*
Sydney’s wayward receptionist, Violet, didn’t show up at work the next morning at the salon. Sydney tried to call her several times, but got no answer.
Vexed because yet another teenager was taking the wrong path no matter how hard Sydney tried to steer her in the right direction, Sydney hurried through her last appointment and told Janey to close up, then she drove out to Violet’s place before Sydney picked up her daughter. Part of Bay’s punishment was no extra time between working at Claire’s and coming home with Sydney in the evenings. No extra time to spend with Josh. And no phone to talk to him, either.
All day Sydney had felt dark and off-kilter. One of her clients today, Tracey Hagen, who had wanted a style to make her Tupperware sales go up, ended up with a style that made people too afraid to say no to her instead of charming them into buying. The end result was the same, but not exactly what she’d wanted. Sydney bought a sandwich keeper from her out of guilt.
The sun began to set as Sydney left the city limits. There was a difference between provincial and rural, a fine line you don’t even know you cross until you’re on that road. And everyone knows that road, the one leading out of town into a deep green expanse of pastures and old farmhouses, which at first makes it seem like you’re entering a fairy tale, something sweet and old-fashioned and lost in time. But, like all fairy tales, the beginning is always beautiful, a ruse to draw you into something you aren’t anticipating. That long stretch of farmhouses turns into a barren landscape of trailer parks, rusting and decaying slowly from the rain and leaves in the gutters.
Sydney knew the area well, from long rides with Hunter John Matteson in high school, a daring sort of excursion to see just how far they would go, in more ways than one, before turning back.
She’d tried calling Hunter John today, too. There was part of her that was almost too proud to do it, because she knew his and his wife Emma’s inevitable disappointment in Josh would mean they didn’t think her daughter was good enough for their son. But if their parental intervention would nip this thing in the bud, then that’s all that mattered. Her daughter’s heart would stay a big, red, beautiful, joyful thing, full of love for someone who deserved her. She tried Hunter John’s workplace first, then his home, where she was informed by the housekeeper that Hunter John and Emma were on an anniversary cruise.
Sydney felt both disappointed and relieved. Probably a little more relieved than disappointed. In the ten years she’d been back, she’d barely said a passing hello to either of them. That is, when they weren’t completely ignoring her. She remembered vividly, one of the first weeks she’d been back in Bascom ten years ago, Hunter John confronting her and telling her that he loved his wife and wasn’t leaving her. Apparently, the whole Matteson family had been in knots about it, thinking Sydney had returned to try to get him, and his money, back. It had amused her. As if you can do what he did to a Waverley heart and expect it to go unchanged.
The trailer park where Sydney’s headstrong receptionist lived was appropriately called Wild West, with road names like Wyatt Earp Drive and Doc Holliday Court. She stopped at an old white trailer with a faded green and white awning over the front door. The yard was tidy enough, with some concrete gnomes and painted toadstools decorating it.
She went to the door and knocked. It was opened by an overweight, elderly man wearing only boxer shorts. The heat emanating from inside the trailer rushed out at Sydney, blowing at her like opening an oven door. It had to be ninety degrees in there.
The man looked Sydney up and down in her black tights and black heels, her short plaid trench coat, and her hair pulled up into a doughnut bun. “What do you want?” he asked over the blare of the television.
“Who is it?” a woman who was either seventy, or a very old-looking fifty, asked from her recliner.
“I’m here to see Violet,” Sydney said. “She wasn’t at work today.”
“Violet!” the old man yelled.
A door off the living room opened. “What?” Violet said angrily, then saw Sydney standing in the doorway. “Oh. Come on in here,” Violet said, hurriedly waving Sydney into her room.
Sydney crossed the living room.
“Sorry it’s so hot in here. Roy and Florence like the furnace turned up,” Violet said as she closed her bedroom door. The single window in the room was open and the cool air coming in clashed with the hot air from the heating vents, creating a swirling breeze that made the room feel like it was in motion. Violet was wearing only a tank top and shorts. “Charlie kept me up all night. Sorry I couldn’t come in today.”
“You should have called,” Sydney said, going over to Charlie, who was sitting on the floor, playing with old plastic blocks. Sydney went to her knees in front of him. She put her hand to his forehead as he put a block to his mouth and looked up at her with those beautiful dark eyes. “Hey, baby. Are you sick?”
“He feels better now,” Violet said quickly, as if maybe there had been nothing wrong in the first place.
Sydney looked around the small bedroom. There was a bare mattress on the floor, covered with an old Native American blanket. No furniture. Toys and clothes were scattered everywhere.
There was a set of matching blue luggage behind the door. It was the only thing in the room that looked like it had been treated with any sort of reverence. “What’s with the luggage?” she asked.
“It’s for when I leave. This isn’t my home. I’m not treating it that way. This is temporary. It’s always been temporary.”
“It’s not so bad,” Sydney said. “You’re just in a rut. Everyone gets in a rut. Ever thought of beauty school?”
Violet sat on the mattress and scooted back to the paneled wall to lean against it. “Maybe.”
“I could help you out with a work-study program. And you could probably get a scholarship.”
“Maybe. But if I do go to beauty school, it’s going to be somewhere far away.” She held up her bare, skinny arm so her hand could feel the cool air coming from the open window above her.
“Bascom is actually a pretty nice place.”
“You left,” Violet pointed out.
“I came back.”
Violet shrugged, bringing her arm back down, her hand in a fist, as if she’d caught the cold air inside it like a bird. “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”
“When I left, it was just me. And that was fine. It was my time to learn, my mistakes to make. When I had Bay, everything changed. It was no longer all about me. I came back so she would have a stable place to grow up, where I had a support system.”
“Charlie is a good baby,” Violet said. “He won’t give me any trouble.”
“I know he’s a good baby,” Sydney said, smoothing down his thick, dark hair. “But the challenge is to raise him into a good boy, then a good man. You think you can do that when you don’t have a place to live? What exactly do you think is going to happen once you leave this place? That you’re going to find the perfect job, the perfect home, the perfect man?”
“Yes!” Violet said. “I know I will. Because I’ve already looked here. They’re not here.”
“Everything will be the same, no matter where you are, if you don’t change first.”
Violet scooted off the bed and walked around Sydney and picked Charlie up in front of her. “Am I fired?” she asked, putting him on her hip. He started fussing. “Because I need this job. I almost have enough to buy Roy’s old Toyota.”
Sydney stood. “No, you’re not fired.”
“Why are you so nice to me?” she asked, bouncing Charlie when he started to cry. Sydney resisted the urge to take him from her.
“Because I was you, once,” Sydney said.
Violet snorted. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me.”
“Are you coming in to work tomorrow?” Sydney asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be there.”
With one last look at them, Sydney left the bedroom. The older couple in the living room watched her with suspicious eyes as she crossed in front of the televison toward the front door.
Once back in her Mini Cooper, Sydney sat in the cold, feeling frustrated because, no matter how hard she tried, she knew she couldn’t catch someone who didn’t know they were falling.