The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [36]
His junior year in college, Mason broke up with Molly for good. Or vice versa; I never knew. She transferred schools and moved to another state. I loved him. And finally I had him, which frightened me. For a while, I thought I wanted to be free of him, or at least untethered. That didn’t last long.
The week our engagement announcement was in the paper, I saw Stacey Johnson for the last time. “Well, I guess I should congratulate you,” she said.
“I guess you should.”
“Maybe you have everything you want right now,” she said. “Maybe you do. But someday it’s going to catch up with you.”
Maybe she didn’t just mean Mason, though she couldn’t have known that, then.
Maybe she meant now.
Chapter 10
October 27
As often happens in the verdant hill country that stretches from the South into the mid-Atlantic and the lower Northeast, the on-again-off-again humidity and heat are finally swept out to sea by a blast of dry, cold air that rushes down from Canada, crisping the leaves and letting them show their colors under the sudden clarity of the autumn sky. It is the best time of year, people say. It is the great, glorious flash of color before the dimming of the light.
Iona is with her stepson, Jeff, on one of these days, the two of them sitting in her office arguing about what he considers her underhanded effort to introduce him to the accounting program that tracks their business.
“You got me here on false pretenses,” he protests. “I thought we were going to discuss that house on Bailey Street.”
“We will. This first.” She points him toward the computer screen, where she has just generated expense reports for nails and lumber. “You need to know what you’re spending. It’s critical. This isn’t hard.”
“Lori’s coming here after the obstetrician,” Jeff informs her. “She’ll be here any minute.”
“Listen,” Iona says, “I’m not kidding when I tell you I’m going to retire someday. If you don’t learn to do this, Real Estate Reborn will be bankrupt in a year. I’ll feel sorry about it, since by then you’ll probably have a couple of kids and a mortgage. But I’ll be damned if I’ll feel obligated to work until the end of time.”
“Nobody’s asking you to.” Jeff shifts in his seat, looks hopefully out the window toward the driveway.
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” says Iona. “You’re going to have to look the part sometimes. Wear a dress shirt. Real trousers. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Go into the bank looking like that”—she waves a hand at his stonewashed jeans, his unbuttoned flannel shirt flapping over a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, his ponytail hanging below the back of a New York Yankees baseball cap—“and they’ll talk to you about a loan only if you’re having a good year and are holding the paperwork to show it. If there’s any real reason to be borrowing, forget it.” She slashes her throat with her index finger.
“Who’s being murdered?” Somehow Lori has come into the house without their noticing, stopping them cold as the enormous lump of her belly precedes her into the room, encased in a form-fitting black shirt that perfectly outlines her eight-month pregnancy.
“Good God,” Iona says. “You’re beginning to look like a beach ball.”
Lori laughs, which Iona thinks is the proper response. Many women would take offense.
“What does the doctor say?” Jeff goes to her, puts a hand protectively on her stomach. He regards her with a new—Iona hates to call it tenderness—a new softness that’s grown between them now that Lori is pregnant.
“She says we’re on schedule. She says all is well.