Beth Harbison - Head Over Heels

She picked up her gardening tools and dropped them into a bucket by the door before stepping into the cool, air-conditioned house.

“Will you be going out tonight?” her mother asked when she walked into the kitchen to get a glass of iced tea.

“I don’t think so, why?”

Was it her imagination, or did her mother blush? “I might have some company, and I wondered if you would be around.”

“Company? Who?”

Her mother took a cloth and busied herself drying dishes that were already sitting, dry, in the rack by the sink. “Oh, it’s not important. Just a member of my bridge club.”

Grace was interested. “A male member of the bridge club, by any chance?”

Dot set the cloth down and looked at her daughter. “Now why on earth would you ask that?”

Grace laughed. “Because, Mom, you’re acting very cryptic about this whole thing.”

“I certainly am not!”

“Okay, okay. Look, do you want Jimmy and me to get out of here tonight so you can have your friend over? We could go to a movie or something.”

“Grace Ann Perigon, you do not need to leave the house so I can have a friend over! I merely asked because I wanted to plan on how many pretzels to buy if I had company. But, now that I think of it, I’ll probably go out to the movies myself.”

Her mother was definitely hiding something, Grace thought. It was either a boyfriend, plans for a surprise party, or she had joined a cult and it was her turn to host the meeting. Assuming it wasn’t the latter, Grace’s birthday wasn’t for two months, so it had to be a boyfriend. But why hide that?

Grace suspected she knew why. “You know, Mom, if you ever did want to date someone…” What could she say without sounding condescending? It wasn’t her place to approve or disapprove, but she had a feeling her mother might worry that she would feel weird about it. “Well, I just think it would be a good idea.”

“What would be a good idea?”

“You dating. If you met someone. Although,” she added cynically, “who you could meet around this place, I don’t know.”

“There are lots of nice men around here, honey. You’ll meet someone.”

“Who said anything about me? ” Three days earlier Roger Logan, who had a wife and four kids, had approached her in the produce section at the supermarket and asked if she wanted to meet him for a drink later. That about summed up the options for Grace here. She wasn’t even thinking about dating for herself.

Her mother smiled and took two glasses out of the cabinet. “This is about you, isn’t it?” She went to the refrigerator and took out the pitcher of iced tea.

“What do you mean?”

Dot poured and handed a glass to Grace. “All this negativity about Blue Moon Bay? Sometimes I think you’re looking for excuses not to like it here.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because it reminds you of the years you spent with Michael?”

And the years she spent before that, years in which she could have been taking a different direction with her life. “You think you’re pretty smart, huh, Mom?”

Dot smiled. “It runs in the family.”

Grace raised her glass to her mother, drank, then went to her room to shower before going to meet Luke. Not that she wanted to impress him; it was just that her pride prevented her from showing up filthy and giving him one more thing to dislike about her.

She stripped her clothes off in the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The strong afternoon sun had toasted her skin, leaving a white impression of her halter top behind. The light in this bathroom had always been flattering, and made her tan look deeper than it was. For a moment, she felt as though she’d time-traveled back to a summer two decades before, when she used to cover her Roxy Music album in tin foil and prop it on her chest as she lay in the sun, wearing no more protection than baby oil. She shuddered at the thought now and wondered how many of the faint lines around her eyes she could attribute to that, and how many to the stress of Michael’s abrupt exit.

She took a quick, cool shower, wrapped herself in a towel and went back to her room. It was only five o’clock. There was time for her to rest for a few minutes before going out, so she lay down on the bed and stared at the faded rose wallpaper.

She remembered when her father had first put it up for her. She’d been eight and had just danced in her first ballet recital. Daddy had told her she was a real little lady now, and he let her pick out new “grownup” wallpaper to replace the zoo pattern they’d put up when she was a baby.

This wallpaper had seen her through a lot. The sketched red flowers had hung there, bright but just a little melancholy, through giggly sleepovers; all-night teenage telephone conversations; delirious first dates and tearful breakups; her dog Buff’s death; getting ready for her high-school prom—and her wedding day.

And if the wallpaper had absorbed anything of her thoughts over the years, it had absorbed more than a little Luke Stewart, especially during one summer when, briefly, their relationship had changed.

Grace and Luke’s association had always been…heated. Throughout their high-school years, it had seemed to be the typical animosity that tended to exist between a guy’s best friend and his girlfriend. They argued over almost everything, from which weekend nights were for Grace to whose fault it was when Michael came over at 3:00 a.m. drunk after a night “with the boys.” Come to think of it, they argued a lot about who was at fault for Michael’s shortcomings.

But right after Grace’s senior year of high school, things had changed. The long, hot summer had stretched by with Michael away looking at colleges. Grace had stayed behind, dutifully spending time with Jenna and being available for Michael’s occasional long-distance calls.

Then one evening Jenna, who pronounced herself sick and tired of Grace’s inactivity, talked her into going to the boardwalk over in Ocean City. Jenna met a guy in a T-shirt shop and disappeared with him, cropping up every half hour or so to promise Grace she’d just be “a few more minutes.”

Grace had waited for an hour and a half, sitting there in her prissy sundress, wondering how Jenna got the nerve to just go off with some guy she didn’t even know and do God-knows-what. Just as Grace was getting ready to give up and call a cab to take her home, Luke had shown up, like some dark knight in a white El Camino. He’d offered her a ride and, telling herself it beat paying for a 40-mile cab ride, she’d accepted.

But that wasn’t entirely true. The prospect of riding all the way home with Luke wasn’t exactly unappealing. In fact, it was sort of…exciting. Thrilling. Maybe even dangerous. Under the boardwalk lights, his dark hair gleaming and his skin tanned to brown, making his pale eyes seem even lighter, Luke certainly looked dangerous. That, contrasted with the unexpected chivalry of his offering to drive her home, had made him irresistible to her that night.

She watched him in the dim dash light as he drove home. His hands strong and capable on the wheel, forearms lean with sinewy muscle, his profile straight and masculine…by the time they made it back to Blue Moon Bay, Grace had kissed him a thousand times in her mind.

Although she could never know the evolution of his thoughts that night, he must have begun to see her in a new light too, because he didn’t go directly to her house when they got to town. And she didn’t ask him to. Instead, they circled the quiet streets by the shore, eventually stopping at the small Jolly George “Fun Park” at the end of the boardwalk, where there were a few ancient rides—a wooden roller coaster and a Ferris wheel, that were open in the summer evenings.