Her Mother's Shadow by Diane Chamberlain

Author:Diane Chamberlain
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2004-09-23T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

Faye walked into the enormous closet—really a small room—on the lower level of Jim’s house and wasn’t certain whether to laugh or cry. He had sent her down there to find the rafts and other pool paraphernalia, but that was not going to be easy. The walls were piled high with boxes and tools and cookware and every other thing imaginable. She did not know where to begin looking for the rafts. She walked back through the lower level and called up the stairs.

“Jim?” She knew he was in the kitchen pouring them glasses of wine. He’d had the pool and the hot tub filled the day before, and this evening would be their first venture into the water. He hadn’t felt like using the pool since before Alice’s death. “She loved it,” he’d said. “I just couldn’t make myself go in alone.” Faye thought it was a good sign that he felt up to using the pool again.

“Did you find the rafts?” he called down to her.

“I’m sorry, Jim, but I don’t know where to start,” she said. “Can you give me a clue?”

She could hear him laugh. “I’ll come down and help you,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

She went back into the closet and sat down on a trunk. This was one of the strangest parts of being in a relationship, she thought: starting to feel at home in someone else’s house. To cook there, as she had several times in the past couple of weeks. To have her toothbrush and toothpaste, her shampoo and her robe in the guest bathroom. To sit in a huge closet, filled with personal items, that had not been cleaned out in twenty years. To see the history of your lover’s life stacked up against the walls and piled on shelves.

It was too soon to be in love with Jim, she told herself, yet there were moments when she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying those words to him. They were truly in sync with one another. Intellectually, professionally, physically. She had never expected to have this sort of partnership with a man, and she was not quite over the surprise of it yet.

Jim walked into the room and handed her a glass of Chardonnay. “This closet is a mess,” he apologized, standing in the center of the room and looking around him. “I’m embarrassed for you to see it. I just threw all the pool equipment in here when Alice died without thinking that I might want to find it again some day.”

“You were grieving,” she said, looking up at him from her seat on the trunk.

He took a sip of his wine. “I think it had more to do with…I don’t know. Laziness,” he said. “Lack of caring.”

“Depression.”

“I guess that’s what it was,” he said, as if he’d never thought about it before. “I just didn’t feel like doing anything for the longest time.” He walked across the room to her and tapped his glass lightly against hers.

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