“Did you say that there was a court stenographer there?”
“Yes. In a way, everything was being done legally.”
“I take it the money didn’t go to the campaign fund?”
“No. And Jessie knew that it wouldn’t. Since everything was so well documented, it was an easy matter to compare dates of when the hundred and fifty was given to the judge and see that he never deposited it.”
“And Jessie got this information?” Leslie asked, eyes wide.
“Yes, and Jessie used it to change everything. On the day that I was to appear in court, Jessie wrote a note—and he still won’t tell me what he wrote—and had it delivered to the judge in his chambers. Ten minutes later, the judge asked to see Jessie. An hour later, Jessie walked out and we went into the courtroom.”
“Then what happened?”
Leaning back on her arms, Ellie smiled, closing her eyes for a moment in delicious memory. “You should have seen Martin’s face! When we walked into the courtroom, he was smug, smirking at me, knowing that he was going to be given one hundred percent control of all my books—or else I was going to agree to anything to retain control. But three hours later, he walked out with a face black with rage. Everything had been split fifty-fifty, as it should have been.”
“And here’s an irony. Since Martin had spent most of what I’d earned on what he told the judge was his own ‘personal property,’ in the end, he owed me money.”
“And what about your house and your books?”
“The house was sold and I was given half the proceeds. And there was never any question that he’d be given control of my books, or that he’d receive any money that I would earn in the future.”
“This time, he didn’t get the house and you the payments.”
“No!”
When Leslie didn’t say anything more, Ellie stood up and yawned. “So that’s it. I finally found out why Martin was believed and I wasn’t.”
“And it’s freed you, hasn’t it?” Leslie said, standing also.
“Yes. It never was the money; it was the injustice that broke me.”
On impulse, Leslie hugged Ellie, then pulled away. “So what happened to Martin?”
“Bankruptcy. And he had to go to work,” Ellie said with a smile.
“Work? Support himself?” Leslie said, then they both laughed. “What happened to the money he turned over to his friend?”
Ellie smiled. “Jessie figured out that Martin’s lawyer probably knew where that was so during the lunch break, he had a talk with the lawyer. After lunch Martin’s lawyer submitted a copy of a bank statement to the court showing that Martin had quite a bit hidden away so I was awarded half of it.”
For a moment Ellie closed her eyes, then opened them and looked at Leslie. “The first time around I had all that money taken away from me, but I learned that I could do without it. And the second time the money seemed somehow dirty to me. I didn’t want to touch it. I gave every penny of it to help abused children.”
For a moment the two women were silent, then they smiled at each other, then they laughed. Then, as though they’d been cued, they once again did the little dance that they had performed in the restaurant. And when they finally went to bed, they were still laughing.
And now Ellie was flying home to Woody’s ranch, where they now lived, home to her husband, Jessie, and to her toddler son, a child she had memories of but whom she’d never seen in person, the idea of which made her laugh. She’d purchased three nylon duffle bags to carry all the toys and clothes that she was taking back with her as gifts to Jessie and Nate, Valerie and Woody, and their son, Mark.
Keeping her eyes closed, she smiled in happiness.
Then, in the next moment, her eyes flew open. What if she wrote a story about—
Ten minutes later, she was writing the plot to a new novel fast and furiously.
Thirty-one
When Leslie entered her house, she stood in the entrance and looked into the living room with new eyes—and she saw many things that she didn’t like. How pretentious Alan’s untouchable antiques looked! He had made what should have been a comfortable family room into a room that one could only admire, certainly not use.
“Put them there,” she said to the man who was setting her luggage and shopping bags on the floor of the entrance hall. He was the same man who had driven her to the airport, the man who’d flirted with her a bit. She’d been flattered then, but now she felt that he’d just been trying for a larger tip. But, oddly enough, on this second trip, he’d been looking at Leslie as though he really was interested in her. And she understood why.
There was a woman at her church who wasn’t especially pretty and her figure wasn’t nearly as good as Leslie’s, but all the men watched her wherever she went. Of course she inspired a great deal of gossip and jealousy among the women, but Leslie had always wondered what it was about the woman that made men look at her. She’d asked Alan.
“I don’t know,” he’d said in that way that lets a woman know that he doesn’t want to analyze something. “It’s as though she expects to be looked at, so she is.”
At the time, Leslie hadn’t understood that, but now she did. Just days ago she’d been a girl again, with a girl’s body, and she’d remembered what it felt like to be desirable.
Had she punished herself all these years for what she believed she’d done to the man she loved? Or had she backed down in every argument because she had decided that she was a failure?
Whatever the problem had been, right now, as she entered the house, she knew that, inside, she was a different woman. “Thanks,” she said to the driver, then handed him a ten.
“Thank you,” he said, then gave her a look that let her know that he was available for further contact.
“Hi, Mom,” Rebecca said as she came down the stairs, walking past the luggage and many bags at Leslie’s feet. “You forgot to hand-wash my yellow sweater before you left, so I had to send it to the cleaner’s. Dad’s going to be mad about the expense.” With that she sailed past her mother and went toward the kitchen.
For a moment Leslie stared after her daughter. Before her trip to Maine, she would have whined to her daughter that she could have washed her own sweater, but now Leslie felt no such compulsion to say such a thing to her daughter.
Alan came in from the garden. He was wearing perfectly pressed trousers and a crisply ironed shirt. He barely glanced at his wife. “I thought you weren’t going to return until tomorrow,” he said as he looked through a stack of mail on the kitchen table. “You girls have a fight?” he asked, chuckling at his own joke.
He picked up a couple of envelopes, and as he walked past Leslie, he gave her an absentminded kiss on the cheek, then started up the stairs. He still hadn’t actually looked at her. “I’m going out in about an hour,” he said. “Bambi and I have to see a client.” At the top of the stairs, he turned into their bedroom.
In the next minute, Joe came down the stairs. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Glad you’re back.”
At that Leslie smiled, but then Joe told her he was hungry. “When’s dinner?” he asked as he went out the front door.
Leslie stood still for a moment. How long had her family been like this? she wondered. When had they become a bunch of strangers living in the same house, with each person caring only about his or her own needs and no one else’s?
She went into the kitchen, thinking that Rebecca would be there, but the room was empty.
“I don’t like this room,” she said aloud. It had cost the earth, but she still didn’t like it.
Going to the sink she filled the kettle with water and put it on to boil.
Isn’t this where I came in? she thought. Isn’t this what I was doing the last time I was in this house?
The water came to a boil and she made herself a cup of tea, then she stood at the window and looked out at the old summerhouse in the back. And as she looked at it, she remembered Millie Formund’s summerhouse. And Leslie remembered what
she’d learned in the last few days.
She put her half-finished cup down in the sink, went into the entrance hall, and gathered up six heavily loaded shopping bags, then carried them outside to the summerhouse. On the way back from the airport she’d had the driver stop at a local art and craft store, and she’d gone inside and nearly cleared the shelves of merchandise.
Outside the summerhouse, she put the bags on the grass; then she pushed open the door to the once-lovely house and went inside. With the eye of a woman who knew about construction, she looked about the place. Most of the damage inside was from neglect, and it could be easily repaired. There was a leak in the roof and water damage on one wall. But she could fix that.
No, she corrected herself, she could have that fixed.
She looked at what was inside the house. There was little that was hers in there. Alan had removed the upper shelves from the bookcase Leslie had refinished and put in a TV. Of course he’d had to cut a hole in the back for the cables; then the TV had been too deep for the shelf, so Alan had cut a bigger hole, until there wasn’t much left of her bookcase.
Joe stored all his old sports equipment in the summerhouse. There were at least three broken skateboards and an old wooden crate held discarded skates. Upon closer inspection, the crate turned out to be a pine washstand that Leslie had found at a flea market. Joe had put the table on its back, opened the doors, and filled the belly with his old skates.
Rebecca had put boxes full of clothes and books in front of the French doors that led into what had once been Leslie’s tiny, private rose garden.
For a moment, Leslie wanted to close the door on the whole mess. Maybe it was more than she wanted to tackle. How was she going to persuade her family to clean this place up so she could use it?
But then she remembered the face of that girl who’d looked back in the mirror at her. That girl hadn’t been afraid of anyone or anything.
As Leslie stood with her hand on the door handle of the summerhouse, she knew that right now, this very second, was the turning point of her life. What she did this moment would determine how the rest of her life would go. She had been given a second chance at her life, and she’d chosen this life and these people because she loved them. But she’d also learned that she needed to love herself.
The truth was that Leslie didn’t know what was waiting for her in the next months. For a long time now she’d expected her husband to ask her for a divorce so he could marry a woman who probably had the fearless eyes that Leslie had once had. And if he did ask for a divorce, where would Leslie be then? Even more afraid than she had been these last years?
And how would her taking over the summerhouse or not taking it over affect her future life?
“Not one damn bit!” she said aloud, then again looked around the summerhouse. And this time when she looked at it, it was almost as though she saw herself in the old building. She had once been something perfect and beautiful, as this building had once been. But she had been taken over by her family, just as they had taken over this house. It was as though they had pushed her onto her back and filled her belly with refuse.
With a smile, Leslie opened both doors to the summerhouse wide, then she walked to the TV set, picked it up, and jerked the cords out of the wall. Her lovely bookcase had had almost the entire back sawn out of it. Still smiling, she carried the TV through the doorway; then she gave it the strongest heave she could manage. The TV went sailing for a few feet, then hit the edge of the little stone retaining wall that Alan had had put in two years ago, then went tumbling down the slope toward the barbecue pit.
When it hit Alan’s oversized brick barbecue and the glass front of the TV smashed, Leslie didn’t think she’d ever heard a more satisfying sound in her life. And the sound gave her strength.
She went back into the summerhouse and began hauling out the rest of the rubbish. Joe’s skates tumbled down the little hill right behind Alan’s TV; then Leslie righted her little washstand and closed its doors. One door’s hinge was wrenched nearly off, but she could fix it.
Rebecca’s old clothes and her years of pack-ratting went next.
And with each item that Leslie threw out, it was as though she got stronger and . . . well, more of herself back.
“I told you!” she heard Rebecca shout. “She’s gone crazy!”
Leslie had her hands full of a broken rabbit cage that the children had dumped into the summerhouse. She gave it a toss down toward the other items that were piling up in front of Alan’s beloved barbecue.
Glancing up, she saw the three of them running down the path toward her. Rebecca looked angry, Alan was concerned, and Joe looked amused.
She didn’t acknowledge them but went back into the summerhouse and picked up a couple of bags of ten-year-old rabbit food. “We might need that,” Rebecca had wailed when Leslie had begged her years ago to give it away. But Rebecca held on to every possession she’d ever had and never released anything.
“Leslie, honey. Is everything all right?” Alan said from the doorway. He was using the voice he saved for difficult clients. “The man was crazy,” he’d say, “so I talked to him like this.” Then he’d show her the voice that he was now using on her.
“Fine,” she said, giving him a bit of a smile as she picked up a box of broken Christmas ornaments that Alan swore he was going to repair someday. “Excuse me,” she said, then stepped past him and threw the box down the hill.
“Could you stop that for a moment?” he said when she turned back toward the summerhouse.
“No, I can’t. I want to get this place cleaned out, so I can set up a studio in here.”
“Studio?” he said, and there was mirth in his voice. “Honey, I know that turning forty has hit you hard, but I do think that maybe you’re a bit old to start dancing again.”
Leslie didn’t answer him as she picked up a box full of broken electronic gadgets, the product of many Christmases. When she got to the door, Alan put his hands on the box, but the look she gave him made him remove his hands and step back. But as she prepared to heave the box, Alan nodded toward Joe and he took the box from his mother.
“Thank you,” Leslie said, then turned back for more.
Alan stepped inside the summerhouse. “Look, Leslie, honey, if you wanted to clean out this old place, why didn’t you tell us? We could have all done it. As a family. And we could have done it in an orderly manner, not throwing things against the barbecue. Did you see that you’ve damaged it?”
“Damaged it?” she asked softly as she picked up a box of receipts that were dated 1984. “I damaged your barbecue?”
“Yes, you did,” Alan said sternly, mistaking her words for caring. “It will have to be repaired.”
Leslie went to the door, and while looking at Alan, she gave the box of receipts a hard sling. Pieces of paper went flying all over the lawn and into the trees and shrubs, but Leslie didn’t look at them as she stepped back into the house, but she could feel anger rising in her. She looked back at Alan. “I damaged your barbecue? What about the damage you have done to my summerhouse?”
“Yours?” he asked in bewilderment. “I thought it was ours.”
“No, Alan,” she said slowly. “The summerhouse was mine, and it always was. You seem to own everything else in our lives, but the summerhouse was mine.”
Alan nodded to Rebecca and Joe to pick up the papers that were flying about, then he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “Leslie, honey, I know that turning forty is hard on a woman, but—”
“Turning forty has nothing to do with this!” she half yelled at him. “What is it with you men? For the first half of our lives when we get angry, you say we have PMS. Now what are you going to say, Alan? That I’m heading for ‘The Change’?”
“I didn’t say anything like that. Could you stop that for a moment?!”
In all their years of marriage, it was guaranteed that if Alan shouted at her, Leslie would cringe. But not now. Now she turned and confronted him. “What??
?s the matter, Alan? Is my little tantrum holding up your rendezvous with Bambi?”
“Bambi? What the hell does she have to do with this?”
“Everything and nothing,” Leslie answered, then tried to calm her anger. She’d no idea that she had this much rage inside her. But it was as though it had been building and festering in her for a very long time.
“That makes no sense at all,” Alan said, and she could see that he, too, was angry.
In the last days she’d made a decision to not allow her happiness to be tied to any man. Ellie and Madison both had careers that they were very successful at, but Leslie didn’t. Those two women had themselves, so they could afford to add a man to their lives. But a man was all that Leslie had. In the week she’d spent with Hal and his family she’d realized that if she chose a life with him, that in twenty years’ time, she’d be just as she was now. She’d be so involved with his life that there would be no room for her. And, once again, that girl who had been so fearless would be lost.
“Right,” Leslie said, and this time she was calm. “Alan, I can’t live as I have been even one day longer. I’ve given all my life to you and the children, and now that they’re nearly grown, I want something for myself.”
“And you want this old place?” he asked, still looking at her as though she were crazy. “You could have just said that and not—”
“No!” she shouted. “I couldn’t have because you don’t see me.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course I see you. You’re right there.”
She advanced on him. “No you don’t. You don’t see me. You see a woman who feeds you and buys your clothes and finds your socks and arranges your parties. But you don’t see that I’m a person separate from you.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You went up to Maine and you spent the weekend talking women’s lib garbage with those women, didn’t you?”