This Place of Wonder (6)

Before she can come up and catch me, I fling open my suitcase and take all the dirty clothes from the hamper, his T-shirts and jeans and underwear, and stuff them into one side. Out of the drawers I take my far more meager things and layer them on top of his. Only then do I go into the bathroom, with its alcoves and tiles, and turn on the shower for the last time. I strip off his boxers and my tank and look at my body in the mirror, thinking of him looking at it, his big hands on my breasts, my ass.

It wasn’t supposed to be Augustus. How did I get so caught up in him?

Meadow knocks on the bathroom door. “You all right in there, Norah?”

Some wild meanness rises in me and I yank open the door, fully naked. “I’m fine.”

For a long moment she stares at me and I stare back, still wishing I could be her friend, be the one who brought her real story to the world, and that will never, ever happen. She is so disdainful of me now.

Maybe with good reason. I don’t know.

We are almost exactly the same height—Augustus was tall and he liked long-legged women—and we stare at each other in a roaring, pulsing silence. In the bright light, the ravages of time show on her skin—in the little lines around her mouth and the softness of her neck. I square my shoulders and she can’t help but look at my breasts, which are still high and proud, and something breaks hard on her face. Tears are in her eyes when she looks up again.

She suddenly leans in and grabs my face in both of her hands and kisses me, hard, with full-on tongue. Her lips are soft and full and she knows how to kiss, for sure. I lift my hands to push her away, but she lets me go.

“Now we both know what he tasted.” She whirls away. “Leave the boxers,” she says, heading for the bed.

I slam the door and lean against it. My limbs are trembling. I cover my mouth with my hand. As I turn on the shower, dive into the hot spray, I’m weeping. I don’t know where to go, but I can’t stay here.

Or can I? A plan suddenly swims up through my pain and presents itself. It’s not perfect, but it will do for now.





Chapter Five


Meadow


Once Norah has gone, I have the house to myself for the first time in eight years. With Elvis, my big black shepherd, padding behind me, I wander through the rooms, reconnecting. Twenty years of happiness were mine here. In the salon, with its leather sofas and fireplace and a wall full of french doors facing the patios and the pool. In the dining room, where we hosted so many dinner parties at the long Spanish mission table, with candles burning on the mantel and the windowsills, Augustus at the head holding court with his big voice, me directing servers borrowed from the restaurant to bring in whatever menu we’d conjured together from my fields.

In the bedroom, where I slept next to him for more than six thousand nights.

My favorite room is the kitchen. Augustus surprised me with the plans for a remodel the day I moved in. They included oceans of counter space for chopping and sorting the produce I was famous for, a sink so deep you could wash a bushel of vegetables, a six-burner gas stove in the arched alcove. We saved all the old touches, the Talavera tile around the stove and along one wall, the handmade wooden cupboards. I’d come from so much nothing that it was extravagant luxury—the kitchen, the house, the man himself.

By the time I met Augustus, I carried a protective shell like a turtle. My childhood was brutal, and I finally freed myself when I was sixteen, running away from home into the even more cutthroat world of the streets. It’s not the best part of my story, and I resist telling anyone much about it. It doesn’t belong to them, and it would shape the story of who I am more than all the things I’ve done since to create a better world for myself.

Who I am was born when I was sixteen and found work as a prep cook at a restaurant on the coast. It was mainly a tourist place, campy and busy, but it employed a big staff, and I learned how to prepare almost anything for cooking—cutting wheels of carrots and chopping massive amounts of onions, smashing garlic with the side of my knife to free the skin, breaking down a chicken in under five minutes. All manner of things. It was so satisfying to contribute, to make something, and I had a talent for it, knowing what went with which thing, how to build a base, how to sense a missing note. Trudy, a big woman with hands scarred from years of knives and fires, took me under her loving wing, not only teaching me how to cook but mothering away some of the worst of my scars.

Everyone asked why I didn’t work front of the house, the implication being that a woman of my physical presence might make a lot of money serving drinks or food. But I loved the kitchen, the food, the creative aspects of preparation and presentation.

I left the Buccaneer when I was nineteen at Trudy’s urging—she saw a call for a position at an organic farm in Ojai, thirty miles away. The position was for a liaison between farm and restaurants, and Trudy thought I would be perfect.

Turned out to be the greatest move of my life. I was on the road a lot in between Santa Barbara and Ojai, but that was fine, good thinking time. At the farm I found childcare for my daughter Rory, who hated when I left her with babysitters. The farm was different. There she could run with the kittens and dogs and chase butterflies and play in the fields.

The farm was where I first met Augustus.

He was the kind of person you felt come into a room, his presence moving ahead of him, an aura the size of a live oak. I was plucking yellow leaves from bunches of radishes when I felt that aura brushing up against my entire right side, as palpable as an actual touch. My skin rustled and I glanced up, thinking it was wind.