Jennifer Greene: Wild in the Moonlight

“As in…it’s the woman’s fault if she doesn’t have a climax?”

“Yup. I can’t believe I swallowed a lot of the things Simpson used to tell me. And on the baby subject, he really believed that it must be the woman’s fault if she couldn’t get pregnant, if the guy was virile.” She sighed. “Some things he didn’t have completely wrong. He had his sperm checked. And they were all aggressive little swimmers. I was the one with the skinny tubes.” She snuggled closer. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to tell you about all this, but…somehow it’s opened my eyes to just air it all out. It’s obvious to me now what I was doing with the lavender. I needed to create something that was totally my own, something that came specifically from me. And I guess I did go a little batty with enthusiasm.”

“A little?”

He heard her soft chuckle in the darkness. “Okay. So I went hog wild. But the thing is-I never thought all my experiments would take. I thought most of them would miscarry, you know? Why should they work? I was a novice at this, no more than a closet gardener. It just seemed to be luck, that everything I touched reproduced with no problem. It was so ironic.”

“Ironic in what way?” He stroked that long hair, knowing she’d be annoyed in the morning she hadn’t braided it, but loving it loose.

“Ironic, because all I had to do was love it. And nurture it. And it thrived.” She sighed. “Same with cats. I took in one stray barn cat three years ago. He was starved, crippled. I didn’t think he had a chance of making it, and the next thing I knew, he’d miraculously turned into a she-cat and had kittens on me.” She stroked his neck, as if somehow instinctively knowing where he liked being touched most. “My mom had this theory, raising kids.”

“Which was?”

“Which was that everybody’s powerful in some way. We just have to clue in to who we naturally are. My mom taught us girls that each of us had something in our nature that we needed to listen to, develop. For me, I thought it was to be a mother. To grow and raise and nurture. To feed. To caretake. That’s part of what was so hard. Knowing I couldn’t have kids. I’d just always been programmed to believe that was a natural part of me.”

Cameron hesitated. He’d never been afraid of wading into touchy waters, but this time, he desperately wanted to say the right thing. It’s not like he knew anything about infertility. Or that he had any way to make her loss any less painful. But he had to find something right to say. The jerk she’d married had made her feel less than a woman, as if she were less than whole because of those “skinny tubes.”

“ Chére, I think you were a born nurturer. Just like your mother said. But I don’t think that’s just about children. It’s about everything and everyone around you. Always will be. Although…”

“Although what?”

“Although I think there’s a definite danger you could get overrun by cats.” There, he’d made her smile. “If you started adopting elephants…well, the potential problems boggle the mind.”

And there. He’d made her really laugh now. Feeling high on those successes, he pressed toward touchier ground. “I’m relieved you went for the divorce,” he murmured, and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry that he was such a blind idiot and hurt you. But if he hadn’t had all those stupid ideas, who knows, maybe you’d have stuck with him. And then I’d never have found you.”

“You think it’s fate we found each other when we did?”

Her voice was getting sleepier, her cheek rooting for just the right place on his shoulder. “Not fate,” he said quietly, bluntly. “Love. The kind of love that’s actually freeing for us both. I mean-I already have two kids, so I don’t need to start a formal family all over again. This is perfect. I’m a free spirit. So are you. We can both do anything, go anywhere we want. There’s nothing to hold us down. Nothing to hold us back.”

She seemed to go very still when he said the “love” word, but she didn’t immediately answer. Moments later, he realized she’d fallen asleep.

That was okay, he told himself. He just wanted to reassure her that he loved her for her. Maybe he’d hoped she would say something to indicate she wanted him to stick around in her life. But she’d just revealed that huge hole in her heart. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Maybe she needed to think about that “love” word for a while. They had time yet.

Surely they still had time yet.

“Girls. Could you keep quiet for a full three seconds?” Both girls whirled around in surprise at her sharp tone. She never yelled at them. She never yelled at anyone, but darn it, August had blown in on a hot, mean wind. A few days ago she’d picked up a stomach bug she couldn’t seem to shake. The cats were crabby; she hadn’t been sleeping; and the girls had been talking for hours about school coming, boys, clothes, boys and then more boys.

“We need to make some more insect repellent. Remember the recipe? Ten parts lavender, ten parts geranium, five parts clove-”

“Hey, I remember it, Vi, not to worry.”

“All right then, if you two’ll make up two dozen of those vial-” She tried to finish the sentence, couldn’t. Suddenly every smell in the Herb Haven seemed to fill her nostrils. She loved those smells. Every single one of them. Always had, always would. But just then, she put a hand over her mouth and ran like a bat out of hell for the back bathroom.

Twenty minutes later she decided that she wouldn’t die, even found the strength to fumble in the medicine cabinet for her spare toothbrush and toothpaste. She worked up a good foam as she stared in the mirror. Her cheeks were pinch-pink, her eyes bright, her hair wild as a witch’s but certainly glossy and healthy. Yet over the past week, she’d found an excuse to cry every day and hurl at least once.

Of course, crying was nothing new. She cried for the national anthem and for dog food commercials. But usually her stomach was cast iron. Last night they’d had fish with a spinach sauce and peachy sweet potatoes. Nothing a normal man would eat, but Cameron, par for Cameron, ate anything she put in front of him and asked for seconds. For herself, they were old favorites, comfort foods, no matter how weird they might be for someone else. Nothing, for damn sure, to inspire an upset tummy.

If she didn’t have those skinny tubes, she might fear she was pregnant.

“Hey, Violet.” Barbara rapped on the bathroom door. “We think you should go up to the house. Just forget all this. We’ll make up the vials and those sachet things and handle the customers.”

“You just want to talk about boys.”

“Yeah, so? Go on. Go lie down or something.”

She didn’t want to go home. Cameron was up there packing. He wasn’t leaving for another couple of days, but the lavender harvest was over and it was not as if he could get all his stuff ready in a second. Between her missed period and her upset tummy and the insanely radiant cheeks she kept seeing in the mirror, Violet kept finding the “pregnancy” word sneaking into her mind. But skinny tubes didn’t suddenly disappear, so she figured she was simply emotionally upset about his leaving.

“I’m not leaving you two kids alone in the shop,” she said firmly.

Barbara opened the door, took one look and popped a bubble. “Yeah, you are.” She aimed her thumb at the house in a clear-cut order. “Go on. It’s hot. Go drink some lemonade or something.”

Violet winced. “Don’t say lemonade. Don’t even think it out loud.”

That’s it. They pushed her out. And the heat was too searing and sticky to just stand there, so she had to traipse up to the house. The back door was open, the phone ringing, but hell’s bells, the phone was always ringing. She opened the refrigerator and then just leaned into the cold smoky air with a sigh.