Circle of Grace, page 28
He peered at the numbers painted on the curb and finally came to 1164. Whitestone’s house. It was set well back from the street, with a circular driveway and a gaslamp.
He glanced again at the crumpled page from the phone book. This was it.
Bo looked around for Amanda’s car but saw nothing but a green Volvo station wagon parked in the garage. The door stood open, and a man came out pushing a lawn cart and carrying a rake.
He looked to be about sixty, Bo noted, stocky, with white hair and a reddish complexion. He wore work clothes—faded blue jeans and a gray Minnesota Twins sweatshirt. While Bo watched, he wheeled the cart to the front porch and began to rake sodden leaves out of flower beds still patched with snow.
This was the man Amanda had left him for? Some old fart who pottered around on a Saturday morning doing his own yard work? Bo couldn’t believe it.
He got out of the Lexus, shut the door, and walked up the driveway. When he was almost to the porch, the man looked up.
“G’day, mate,” he said in a jovial voice. His accent reminded Bo of Crocodile Dundee. “Can I help you?” Then he stopped raking and shielded his eyes with a gloved hand. “Crikey, you’re Big Bo Tennyson.”
“So you recognize me, do you?” Bo took a step forward, his hands clenched into fists.
“I expect anyone would,” the man said, “seeing as how your face is plastered on half the billboards in the state.”
Bo hesitated. The guy had a point. He was well known, after all. He was Big Bo. A brief surge of pride rushed through him at being recognized, but it vanished the minute he remembered why he was there. “You’re John Whitestone?”
“I am.” He pulled off the gloves and extended a hand. “Good to meet you.”
“You can skip the pleasantries,” Bo snarled, “and tell me where Amanda is.”
“Amanda?” For a split second Whitestone looked confused, then his expression cleared. “Ah. Lovey. Yes.”
“Lovey? Is that what you call her?”
“Just a little nickname. Her friends used to call her that in college, I believe. As did you, once.”
Bo took another step closer, his anger rising. “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”
“Ah, but I do. Quite a bit, actually. Unfortunately, anything Lovey has told me is strictly confidential. I can’t talk about it.”
“Well, you’re going to talk.” Bo seized him by the neck of his sweatshirt. “How long have you been seeing her? Is she here?” His eyes flitted to the front door, which stood open, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the glass storm door.
“Of course she’s not here. What would she be doing here?”
“She’d be—uh, being with you, of course.”
“And she would be here because—?”
“Because you’re having an affair with her!” Bo gave him a little shake.
“With Lovey?” Whitestone laughed, not in the least put off by Bo’s show of force. “Not a chance, mate.”
“I’m not your mate. And what’s the matter, she’s not good enough for you?”
“She’s a lovely woman. And, I might say, quite a catch for any man. It’s just that—” He grinned, showing uneven white teeth. “I believe you’ve gotten entirely the wrong idea, Mr. Tennyson. Lovey—Amanda—is my client. We do not have a personal relationship.”
“Client?” Bo repeated. “What do you mean, client?”
“At the center,” Whitestone said calmly, as if this should be perfectly clear. “The Minnetonka Family Counseling Center.”
“She’s been going to counseling?” Bo let go of the sweatshirt and stumbled back a step or two. “With you?”
“Right you are.” Whitestone eyed him cannily. “As you undoubtedly know, if you’ve been reading her journaling and discovered my name.”
He threw the leather gloves into the lawn cart and motioned to the chairs on the front porch. “Perhaps we should sit down and have a bit of a chat.”
Bo followed him onto the porch. Whitestone opened the door, leaned his head in, and called, “Sheila, darlin’, would you mind bringing out some coffee? I’d do it myself, except my shoes are muddy.” An indistinct voice answered him from inside the house. “Right. Two cups, please. That’s a love.” He turned back to Bo. “Black?”
Bo nodded, and Whitestone conveyed the message to whoever Sheila was. After a moment, a woman with tousled strawberry-blonde hair appeared at the doorway bearing two steaming mugs of coffee.
“This is my wife, Sheila. Sheila, Mr. Bo Tennyson.”
“Big Bo, is it?” Sheila handed a mug to each of them and surveyed Bo from head to foot. He had the strange feeling he was being examined, like a bug on a skewer. “Pleased to meet you.” She disappeared back into the house.
“Now,” said Whitestone, all business. “Why, exactly, are you at my house on a Saturday morning looking for your wife?”
Bo sighed, deflated. “Because she’s missing. No note, no phone call, nothing. Her car’s not in the garage. She was gone when I got home last night. Just vanished.” He groped in his jacket pocket and extracted the broken picture frame. “I found this.”
Whitestone took the pieces of the frame and held them in both hands, examining them as if he found them utterly fascinating. “Ah. And you think I might know where she went, is that it? Where, and why?” A grin played around his mouth. “And with whom?”
Bo nodded. “You were right. I found her diary—journal, whatever—and your name was in it. Also a lot of crap I thought was water under the bridge. About—about our relationship. Old stuff, you know. From the past.”
“But perhaps not so old for her.” Whitestone took a sip of his coffee and set the mug down on the porch bricks. “You believe she’s left you for another man. Why might you think that?”
Bo felt himself bristle. “Don’t shrink me, Doc. I’m not one of your clients.”
“But you do appear to be in crisis,” Whitestone said mildly. “And we can all use a little shrinking once in a while, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.” Bo thought about this for a minute, and recalled how Amanda had referred to him in the journal—as Big Bo, with a hint of scorn. Well, he had been a big man, he couldn’t help that, could he? He had once played for the Vikings, made a game-winning touchdown that put them in the playoffs.
And broke your tailbone showing off for the crowd, a nasty little voice inside him added.
Then, after his football career was over, he had become just as big—even bigger, maybe—as the owner of the largest sports gear chain in the state. Whitestone had said it himself: Everybody knew him; a twenty-foot reflection of his face was pasted on billboards in every major town in Minnesota.
Big face, big head, the voice chimed in.
He shook himself to silence the inner criticism and tried to focus on Whitestone’s last question. “Why am I convinced she’s left me for another man, you asked?” He shrugged. “Because she’s gone without a word, that’s all. Look at her. She’s a wonderful woman. She’s loving and smart and beautiful and sensitive, and—”
“Have you told her that?”
“What?”
“That she’s smart and beautiful and sensitive.” Whitestone arched one eyebrow. “That you love her.”
“She knows I love her.”
“How does she know?”
“Well, shit,” Bo said, “I provide everything for her, don’t I? I give her whatever she wants.”
“And what does she want?”
“What does any woman want?” Bo retorted. “A home. A good life. A platinum card. A retirement fund. Security.”
“Are you certain? Have you asked?”
“I’ve never been unfaithful to her.” But even as he said it, Bo’s mind filled with images—partly from his own checkered memory, partly from what he had read in his wife’s journal. The traveling. The drinking. The social climbing. Long absences when he barely gave her a second thought. Parties and business dinners she didn’t really want to attend. And he wondered, just briefly, if faithfulness might be about something more than sex.
“What’s been going on with my wife?” he asked.
Whitestone shook his head. “I can’t say.”
“You don’t know, or you can’t say?”
“I can’t say. That’s a question you ought to ask her.” Whitestone paused. “But I will make a suggestion to you. You might consider the possibility that your wife has not left you to go looking for another man.”
A brief hope flared in Bo’s chest. “Not looking for another man? What, then?”
“It’s likely she’s looking for a woman instead.”
Bo’s stomach lurched and dropped into his shoes. A man he might be able to compete with, but another woman—well, it was unthinkable.
“Amanda, looking for a woman?” he demanded. “What the hell are you talking about? What woman?”
Whitestone turned an intense gaze on him and held his eyes.
“Herself,” he said.
Bo drove home slowly, mulling over the things John Whitestone had told him. Now that he thought about it, the man had said very little, actually. He had asked the right questions, though, and now that the wheels had begun to turn, Bo couldn’t seem to stop them.
Why hadn’t he noticed that Amanda was unhappy? Why hadn’t she told him?
But of course she wouldn’t. They hadn’t communicated in years, and if her journal was any indication, she didn’t feel he was capable of being trusted with any part of her heart or soul.
She had simply endured. And now, it seemed, her endurance had come to its end.
Other questions plagued him, too. Why had it taken her leaving to jolt him to his senses? He wasn’t too old to remember the passion, the love that had once linked them together like some invisible magnetic force. Before they got married, they hadn’t been able to get enough of each other. They had laughed and played and had fun. They had danced under the stars and written long letters when they were apart. She had cheered him on.
The truth hit him like a three-hundred-pound defensive tackle running full speed. Amanda had been his personal cheerleader, and he had expected the cheering to go on forever.
Half a mile from home, he pulled into a drive-through, ordered a double Whopper, extra-large fries, and a Coke, and sat in the parking lot barely tasting the food as he wolfed it down. When the last few fries were gone, he sat with his head on the steering wheel, staring at the empty cardboard container on the dashboard. BIG. BIGGER. SUPER BIG FRENCH FRIES was printed in bright red on a blue background.
Big. Bigger. SUPER BIG.
That was him. Big Bo. Big Man on Campus. Big Vikings Tight End. Big Successful Businessman.
“We all need shrinking now and then,” Whitestone had said.
When he pulled the Lexus into the driveway, Neva Wilson was sitting on the front steps waiting for him.
“What’s happened?” he said as he jogged up the sidewalk to the porch. “Did she call?” His big burger and big fries made a big churning in his stomach, and acid rose up into his throat, the bitter taste of bile.
“No sir.”
“What then? Why are you sitting outside?”
“Because I know where Miz Manda is,” she said.
He grabbed her by the arm and steered her inside. “How? What? Where?” he demanded.
She yanked the cream-colored envelope out of her pocket and thrust it toward him. “Here,” she said simply.
He opened it and stared at its contents. This weekend, in Asheville, at the Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa.
“And you think she’s gone there, to this reunion, or whatever it is?”
“Yessir.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I called information, got the number, and phoned that resort.” Neva poked a finger at the writing on the invitation. “She’s there, all right. She and those three friends from college.” She peered at him. “What are you going to do, Mr. Bo?”
He stared back, his mind racing. A housekeeper shouldn’t be asking such an impertinent question, and he, as her employer, shouldn’t be answering. Still—
He paced over to the fireplace. “The first thing I’m going to do is call John Whitestone and get an appointment for the two of us, soon as he can fit us in,” he said. “Then I’m going to fly to Asheville—right now, this afternoon. I’ll rent a jet if I have to.”
He balked as an unwelcome thought crowded into his mind. “No. Not today. She needs this time with her friends. Tomorrow morning.”
“And when you get there—?” Neva prodded.
“When I get there, I’m going to confess a lifetime of stupidity and ask her to forgive me for being such an ass. And if she gives me a second chance, I’m going to work like hell to become the husband she deserves.”
He raised his head and looked at her. “Pardon my language.”
Neva got up, sidled over to him, and placed a hand on his arm. He didn’t pull away.
“You’re a big man, Mr. Bo,” she said in a tone of respect he had never heard before. “Yessir, a mighty big man.”
-34-
IN THE GROTTO
When Grace had initially conceived of this get-together, she had determined that for once in her life she intended to treat herself—and her friends—to the best of everything. The mountainview suite was magnificent; last night’s dinner and breakfast this morning had both been excellent. But until this moment, when she opened the door and stepped from the stairwell into the lower level of the Grove Park Spa, she had not even begun to imagine what kind of pampering awaited her.
Now her jaw dropped, and she gaped around in awe. It was a shimmering dream turned into substance, a fantasy, pure magic. The huge room, constructed with massive stone boulders, resembled an underground grotto. In the center of the entryway, an indoor waterfall splashed from twenty feet above into a lighted pond. Directly ahead was an enormous mineral pool, five times the size of an ordinary swimming pool, with soft amber lighting glimmering off its clear teal waters. Flanking the mineral pool were two caves cut into the walls—identical sunken hot tubs with wide waterfalls plunging into them—and to the right, in a narrow cavern of its own with a fireplace flickering to one side, a lap pool. A high glass wall opened onto a terrace overlooking the mountains, and here and there other stone fireplaces—even one outside, on the patio—danced with flames.
“It’s so quiet,” Tess whispered in her ear.
And it was. No blaring radios, no jangling cell phones, no squalling children—just the peaceful sounds of cascading water and gentle, calming background music. A few people were floating in the mineral pool, and in the corner lap pool one man was swimming energetically.
They were scheduled for massages later in the morning, but that was a couple of hours away.
“Let’s start there,” Liz suggested, pointing to the roiling waters of the hot tub. She pulled off her robe, flung it onto one of the lounge chairs, and descended the stone steps into the steamy water. “Ah, this is wonderful,” she sighed as she situated her shoulders under the coursing waterfall. “Come on in, you won’t believe it.”
Tess and Lovey followed Liz into the hot tub and sank onto the stone bench that ran below the waterline, but Grace held back. At fifty-something, Tess and Liz were both still slim and fit, and even Lovey, with her additional pounds, was pleasantly curved. Grace felt more than a little uncomfortable about revealing her lumpy, middle-aged body in a swimsuit.
She looked around awkwardly. Someone was just coming out of the mineral pool, a white-haired, matronly woman with heavy, sagging breasts, wide, dimpled thighs, and a protruding stomach. She struggled dripping to the top of the steps, pushed back her wet hair, and smiled. “Isn’t this marvelous?” she said as she adjusted the straps of a garish blue-and-purple-flowered swimsuit. “Just what these old bones need.”
Grace watched as the woman lumbered off toward the terrace, not bothering to cover her flabby cellulite with the robe provided by the spa. If she’s not embarrassed, Grace thought, I certainly shouldn’t be.
And with a sense of welcome liberation, she dropped her robe and joined her friends in the hot tub.
The morning was relaxing, if not exactly conducive to conversation. They stayed in the hot tub, taking turns under the waterfall, for twenty minutes or so, then decided to try the contrast pools, where you soak in very hot water and then plunge into an icy bath.
“People do this in Minnesota,” Lovey panted as she came up breathless from the frigid water. “They sit in a sauna until they’re so hot they can’t stand it, then run and jump into the lake, through a hole cut in the ice.”
“And this is supposed to be good for the circulation?” Liz said. She had just come out of the hot pool and was cooling down with a glass of iced lemon water and one of the spa’s frozen peppermint washcloths, which were provided around every corner. “Sounds pretty crazy to me.”
“Well, you’re the expert on crazy,” Grace jibed, purely on instinct.
“Grace!” Tess stared at her.
“Lighten up, Tess. I wasn’t talking about Liz. I was talking about her clients.”
Everyone laughed, and a rush of gratification surged through Grace’s veins. Finally, this was how she had envisioned it—the joviality, the teasing, the fun. The old gang from Barnard Street rediscovering the friendship that had held them together all these years.
After the contrast pools, the mineral pool was perfect. There the water was warm but not hot, and much to Grace’s amazement, the music was piped in under the surface, so that when she put her head back and began to float, soft instrumental sounds came clearly to her submerged ears.
It was like being in a womb, drowsy and comfortable, almost hypnotic.
Was this, she wondered, what death was like? To be suspended and completely at ease, the mind at rest, freed from the confines of flesh?
If so, it wouldn’t be so bad. Much better than the prospect of being alive and in pain, riddled with cancer, debilitated.
