Read Online Outside the Ordinary World by Dori Ostermiller - Free Book Online

at children over socks and houseplants (which are dying anyway), perpetually late and haunted by the past. Is she on a difficult path, or just lost?
    But I was not lost. I was driving on the back road to my studio at 9:09 on a humid Tuesday, the morning of my forty-second birthday, and suddenly I knew where I was going. I took a left on Crocker, a right on Pine, turned down an alleyway, then pulled into the parking lot of The Wild Rose Café. As I checked my lipstick in the rearview mirror, the sky finally opened, spilling enormous drops of water across my windshield—they smacked the glass and shattered.
    I had no umbrella, so I just ducked and headed for the door.
     
     
    For a few months, I would tell this story to myself and to my friend Theresa: I was driving to my studio, I’d say, and the next thing I knew, I was in the parking lot of The Wild Rose. For a few weeks, I’d play the scene in my mind, like a movie I could rewind whenever I chose. There I was dashing across the parking lot in the rain, sandaled feet splashing in mud puddles, swinging through the café’s glass door…. Over and over I’d wonder, at which moment might I have been able to turn back? Was it this moment, as I watched him in the corner, pretending to read the paper? Half a minute went by before he saw me, so I was able to notice other things—the white linen shirt and ragged jeans, expensive leather hiking boots clumped with bits of mud, newspaper vibrating in his fingers. He looked like someone from another life. His foot beat a rhythm on the bleached pine floor and I was still free to walk out, make another choice, until he glanced up. His smile was slow in coming; then it completed his face. Next to him, on the glass table, was a red rose, freshly clipped from someone’s garden.
    It was the rose that made me want to bolt back across the wet parking lot and descend into the warm safety of my minivan, surrounded by used sippy cups and forgotten socks, empty juice boxes and overdue library books. The impulse shot through me like an electric bolt. Then slowly, calmly, I made my way to his table.
    “I knew you’d come.” He grinned.
    I squelched the urge to tell him how nearly I hadn’t come, how even now I wasn’t sure I’d stay. “How could you have known?” I asked, wiping the rain from my arms with a paper napkin. “I didn’t even know.”
    He didn’t answer, just shrugged and poured green tea from a small blue teapot into two mugs, handed me one. “It’s jasmine,” he said. “Try it.”
    I stared at the rose on the table, brought the mug to my lips, all the while picturing Nathan’s white daisies on the kitchen counter that morning—had I put them in water? Had I even unwrapped them? I held the warm, sweet liquid against my tongue and closed my eyes.
    “Nice, isn’t it?” His eyes were gaudy behind those glasses, rimmed in extravagant lashes, an edge of bright amber around each pupil. “Doesn’t wig you out the way coffee does.” Again, I found myself intrigued and repelled by his New York accent, the confident hands on the table, the roguish smile.
    “Did our encounter in Ashfield put you off coffee forever?” I asked.
    “No, I love coffee, but just on weekends. I love everything I shouldn’t have—coffee, cigarettes, wine, you name it. Just have to do it all in moderation or I’m wrecked.”
    I smiled tightly, resisting the urge to speak my thoughts: And married women? You do them in moderation, too?
    “What happened in Ashfield changed me in other ways,” he said, his fingers diving through his dark curls.
    “Oh?” My throat constricted around my words. “How so?”
    “Well, I never used to come here so much.”
    “And now you do?”
    “Only on Tuesdays.” He shrugged helplessly, pushing the glasses up his nose. I realized with a start what he was confessing; that he’d sat at this table, every Tuesday since we’d run into each other over three weeks ago, waiting for me to come in. I set my