Linda Miller - Ragged Rainbows

Shay shook her head. “No chance. My mother is in bad shape and I have to go straight to the convalescent home as soon as I leave here.”

“After that—”

“My son is leaving on a camping trip with his uncle, Richard, and he’ll be gone a month. I want to spend the evening with him.”

“Shay—”

Now Shay held up her hands. “No more, Richard. You and Marvin insisted that I take this assignment and I agreed. But it will be done on my terms or not at all.”

A look of annoyance flickered behind Richard’s glasses. “Temperament rears its ugly head. I was mistaken about you, Shay. You’re more like your mother than I thought.”

The telephone began to jangle, and Ivy wasn’t out front to screen the calls. Shay dismissed Richard with a hurried wave of one hand and snapped “Hello?”

A customer began listing, in irate and very voluble terms, all the things that were wrong with the used car he’d bought the week before. While Shay tried to address the complaint, the other lines on her telephone lit up, all blinking at once.

It was nearly seven o’clock when Shay finally got home, and she had such a headache that she gave Hank an emergency TV dinner for supper, swallowed two aspirin and collapsed into bed.

Bright and early on Saturday morning, Garrett and his family arrived in a motor home more luxuriously appointed than many houses. While Maggie stayed behind with her own children and Hank, Shay and Garrett drove to Seaview to visit Rosamond.

Because the doll had been recovered, Rosamond was no longer curled up in her bed weeping piteously for her “baby.” Still, Garrett’s shock at seeing a woman he undoubtedly remembered as glamorous and flippant staring vacantly off into space showed in his darkly handsome face and the widening of his steel-gray eyes.

“My God,” he whispered.

Rosamond lifted her chin—she was sitting, as always, in the chair beside the window, the rag doll in her lap—at the sound of his voice. Her once-magical violet eyes widened and she surprised both her visitors by muttering, “Riley?”

Shay sank back against the wall beside the door. “No, Mother. This is—”

Garrett silenced her with a gesture of one hand, approached Rosamond and crouched before her chair. Shay realized then how much he actually resembled his father, the Riley Thompson Rosamond would remember and recognize. He stretched to kiss a faded alabaster forehead and smiled. “Hello, Roz,” he said.

The bewildered joy in Rosamond’s face made Shay ache inside. “Riley,” she said again.

Garrett nodded and caught both his former stepmother’s hands in his own strong, sun-browned ones. “How are you?” he asked softly.

Tears were stinging Shay’s eyes, half blinding her. Through them, she saw Rosamond hold out the doll for Garrett to see and touch. “Baby,” she said proudly.

As Garrett acknowledged the doll with a nod and a smile, Shay whirled away, unable to bear the scene any longer. She fled the room for the small bathroom adjoining it and stood there, trembling and pale, battling the false hopes that Rosamond’s rare moments of lucidity always stirred in her.

When she was composed enough to come out, Rosamond had retreated back into herself; she was rocking in her chair, her lips curved into a secretive smile, the doll in her arms. Garrett wrapped a supportive arm around Shay’s waist and led her out of the room into the hallway, where he gave her a brotherly kiss on the forehead.

“Poor baby,” he said, and then he held Shay close and rocked her back and forth in his arms. She didn’t notice the man standing at the reception desk, watching with a frown on his face.

When Hank disappeared into Garrett and Maggie’s sleek motor home, a lump the size of a walnut took shape in Shay’s throat. He was only six; too young to be away from home for a whole month!

Garrett grinned and kissed Shay’s forehead. “Relax,” he urged. “Maggie and I will take good care of the boy. I promise.”

Shay nodded, determined not to be a clinging, neurotic mother. Six or sixty, she reminded herself, Hank was a person in his own right and he needed experiences like this one to grow.

Briefly, Garrett caressed Shay’s cheek. “Go in there and get yourself ready for that party, Amazon,” he said. “Paint your toenails and slather your face with gunk. Soak in a bubble bath.”

Shay couldn’t help grinning. “You’re just full of suggestions, aren’t you?”

Garrett was serious. “Devote some time to yourself, Shay. Forget about Roz for a while and let Maggie and me worry about Hank.”

It was good advice and Shay meant to heed it. After the motor home had pulled away, a happy chorus of farewell echoing behind, she went back into the house, turned on the stereo, pinned up her hair and got out the skirt she’d made for the party. After hemming it, she hurried through the routine housework and then spent the rest of the morning pampering herself.

She showered and shampooed, she pedicured and manicured, she gave herself a facial. After a light luncheon consumed in blissful silence, she crawled into bed and took a long nap.

Upon rising, Shay made a chicken salad sandwich and took her time eating it. Following that, she put on her makeup, her new skirt and the lovely shimmering top. She brushed her hair and worked it into a loose style and put on long silver earrings. Looking into her bedroom mirror, she was stunned. Was this lush and glittering creature really Shay Kendall, mother of Hank, purveyor of “previously owned” autos, wearer of jeans and clear fingernail polish?

It was. Shay whirled once, delighted. It was!

Promptly at seven, Mitch arrived. He wore a pearl-gray, three-piece suit, expertly fitted, and the effect was at once rugged and Madison Avenue elegant. He was clean shaven and the scent of his cologne was crisply masculine. His brown eyes warmed as they swept over Shay, and the familiar grooves dented his cheeks when he smiled.

“Wow,” he said.

Shay was glad that it was time to leave for the Reeses’ beach house; she had rarely dated in the six years since her divorce and she was out of practice when it came to amenities like playing soft music and serving chilled wine and making small talk. “Wow, yourself,” she said, because that was what she would have said to Hank and it came out automatically. She could have bitten her tongue.

Mitch laughed and handed her a small florist’s box. There was a pink orchid inside, delicate and fragile and so exotically beautiful that Shay’s eyes widened at the sight of it. It was attached to a slender band of silver elastic and she slid it onto her wrist.

“Thank you,” she said.

Mitch put a gentlemanly hand to the small of her back and steered her toward the door. “Thank you,” he countered huskily, and though Shay wondered what he was thanking her for, she didn’t dare ask.

As his fancy car slipped away from the curb, Mitch pressed a button to silence the blaring music.

The drive south along the coastal highway was a pleasant one. The sunset played gloriously over the rippling curl of the evening tide and the conversation was comfortable. Mitch talked about his seven-year-old daughter, Kelly, who was into everything pink and ballet lessons, and Shay talked about Hank.

She wanted to ask about Mitch’s ex-wife, but then he might ask about Eliott and she wasn’t prepared to discuss that part of her life. It was possible, of course, Shay knew, that Ivy had told him already.

“Have you started furnishing the house yet?” Shay asked when they’d exhausted the subject of children.

Mitch shook his head and the warm humor in his eyes cooled a little, it seemed to Shay, as he glanced at her and then turned his attention back to the highway. “Not yet.”