Return To Little Hills. Janice Macdonald
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.”
“I don’t expect you to stay forever, Sophia. The girls know that, too.”
He stretched his legs out. His oldest daughter, Natalie, was pushing the twins on side-by-side swings. Natalie was eight; Abbie and Kate were four. Delphina, the seven year-old, sat off to one side, her expression wistful. A quiet and solitary child, she seemed always in the shadows of her sisters’ play. He worried about Delphina. He worried about them all. Natalie was saddled with too much responsibility for a child of her age; the twins still sucked their thumbs. Last night, Abbie had wet the bed—the third time in a week.
“Peter—” Sophia knocked on his temple “—are you in there somewhere?”
“Thinking,” he said.
“Not about a sudden sighting of the swallow-tailed thingamajig, I hope.”
“Painted swallowtail.” He grinned. “Actually it was rather unusual to spot one so far north this late in the year…but no, I was thinking about what you were saying. You’ve been an incredible help with the girls, but I do understand that you need to go home.”
“What will you do?”
“Look around for a live-in nanny, I suppose. I’d planned to do that after Deborah died…”
Sophia rubbed his arm.
“I’m fine.”
“Still miss her?”
“Of course.”
“Life goes on, though.”
“Please spare me the homilies, Sophia. I’ll work things out in my own way.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Deborah was always very pragmatic and unsentimental,” he said. “As soon as we knew how ill she was we discussed what would happen with the girls. She was convinced I’d be married within the year. Quite adamant really that I should be married,