Tea by the Sea by Donna Hemans

Author:Donna Hemans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press

PART 4

Tea by the Sea

1

Brooklyn, East Thirty-Third Street. The air was a little bit cooler and smelled of rain. Plum polished windows, both the inner and outer sides of the glass, with a crumpled newspaper and a mixture of vinegar, lime, and water. She whistled, thinking at the same time of the uselessness of her chore: polishing the exterior windows when rain had set up to fall. But she didn’t stop, simply moved her arms like a wound up doll powerless to stop itself. Behind Plum were her girls—Nia and Vivian, seven-year-old twins—one doing cartwheels, the other watching, both girls lingering really and waiting for Plum to finish and turn to them. They were clingy girls. Or perhaps it was the other way: Plum was an overprotective mother, preferring to have her girls with her, underfoot, within reach. Except for work, she didn’t leave them. All these years, she hadn’t been able to shake the fear that her girls wouldn’t be there when she returned.

But they were there—Nia, the acrobatic one, contorting her body through the air, and Vivian, a quiet observer with a book on her lap, stealing glances at Nia. Nia took risks. Vivian weighed consequences. Together, the girls balanced each other, and often, when Plum imagined them older, teenagers, she saw Nia treating life like a tightrope and Vivian holding the net beneath her sister.

Even if Alan had been home at that very moment, the girls would still have been nearby waiting for her to finish and turn to them.

Nia stumbled and crashed and Plum turned to see her sprawled on the hardwood between the coffee table and the couch, water from a cup pooling, magazines from the rack scattered on the ground like shattered glass and the storage bench flipped over on its side.

“You all right? Where did you hit? Did you hit your head?”

Nia, giggling instead of talking, looked at her sister and the pool of water spreading fast toward the rug. Vivian laughed too, their laughter loud, uncontrollable. Plum moved her daughter’s shoulders and arms, watching for a wince, waiting for a shiver of pain, but again got only uncontrollable giggles.

“Enough of the cartwheels.”

“She was trying to flip onto the bench and back down,” Vivian said.

“Enough.” Plum hadn’t heard their discussion at all, hadn’t heard the usual, “watch me.”

Plum shook her head, moved toward the spreading pool, newspaper in hand and layered it on top of the water sheet by sheet.

And drew her breath. It was a hiccup, really. She looked again, closer this time, back bent, water dripping from one half of the newsprint. She ripped the sheet in half, dropped the wet half to the floor, then moved toward the window, sheet in hand, for a closer look in the natural light.

Unmistakable.

Lenworth.

She hadn’t forgotten the face, the half-smile, the thick brows, the thin nose. Below the photo, a caption with his name and his title: Priest.

Unmistakably him.

Outside, the rain that had set up came with force, pummeling the plants that had withstood summer, and flooding the gutters and the nearly empty roads.

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