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“I have it on Ruby’s authority that there were Italian men,” Marianne said.
That broke something in Lydia’s vision. Cracked the glass she looked at her sister through. Because of course Ruby wasn’t a baby, any more than Dahlia was, but she had a difficult time seeing either of them as fully grown women. And the thought of Ruby fooling around with European men was a strange one indeed.
Still she was very happy for the subject change, and if putting Ruby in the hot seat eased the gravity of the moment...
She supposed that made Ruby helpful. Just in unexpected ways.
“Just two,” Ruby said, sounding defensive.
“And a Frenchman.”
“Justthe one,” Ruby said dryly.
“Any Englishmen?” Lydia asked. “You were always a big one for Mr. Darcy.”
“I am not a sex tourist,” Ruby said crisply. “Though, yes.”
“And again, you came back home why?” Marianne asked.
“Because they weren’tmyMr. Darcy. None of them were more than a paragraph of my story.”
It was a strange choice of words. They weren’t more than a paragraph of her story. And it pushed Lydia off-kilter even more.
She’d thought she knew her story. Every line.
“But you know it is strange,” Ruby said. “I thought that... I thought maybe that’s where the answers were. Traveling. Seeing the world. Having experiences beyond my high school boyfriend. But I didn’t find anything there. I mean, I found some things. But it just wasn’t... It wasn’t this.”
Lydia had thought Mac was her whole book, and he’d been a few chapters, and then...
What was left?
What came next?
She didn’t know.
But for a moment, Lydia chose to let go of the dread. She chose to release her hold on her sense of uncertainty.
Because Ruby filled her mind with images of a book, and when she thought of it like that, it seemed so easy to flip back a few pages. This moment felt like it could be placed at any point in time. Maybe she would go back inside, go upstairs and find her old bed there, go to sleep in her room.
Maybe she would go home, and Mac would be there. All those things seemed about possible right now. Thanks to that cocoon of darkness outside, the familiarity of the porch light and the tea, and the presence of her sisters.
So she chose to take a breath and just live in this moment of suspended time. Because all too soonnowwould be crushing, clear and unavoidable. But it wasn’t at the moment.
Right now, she’d stay on this page and not think at all of the pages up ahead.
4
BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENTS—To Marianne and Jackson Martin, of Pear Blossom, OR, a baby girl, Ava Helene Martin, born at Rogue Valley Medical Center September 5, 2007
MARIANNE
“Do you think Dahlia is going to dye her hair pink and start going through another rebellious phase?”
Marianne walked out of the bathroom, rubbing at her face in a circular motion, making sure every last bit of her luxurious (expensive) moisturizer sank into her skin. She looked over at her husband, who was grinning at her, the lines around his mouth deeper than they’d been seventeen years ago, but she could still see the boy there who had first stolen her heart. She could see him with the years and without them and loved both. Just as she still loved him.
“Why exactly?” she asked.
He shrugged his shirt off, chucking it in the hamper by the dresser—God bless the man, it had only taken ten years to train him to do that—and walked over to their bed, sinking down onto the pale blue bedspread.
