I shouldn’t even spend twenty-five dollars on something that wasn’t a necessity, and yet I’d anticipated having to part with two hundred and fifty dollars for my car that I now had in my pocket. Surely Ricky and his dad wouldn’t mind my spending a small bit of it on a brief hour of pampering. Just this one thing, nothing more.
I crossed the street and walked into the busy shop. Lien Mai called a greeting from her spot at a pedicure table where she was using an electric file on an older woman’s acrylic nails. “Long time no see, Crystal. You need pedicure?”
“Hi, Lien. Yes, but it looks like you’re busy.”
“Nah. Canceled appointment. You sit down.” She nodded to the large black massage chair at the end of the row. Ah, sweet heaven. I walked to it, and a petite girl with long, pin-straight black hair smiled politely at me and started filling the basin with warm, soapy water. I sat down and turned on the rolling back massage and sighed as I sunk back into it, submersing my feet in the water.
“What color?” the girl asked, referring to polish.
I closed my eyes. “I don’t care. You pick.”
She giggled softly. “You need this, yeah?”
I smiled without opening my eyes. “Yes.”
When she rubbed the grainy exfoliating cream into my feet and calves, an ache rose so strongly in my chest, I almost gasped. I pictured Gabriel’s beautiful hands moving on my skin, and for a second, the pain of my yearning for him was so intense, I didn’t know if I could make it to the next moment. I focused on my breathing, and after a few minutes, the worst of it passed, and it felt manageable again.
I listened to the chatter and the busyness of the shop as my muscles loosened beneath the chair’s mechanical ministrations. The phone rang incessantly and sometimes it was answered, but mostly it seemed that it wasn’t. “Don’t you have someone to answer your phones?” I asked the girl sitting on a small stool at my feet.
She shook her head. “No. Lien want hire someone but too busy.”
A flutter of excitement moved through me. “I have experience answering phones.”
She looked up at me. “Oh yeah?” She turned toward Lien. “Lien, she want job answering phones.”
Lien was just saying goodbye to the woman in front of her, and they both stood, Lien working to bring herself upright. Once her body wasn’t being obscured by the table, I noticed she was about fourteen months pregnant. My eyes widened. “Oh yeah? You want job, Crystal?” She walked over to my chair and stood next to it, one hand on her lower back.
“Yes. I’d love a job. I have experience answering phones. I recently worked at the quarry over in Morlea. I can provide a reference.”
“Hmm. Okay. You come back tomorrow and we try you out.”
Worry settled in my gut, but I smiled and nodded. I could do this. I could try. It felt like the opportunity had fallen into my lap, almost as if it was meant to be.
When Lien had walked away again, I whispered to the girl, “How pregnant is she anyway?”
“She have eight week left.”
I held my gasp inside. Oh, dear Lord. There was no way her tiny body could get any bigger than it was now.
The next day when I arrived back at the shop, I was nervous, but after an hour or so, I had a good handle on the phone system, and I was taking messages and scheduling appointments as if I’d been there for months. It was busy and the walk-ins were constant, but I handled it.
The longer the day went on, the more accomplished I felt, and when Lien came up to the desk at three, she told me to go into the back office and sign the new-hire paperwork. I felt giddy with happiness, and the first thought that came to my head was, I have to call Gabriel and tell him! But then reality came flowing back, causing me to stumble slightly and clench my eyes shut with sadness. I made a stop in the restroom to get my bearings before heading to the back room that served as Lien’s office. “Lien, I have to tell you something before I fill out this paperwork.”
“What that?”
“Well, my name isn’t really Crystal. It’s Eloise. Ellie for short.”
She regarded me for a moment and finally nodded. “That good. You better Ellie anyway.”
A short laugh bubbled up in my throat. God, I hoped so. I really did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Something tells me I’m going to love you forever.
Lady Eloise of the Daffodil Fields
ELLIE
I settled into my job at Lien Mai’s House of Nails and after a couple of weeks, I was practically running the place. Not just answering the phones, but ordering supplies, and keeping inventory. I loved the casual atmosphere of the salon, the chatter that rose and fell through the shop, both English and Vietnamese, the way the days whizzed by, and the way I was bone weary as I fell into bed.
I woke up one cold Friday night, gasping as I sat up in bed. I’d had the dream again, the one where my mother’s voice called to me as I moved through the darkness. Only this time the walls of the space had been growing wider instead of narrower and she’d been urging me forward. He’s waiting for you, she’d said again. He? The only he I wanted was Gabriel.
But maybe he was waiting. I’d had the dream when I’d been with him, though, too. Only … it seemed I’d traveled the wrong way toward him and ended up right in front of him with a barrier still between us. I’d had to turn away in order to travel the path that would bring me back to him, the path that ended with nothing separating us at all. I didn’t know whether I should even dare to hope it, but in any case, the path I’d been on had been squeezing the life from me. I’d turned back not only for Gabriel, but for myself.
The feeling of the dream clung to me so that I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I got out of bed, shivering, and turned up the heat slightly. It started to rain softly and I stood at the window for a few minutes, looking out into the darkness, the streetlights reflecting on the water puddles in the parking lot below.
Turning, I spotted the bag I still hadn’t unpacked from Gabriel’s and sighed. It seemed I could only let go in very small steps and this, too, I supposed was one of them.
As I emptied the contents, throwing the clothes into the hamper, my hand hit upon plastic and I startled, pulling out the plastic bag I’d completely forgotten about in all my misery. I lifted it out and held it to my chest. Lady Eloise of the Daffodil Fields. Seemingly broken beyond repair. But maybe … maybe … I set it down on the small desk I had by the window and switched on the light sitting on the corner. I grabbed a hand towel from the bathroom and then carefully, so carefully, I emptied the contents onto the towel, spreading the pieces out to determine if anything was recognizable. Yes, a small foot, and a bouquet of flowers, and two halves of her pretty face. Hope.
I sat down at the desk, rooting through the drawers until I located a tiny vial of superglue I’d bought for some reason I couldn’t even remember now.
I felt completely overwhelmed, but I figured the best place to start was at the beginning, and so I picked up the little piece of foot and started from there. I couldn’t help picturing that tiny shattered girl as a thousand pieces of me, and as I worked, fitting together small shards, I wondered if the work I was doing with my hands was a representation of the work I needed to do on myself. And so I hunched over that table until the light of dawn seeped through the curtains, and I thought about all the things in my life that had crushed and shattered me as well.