Walking on Broken Glass - Christa Allan [48]
If Molly was not my best friend, she’d be one of those women I’d wish would drag toilet tissue on her stilettos when she left a bathroom. When she walked into a room, even women noticed her. I used to joke that I was her friend so she’d never be accused of profiling or political incorrectness. I knew, though, what attracted people to Molly was not what they’d seen on her, but what they’d seen in her.
“You look great,” she said after we disengaged. “Carl, don’t you think so?” It sounded less like a question and more like a direct order.
I looked at Carl. He hesitated.
My cue. “Molly, you’d compliment me if I walked in here straight from a mud bath without rinsing off.”
I led them to one of the sofas. “Not exactly Southern Living.” I could see Carl and Molly scanning the room, but trying to look as if they weren’t. “The idea was not to make the place too comfy or else we wouldn’t want to leave,” I said, relieving them of having to lie about the décor.
“Well,” said Molly, reaching for my hand and pulling me next to her as she sat on the sofa. “You’re not exactly here for the furniture. When you leave, we’ll write letters to those Extreme Makeover people. That’d be a hoot.” She grinned.
She was one of the only people I knew who could use the word hoot and not sound like she just arrived here in a time machine.
Before he sat, Carl brushed off the chair seat. He didn’t exactly settle into the chair. He seemed to hover, holding onto the chair arms as if a flight attendant would come along and announce takeoff at any moment. His movements were wooden, but maybe it was the heavy starch in his white and navy plaid button-down collared shirt and solid navy chinos. So, he does know how to pick up clothes from the cleaners.
Carl sat across from me, looking, as my father would have said, “like a lost ball in high weeds.” He stared at his barely scuffed brown deck shoes, then glanced at Annie's stack of outdated People magazines. He leaned back and entertained himself by removing ant-sized lint from his pants. Totally out of his element. A vulnerability had tiptoed out of his soul when he wasn’t looking. It leaped the void between us, tripping the emotional siren I’d installed years ago. No, go back. I can’t trust you yet, but I want to. I really want to.
Before the silence drowned us all, Molly threw out a lifeline. “Carl, tell Leah about your conversation with her dad.” Had the words not been dressed in her party clothes voice, I would have panicked.
He cleared his throat, the noise like a closed mouth cough, and looked, not so much at me, but in the vicinity of my head. “Your dad called. He wanted to visit, so he's flying in on Wednesday. I’m not sure how long he’ll stay in town.”
I straightened and pulled threads from the sofa's cording with my fingernails. My inner child (Cathryn joked with me yesterday that I held mine hostage) bounced on both feet and clapped her hands deliriously, using my stomach as a trampoline. It's going to be okay. It's all going to be okay.
Carl grinned. Had I spoken that out loud? I shivered because what I saw in Carl's eyes was an approaching reprimand for that excited little girl who’d just made her appearance.
“Oh, I almost forgot. He's coming for family group,” he said. He sat back and looked at me.
The clapping stopped. So, this was the new game. Words were the weapons. Information used as stealth destruction.
I scratched the top of my hand. Carl wanted this news to hurt me. Why? Because I had hurt him. This was still about him.
Journal 8
I was the blind date Carl met for dinner. Generally, Carl refused offers of blind dates. A year later he told me that he thought if a woman needed a blind date, then maybe her date needed to be blind. Besides, it wasn’t as if he needed dates. But Nick and his wife, Brea, wouldn’t stop nudging him about meeting one of Brea's teacher