Today, sparks of something else peppered what would otherwise have been a normal morning. A heaviness in her belly, a shortness of breath. It felt like excitement, but she couldn’t pinpoint its origin.
Since it was Saturday, she packed up a basket with eggs, veggies from her garden, and quiches she’d baked earlier in the week. After a quick stop at the gas station, George made her way to her parents-in-law’s home—a brick rancher in one of Blackwood’s older, leafier neighborhoods.
The door opened before she’d made it to the stoop.
“Georgette, darling!” Bonnie Hadley was not her mother, strictly speaking, but the closest she still had to one. As usual, the woman hugged her hard, and George soaked it up.
“How are you, Bonnie?”
“Good, good!”
“And Jim?”
“Oh, you know, he’s the same.”
“But not worse?”
“No, darling, not worse. He’s in the back, weeding.”
“Uh-oh.”
“We’re doing okay today. I managed to stop him from pulling out most of my hostas.”
“Phew. Lucky.” George walked straight to the kitchen—eyes avoiding the school portraits and family pictures on the walls. What was essentially a shrine to their son—her wedding photo at the center of it. “I made a bunch of quiches to freeze this week and thought you might like some,” she said, forcing her voice to be breezy and light.
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that.”
“They’re left over from a dinner party,” she lied. George hadn’t seen the inside of a dinner party in a decade. “And the trout’s from the fish man at the market. Here, I’ll put this stuff away.”
“Nonsense,” said Bonnie. “Leave that. I can do that anytime. Come out back and say hello to Jim. He’ll be so glad to see you.” That, George knew, probably wasn’t true. The last few Saturdays, he hadn’t known who she was. George gulped back a wave of sadness and pushed her way back out into the blinding sunlight, wishing herself somewhere else.
“Jim,” said Bonnie, her voice loud and artificially bright. “It’s Georgette, here to visit!”
“Mmm?” came her father-in-law’s voice from somewhere beyond the edge of the blue-painted deck. The women exchanged a look and descended the stairs to find the tall man digging a hole in the dirt, up against the house. His white button-down shirt was filthy, as was his face, and George had to swallow hard to keep the melancholy at bay. Tears, she knew from experience, served no purpose but to sow more tears. If she started now, she’d never stop. Best to just get things done here and head back home. Or to work. Work would be perfect.
“Hello, Jim!”
He paused, glanced at his wife for confirmation, and then rose, his smile unsure.
“Oh, oh. Hello, hello,” he said. “Hello, hello.”
After an awkward moment where no one spoke, George said, “I’ll just…get the gas from my car and mow the lawn now, Jim. If that’s okay with you.”
He gave a vague sort of nod, so she gassed up the mower, got it going on the third try, and started cutting the grass.
A couple rows in, the hum of the motor dulled her conscious thoughts, and George let her mind wander. Flashes of memory—bronze skin, black lines, burn marks, vestiges of pain scattered across a body so beautiful she could cry. An unexpected shiver of excitement, another flash of sharply pebbled nipples, her own hardening sympathetically, warmth in her abdomen a pleasant weight and then… Oh crap. She was wet. Actually wet, thinking about the stranger—her patient, for God’s sake.
George stilled, lifted her shirt, and mopped her brow, shutting her eyes hard and pulling in a ragged breath. Stop it. He needs help, not…whatever the hell this is.
For the next hour, she battled her stubborn subconscious, shutting it down every time it fed her another drop of him, another memory, a smell, a shiver.
An hour later, sweaty and grass-covered in the frigid living room, George accepted the usual lemonade and sat beside her mother-in-law on the sofa, feeling caught and guilty in the worst possible way.
“You sure you don’t want me to fire up the grill?” George said. “It’s the Fourth of July, after all. We should celebra—”
“No, no. It’s too much for Jim. Besides, didn’t you say you’d been invited to a party this afternoon?”
Oh, right. A party. A fresh wave of dread rolled up, and George wondered, not for the first time, how upset Uma would be if she canceled. “You’re right,” she said, voice small.
