. She had responded by gaining more weight, neglecting to do her hair and make-up, deferring to Wade on all decisions involving the household, and immersing herself in her art projects and her children’s lives.
Natalie dragged a big soapy loofah down her arms. They too had muscle definition that surprised her. She should make an online exercise video and call it “Body by Bissell” or “Mop and Tone.”
She remembered the anniversary she and Wade had celebrated when Callie was about five months old. Natalie had decided to work hard, despite nursing, to try to fit back into her regular clothes, realizing that even those were two sizes larger than she’d worn when she’d married Wade. Her relationship with Wade had been in a serious downslide, and she’d felt it was her fault. If only she had eaten less, hadn’t let herself go as badly as she had. If only she had kept the house cleaner, ironed his shirts just right, made his favorite meals more often. If only she’d gone to college. All of their extra money had gone to getting him through school, and by the time he’d finished, she’d had two kids at home. Then Callie had arrived on the scene, and there had been three. Wade had worked long hours, and she’d been so tired after a long day with three little kids that she hadn’t given him the attention he’d needed. He’d become distant all of the time, and they’d stopped talking to each other. He would come home late and eat his dinner alone (it was hard to make the kids wait until after eight to have dinner with him); she tried to convince him to come home earlier and spend a little time with them, but he always insisted his work was too demanding.
So she resolved to make this anniversary special, show him she loved him and was committed to making their marriage a happy one—although, at this point, she really suspected she was just attempting to keep it alive. She reserved a table at Cedars of Lebanon, where Wade had taken her on their first date. She fit herself into a borrowed dress she hoped made her look sultry as opposed to simply fat and spent the day doing her hair and make-up so Wade would be impressed. If he was feeling neglected and that was causing his indifference, she wanted to make it up to him.
Wade was late coming home from work again, and Natalie was concerned they would miss their reservations. He didn’t comment on her appearance when he walked through the door and threw his keys unceremoniously on the table. He simply asked, “When’s dinner?”
Natalie forced a smile. “I made reservations for us for our anniversary. Cedars of Lebanon,” she added expectantly, hoping he’d remember.
Wade slumped into a kitchen chair and thumbed through the mail. “I’m a little tired. I wasn’t expecting to go out tonight.” Natalie watched the realization dawn on him and saw a muscle twitch near his left eye. “I didn’t forget,” he said. He was scrambling for cover. “It’s been so busy at work—you know that—and I assumed you wouldn’t be able to get a babysitter on a school night. You caught me off guard.” He rose to stand next to her and shot her his mildly irritated look. “You could have reminded me. You know how much I have on my mind right now.”
She had tried to remind him—at least she’d tried to encourage him to come home early. But she’d also learned that his work hadn’t been too busy for him to take a two-hour lunch with a client, as she’d found out when she’d called his office at different times that afternoon. At the time, Natalie had wondered just who the client was, especially since Wade’s secretary had sounded nervous over the phone.
“Give me a minute to unwind, and we can hit the road. A little lamb and couscous sounds good, I guess.”
No comment about her hair, her face, her dress. No words of love or even affection. They hardly talked during the drive to the Cedars. Natalie stared at the menu, mentally resolving to leave the conversation up to him; she had been the one to do everything else, after all. He drank his spiced herb tea, dug into his lamb tagine, and tipped the belly dancer five bucks, slipping it into the waistband of her harem pants. Natalie noticed the harem pants of sheer black silk and the gold bangles attached. She also noticed Wade noticing as well. He hadn’t looked at her that way—or in any way—for months now. Trying not to sound hurt or petty, Natalie suggested taking belly dancing lessons. “Maybe you’d like it if I could dance like that,” she offered shyly.
Wade had looked at her over his cup as he’d sipped his tea. “That’s not a bad idea. Maybe it would help you lose all that disgusting weight you can’t seem to get rid of.”
Natalie stepped from the tub and wrapped herself in her towel. That anniversary, that event meant to celebrate the joining of two people forever as one, had been a major turning point. Life was full of turning points, moments of epiphany, when the clouds parted and illumination shone forth. And there had been events to follow, events that had eventually culminated in the end of her marriage to Wade, leaving two bereft daughters and a son who had guessed at the inevitable and still had felt betrayed.
Tucked into her favorite fleece pajamas and wrapped in her robe, she grabbed her latest read and curled up on her bed to relax. Cleaning houses for others had freed her from her unwanted pounds and had also given her at least partial freedom from Wade. But what she really craved was the ability to care for her and her children without having to rely on anyone but herself. She’d been the little daughter at home, then the reluctant, remorseful, pregnant bride of her so-called high school sweetheart, then the dutiful wife of a distant, critical husband. She’d learned the hard way that she could trust no one else. If Wade was going to pull his child support, then let him. She would not ask again. She would not depend on anyone, any man, ever again. She would get her education somehow. She would go to school and find a career that would support her family.
Wade threatening to stop financial support for the girls wasn’t a complete surprise, considering what a deadbeat he’d already been, but it complicated things; she would have to use her carefully saved tuition funds to pay for things she had presumed would be taken care of by the girls’ father. So be it. She would not see her daughters or Ryan go without, nor would she be stopped from her course now that she knew what she had to do. That meant finding another house to clean, and soon. She opened her book, feeling resolved on the matter, read one paragraph, and fell into a deep sleep.