Song of Silence. Cynthia Ruchti
already called it in,” Kiersten said, indicating her cell phone.
A small, sympathetic crowd gathered. A library assistant. A friend from church. Patrons who got more than they expected—a good book and a show. Finally, the law enforcement officer—also a former student but from a decade earlier—and Lucy’s insurance agent, whose office was across the street from the library. Handy, in incidents like this.
Statements taken, truth told, bumpers untangled, the women were freed to leave the scene. Plastic bumpers on both vehicles meant they were left with unsightly holes, but nothing dragging behind them. Drivable, but a little broken.
Lucy’s sigh expanded to fill the suffocating interior of her Malibu. “Me, too,” she said, patting the dashboard. “Drivable, but broken.”
Thank goodness for the accident. Thank God for it. She’d managed to divert every conversation that started with “So sorry about your job” to instead focus on the traffic jam in the library parking lot and the two wounded vehicles at the center of attention. That, and the crumpled grandmother who couldn’t stop crying. They made an interesting threesome—the ex-schoolteacher who’d gotten additional practice weathering embarrassment, the young woman whose only sin was giving in to her grandmother’s request, and the older woman whose keys had already been taken away but now faced the humiliation of other people’s keys being taken away from her, too.
Lucy hadn’t called Charlie. What could he do with his own car out of commission? She drove to the body shop for an outrageous estimate, then opted to drown her estimate sorrows in taco salad at Bernie’s. She’d call Charlie after that. Or go home. Or . . .
“Raspberry lemonade?” the waitress asked.
“Oh, sure.” The humor helped somehow. “Let’s make some lemonade out of all of this.”
“Pardon me?”
“Lemonade. Yes. Thank you.” And some to go.
Lucy’s two forkfuls of taco salad fought each other in her stomach when Evelyn Schindler walked into the restaurant on a path that would take her right past Lucy’s booth. Lucy dug into the salad as if looking for buried treasure under the lettuce.
“Lucy!”
Foiled again. “Mrs. Schindler.”
Evelyn Schindler sent her lunch companion to a table nearby with instructions to order her a lemonade. What right did she have to drink lemonade? Lucy swallowed the hooked barbs of wounded pride.
“I’d hoped to have a chance to talk to you about the budget cuts,” the woman said, leaning her Stella McCartney fragrance-of-the-month into Lucy’s personal space. “Nothing personal in all that. Purely a financial decision. We had no choice.”
Lucy’s three-point, fourteen-page rebuttal fell in line like iron shavings to a magnet. How could ripping music and art from the lives of young children ever be a wise decision, in light of the impact of those two disciplines on brain function, self-worth, and a sense of community through the arts, for one thing? What was “pure” about it? And how could it not be personal, especially for Lucy, who had carried on the tradition established by her father? Not personal?
Three bullet points. Extra emphasis on the third.
All three stayed buried under seasoned meat and shredded cheese. Lucy sipped her raspberry lemonade for courage. “I understand.” Wait? What? That’s not what she’d planned to say.
“Well,” Mrs. Schindler said, “best wishes in your future endeavors.” She paused a long moment before leaving Lucy to her salad and super-sized lemonade.
Future endeavors. I’m fifty-six. Almost. You chopped at least nine years off my future endeavors. Not that Lucy seriously entertained the idea of retirement at sixty-five. Ninety sounded more reasonable, providing she could stay a little more alert than Kiersten’s grandmother.
Her cell phone vibrated against the tabletop. She picked it up and checked caller ID. Charlie.
“Where are you, Lucy? Are you okay? Martin heard from Steve’s mother that you were in a horrible accident. Why didn’t you call?”
“Weren’t you fishing?”
His pause made her think they’d lost the connection. “I still am. Reception’s not great out here. Talk to me.”
“Charlie, I’m fine. A small fender bender. In a parking lot. I already got an estimate from the body shop.”
“You did?”
“It’s crazy how little damage it takes to push a repair bill past the deductible.”
“You sound okay.”
Lucy had kept her voice low but now turned to face the corner of the wooden booth. “I am okay. I can’t talk now, Charlie.”
“Me either. Martin’s got a bite, and it looks like he’s going to need the net.”
For a brief moment, she wondered if the two men were fishing with artificial lures or worms. “See you at home later.”
Broken, but drivable.
Chapter 6
6
He’d lied to her. He hadn’t been fishing. He’d been painting the kitchen. From the looks of it, he’d started right after she left the house. If she hadn’t stayed so long at Riverside Park, staring into the water and trying unsuccessfully to oust every verse of “The Water Is Wide” and “Down to the River to Pray” from her mind, she might have walked in on him mid-project.
Instead, she found him peeling the last of the painter’s tape from the crown molding. He rolled it into a sticky ball and tossed it toward the plastic garbage can he’d positioned near the ladder. “Nothing but net,” he said.
“Charlie, what are you doing?” She adopted her reserve-judgment-until-I’ve-heard-the-whole-story voice she’d often used on her students. And the Tuttle kids.
“Welcome to your freshly painted kitchen, LucyMyLight,” he said, descending the ladder. “How do you like it? Baby, don’t cry.” He held her against his paint-speckled once-red shirt. “It wasn’t that big of a deal. I can go fishing some other time.”
She pulled back to catch her breath.
“Oh, look at that,” he said, whipping a paint rag from his back pocket and daubing at the spot of Berrington Blue on her jean jacket. “The price of a hug, I guess. You’ll want to wash that out right away, before it dries.”
As if she hadn’t done every single load of laundry in their house for the last thirty-two years. As if she didn’t realize dried paint was a whole different animal than wet paint. As if she needed the instruction.
As if she needed him to take away the one project that would have made the summer have a small nugget of meaning to it.
“I had to hurry to finish before you got home. So we might have to do a few touch ups.”
“It looks . . . nice, Charlie. I love the color.” She wetted a corner of a clean rag and scrubbed at the paint smear.
“Me, too. You have great taste.” He smiled. “Of course, we knew that already. You chose me.”
He busied himself putting away the step stool, ladder, and his painting tools while Lucy shrugged out of her jacket to get a better look at the spot and contemplated how she’d ever pay for the counseling she probably needed. What kind of woman resents a man like Charlie? What’s wrong with a woman like that?
Resent? Had she really used that word? The indictments against her character mounted like the constellations of Berrington Blue spatters on her white cabinets.
***
She worked late into the night putting the kitchen back to rights. If only blemishes on her soul flicked off as easily as the dry dots of blue paint responded