Janice Macdonald - Return To Little Hills

“I’ll give it a try,” Edie said, biting back a sarcastic response. In the kitchen, she eyed the wineglasses Viv had set in the sink. Her own was still full. Perhaps she’d just hold her breath and gulp it down; anesthesia against the rest of the evening. And then Ray was behind her, his arms around her waist. She removed his hands and turned to look at him. “Lettuce,” she said, increasing the distance between them. “You wouldn’t know if Viv has any tomatoes, I guess.” She pulled open the refrigerator’s stainless-steel door. Cold air hit her face. “Lettuce, lettuce, lettuce,” she said. “Bottom drawer. Crisper. God, I’ve never seen a refrigerator this big. You could chill a…yak. Okay, lettuce.”

“So how long has it been since I saw you last?” Ray asked. “Five years?”

“Six.” She pulled out the lettuce and closed the door. Ray leaned against the sink, arms folded across his chest. She’d taken his measure, too; he had lines around his eyes now, the thick blond hair had faded and thinned, and the smile that had made her knees weak in high school struck her as goofy now. Her face colored, anyway. “When I came back for the high-school reunion, you and Viv were on vacation. Before that it was Mom’s heart attack. That was the last time.”

He nodded. “Sorry I couldn’t be at the airport to meet you. School board meeting. New principal’s big on everyone attending. What do you think of him? Kind of out of place with Luther kids, isn’t he?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She took the lettuce to the sink and began separating leaves. “He seemed fine to me. What do you see as the problem?”

“Aagh.” Ray shrugged. “Don’t even get me started. He won’t last long, that’s all I know. I could have had the job if I’d wanted it. School board practically begged me, but I wasn’t interested—too much work. I’ve got a family. The boys. More important things in life than chaining yourself to a desk.” He laughed. “’Course, I’m probably telling that to the wrong person, right, Eed?”

Edie felt the knot in her shoulders ratchet up another notch. Salad. Could she possibly do a Caesar? She’d once spent half a day putting together a Caesar salad for Ben. Finding the necessary ingredients in a shattered Belgrade marketplace had been a challenge, but he’d confessed to a nostalgic yearning for the kind of Caesar salad he’d enjoyed at a certain Los Angeles restaurant. He’d been unimpressed, less by the salad than by what the effort said about her priorities. “Don’t go getting domestic on me, Edie,” he’d warned. “It’s not what I need or want.”

She took a couple of eggs from the fridge and set them in a pan of water to simmer. Back at the fridge, she dug around for anything resembling Parmesan. She could feel Ray’s eyes on her back.

“So what time will the boys be here?” She thought again about the nephews she’d watched grow, mostly through pictures sent by Vivian, from cute, wide-eyed babies to strapping, athletic teenagers and felt a stab of remorse. “I will get to see them, right?”

“Oh sure,” Ray said vaguely. “Hey, Eed, remember that day after school when we were goofing around in your mom’s kitchen and I squeezed Thousand Island dressing into your mouth?”

Edie watched his face for a moment. “Not a day goes by that I don’t relive that experience, Ray. It haunts my dreams.”

Ray’s forehead creased. “You being sarcastic?”

“Bingo.”

“You ever try not being sarcastic for more than five minutes?”

“Once. I was bored.”

Ray shook his head. Clearly, there was no hope for her. He took a beer from the fridge, popped the top, and stood with his back against the granite countertop watching her move around the kitchen.

“You were pretty hot back then,” he said.

“Thank you, Ray. So were you. Back then.”

“You ever think about the way things might have turned out if we’d stayed together?”

“No, Ray.” She looked directly at him. “I don’t. I’m happy with my life. And it looks like you’re doing well too. This house, by the way,” she said with a sweeping gesture at the kitchen, “is amazing.”

“You like it? Viv give you the grand tour?”

“She did.” Behind the jars of mayonnaise and bottles of ketchup and mustard, Edie found a green tub of grated Romano cheese. “It’s huge. You guys must get lost going from one room to another.” She set the cheese down on the center island. Out in the living room, she could see the top of Maude’s white head. Her mother had all but disappeared amidst the massive pillowy cushions of the couch. The coffee table on which Maude’s feet rested was several feet of mirrored glass atop a low chrome cylinder. “Very elegant,” Edie said. “Impressive.”

Ray gave her a look that seemed to calculate her sincerity. “But it isn’t what you’d buy, right?”

“What does that matter? It’s your house.”

Ray smiled. “But you’d buy something down in the Historic District, wouldn’t you?” he persisted. “If you ever settled down and came back home, I mean. Every time Viv and I go down Roosevelt, we see this old Victorian place that’s been for sale forever and she always says, ‘That’s what Edie would go for.’”

Edie shrugged, thinking of the astronomically priced bungalow off Sunset Boulevard she’d once been tempted to buy, mostly because it reminded her of some of the older homes in Little Hills. For what it cost, she could have bought two of them and had change to spare.

“It’s a moot point, Ray, because I’m not about to settle down and come back home. Married to my work,” she said. “Kind of like your new principal.”

“Goddamn butterfly collector.” His expression darkened. “Thanks for mentioning him again, Edie. Now you’ve ruined my mood altogether. Head stuck up in the clouds. Hasn’t figured out that we’re dealing with a bunch of loser kids. They’re not going to be Rhodes scholars, for God’s sake. Get ’em in, get ’em out, that’s the best you can do with them.”

“So what?” She asked and then, too late, remembered Vivian’s admonition. She pushed on, anyway. “He thinks some of them might have potential or something?”

Ray narrowed his eyes at her. “You haven’t changed a whole lot, have you?”

“I guess not,” she said. “Neither have you.”

“See, that’s what I mean. With you, everything has to turn into some goddamn battle. You really don’t give a damn whether I’m right or wrong about this guy. You just want an argument. Well, I’ll tell you. Give Peter Darling six months around some of those kids at Luther and I bet you a six-pack he won’t be collecting butterflies for long.”

“God, Edie,” Vivian said from the doorway. “I told you not to get Ray fired up. Now you’ve ruined the whole evening.”

“THE LAST THING I want to do is interfere in your life,” Peter’s sister, Sophia, said as they sat on a park bench watching the children play. “But it’s nearly two years now and, quite honestly, as much as I adore the girls, I do have a life back in England. This popping back and forth for extended visits is getting a bit much.”

“Has George complained?” George was Sophia’s longtime companion, but Peter gathered that the relationship was problematic. So much so that when Sophia first volunteered to come and look after the girls, she’d intimated that it would be a relief to put some distance between herself and George. In the last few weeks though, George had been calling quite frequently.

“He’s grumbling a bit, but it’s not that, really. I don’t quite trust anyone to handle the nursery as well as I can. It’s silly of me—I’m sure Trudy does a perfectly competent job—but I envision the assistants selling half-dead flowers and not offering the kind of variety people have come to expect.”