Bedtime for Bonsai Read online

  Elaine Fox

  Bedtime for Bonsai

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Penelope Porter pulled her car up in front of her…

  Chapter 2

  Dylan Mersey was accidentally drunk.

  Chapter 3

  Not fifteen minutes after Lucy left the shop with the…

  Chapter 4

  “He’s an ex-con,” Penelope said, looking direly at Georgia.

  Chapter 5

  Had she asked for it? He was sure of it.

  Chapter 6

  “No, no, no, no, no!” Penelope raced across the room…

  Chapter 7

  Penelope had never felt so attracted to anyone in her…

  Chapter 8

  That night Penelope decided to pamper herself. Aside from the…

  Chapter 9

  Penelope stood outside her shop minutes after the girls had…

  Chapter 10

  It was a miracle. All six of her guests were…

  Chapter 11

  She was wired. She’d cleaned the house, loaded the dishwasher…

  Chapter 12

  Dylan sat at his potting wheel working an eight-pound block…

  Chapter 13

  The place was a mess. All of his displays had…

  Chapter 14

  “That’s the whole story,” Penelope finished telling the girls. She…

  Chapter 15

  Dylan closed his shop at six and took off running…

  Chapter 16

  Dylan was half glad for the crazy day. Women from…

  Chapter 17

  Penelope’s hands shook as Sara Mersey handed her a cup…

  Chapter 18

  When they reached closing time and Dylan had still not…

  Epilogue

  Penelope leaned in to Dylan, snaked her arm snugly through…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Elaine Fox

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Penelope Porter pulled her car up in front of her ex-husband’s house.

  Her friends were going to kill her. Her family might disown her. Her father, in particular, would call her the worst kind of fool. But they would all, she knew, come around in the end.

  Once she and Glenn had gotten back together.

  Her heart pounded and her palms were damp as she ran them back and forth over the top of the steering wheel, looking toward the glowing windows of the house.

  Only one window on the first floor shone with light, and none on the second floor.

  Penelope grabbed her purse off the seat beside her and rummaged inside until she found her brush. Running it through her hair, she practiced: Glenn, I was driving by, saw the lights on and thought I’d stop by. I haven’t been in the house for so long—I wanted to see if you kept the yellow kitchen.

  With that she would smile her gentlest smile, recalling with him how they’d argued about the color. He’d wanted red—claiming that restaurants were always red—but all her life she’d had a yellow kitchen. She even had one now. She’d finally managed to win that long-ago battle by saying yellow put her in an amorous mood more than any other color in the spectrum. He hadn’t believed her, but he had laughed as he’d conceded and told her she’d be called upon to prove it once the painting was complete.

  She had. That part of their life together had been good, at least in the beginning.

  Penelope plopped the brush back into her purse and looked resolutely at the house. First she’d have to make sure he didn’t have any company. Then she could implement her plan.

  She got out of the car, closing the door with a push instead of a slam—just in case—and walked across the lawn. The air was warm, fallen leaves still few and far between this early in October.

  The curtains on the front window were drawn, but there was a gap that she’d be able to see through if she could get in close. It would require pushing past the bushes, but that was okay. She had dressed carefully, wearing jeans and a light sweater with her brand-new boots. She could wrestle with a bush or two without coming out the worse for wear.

  She hefted her purse up higher on her shoulder with one hand while holding branches back with the other. The bushes only came to about her waist, but a few ragged stems protruded and what was low was thick. Glad of the darkness, for fear of neighbors thinking she was an intruder, she peered through the window into the lit room where Glenn sat—alone—in a recliner, a remote control resting in one hand on his thigh.

  She sighed and watched him a moment. Was he lonely? His curly hair was mussed, but he still wore his suit pants and button-down shirt from work, though the tie was gone and the collar open at the neck. Underneath she could see his white tee-shirt. He hated wearing shirts without a tee-shirt underneath because he loathed the way some men got sweat stains in their armpits.

  Or was it she who had hated that? In any case, he still wore the undershirt.

  She smiled to herself, turned to push back out of the bushes and dropped her keys. She heard them hit the ground with a soft clink and backed up a step. The stacked heel of her brand-new boots hit something solid and her car horn blasted to life, jarring as a marching band in a library.

  She jumped and spun on her heel, looking down into the brush at her feet. She’d obviously stepped on the panic button and there was no stopping the damn thing until she could find her key fob and hit it again.

  As the horn honked over and over and over, head-and taillights flashing in time with the noise, Penelope struggled not to panic.

  “Noooo,” she wailed, her voice—now needlessly—quiet. “No no no no no.”

  She squatted in the bushes, hands scrabbling in the mulch. Nothing. She rose up and stomped around with her boots again, reasoning if she’d turned it on that way the reverse could work too. But they were nowhere.

  What if she’d buried them when she’d stepped on them? She bent down again, digging under the branches, dirt shoving up her fingernails and azalea branches catching at her hair. She’d planted these damn bushes, she thought. Why had he let them get so big?

  A minute later, the worst happened. From her position near the ground she saw light spill across the front porch.

  Glenn had opened the door.

  Staying low, her fingers crawling through the mulch like spiders, she kept her eyes trained on his feet. He’d never see her here.

  But then, he would see her car. Her silver Mercedes Benz C-Class sport sedan—not altogether common—flashing like a UFO directly in front of the house.

  Dammit.

  Still, he might think it belonged to somebody else, especially if she could find her keys and get the damn thing turned off. Her fingers continued to sift through the dirt around her feet.

  Glenn’s legs stepped out onto the porch. She could tell from the way his feet moved that he was looking up and down the street. He thought it was her car, she just knew it.

  Did she come out now and confess? Or did she wait and hope he went back inside? Who came outside to investigate a car alarm, anyway? They went off all the time. A nuisance, mostly.

  On the other hand, this was a quiet neighborhood, and the neighbors might come out soon too.

  But how could she reveal herself? What reason could she possibly have for being in the bushes, other than that she’d been looking at him through the window?

  She had the truth—which was not so awful, she told herself. He’d understand that she had not wanted to interrupt if he had company, and they could laugh about it later.

  With a deep breath, she rose and backed out of the bushes.

  “Penelope?” His voice was incredulous. And loud. It had to be, over the noise
the car was making.

  She looked up as if she hadn’t seen him there. “Oh! Glenn! Hi.” She gave him her brightest smile. Not that he could necessarily see it in the dim light.

  “What on earth are you doing? Shut that thing off, will you?”

  Okay, this was not the best start.

  She brushed her long hair back from her shoulders, pulled a small twig from near her ear, and tried to remain upbeat.

  “I can’t. I was just about to knock on your door, but I dropped my keys and—and the panic button got pushed and then—then all hell broke loose.” She threw a hand toward the car with a laugh.

  “How did you drop your keys in the bushes?”

  She laughed again; her nervous laugh. “I don’t know exactly. You know how that happens sometimes, you drop something and somehow it goes really far—”

  He stomped down the steps and moved around her, diving into the bushes himself. A second later he emerged with the keys, handing them to her like they were a piece of dirty laundry she’d left behind.

  She grabbed the fob, hit the panic button and dropped her hands by her sides.

  “I’m sorry,” she said into the reverberating silence. “Really, I didn’t mean to be so intrusive.”

  He looked at her suspiciously as he ran a hand through his hair. His shirt came partly untucked with the motion.

  “What are you doing here, Penelope?”

  “Um. Well, I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by. I saw your lights were on and…am I interrupting anything?”

  Glenn looked at her a long moment. “No. But you probably already knew that.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say something about scouting for company, but it suddenly sounded weird to her, so she let it pass.

  “It’s just that I haven’t seen the house for so long.” She gazed up at the façade, smiling as confidently as she could. “It’s looking good. Is the kitchen still yellow?”

  He looked at her as if she were nuts. “The kitchen? No, it’s white. Why?”

  Her smile faltered. “Um, okay. Well, uh, can I come in?”

  He hesitated.

  “Just for a minute?” She put her hands in her jeans pockets, hunching her shoulders against some imaginary cold.

  “I guess. For a minute. It’s kind of a mess.” He turned for the stairs, rubbing a hand along the back of his neck.

  If she’d thought the place would look as it had when they’d been together she was dead wrong. It was nothing like it had been. The furniture—what there was of it—was worn and masculine. There was the recliner—blue, ripped at the right arm—a couple of narrow armchairs with flat seat cushions and a small table between them. Spots marred the off-white wall-to-wall carpeting that now covered her carefully tended hardwood, and the vague outline of several now-absent pictures could be made out against the dimming white paint. The largest piece of furniture in the room was a flat-screen TV, sitting on what looked like a computer cart.

  Suddenly she didn’t want to see the kitchen.

  “So Glenn. I was thinking about, well, I was hoping that we could, or that you’d want to—” She interrupted herself with another nervous laugh as he turned to look at her. “Sorry, I’m really botching this up.”

  “Botching what up?” His arms were crossed over his chest. He did not sit down.

  For no reason at all she noted that he’d put on a little bit of a belly. It looked strange on his tall frame.

  “Well, I wanted to ask if we could get together sometime,” she forced out. “Just to, you know, catch up.”

  His eyes moved over her face but he was otherwise motionless.

  “Pen, last time we ‘got together’ you told me I was the biggest mistake of your life and you were glad I was out of it.”

  “I—I know, I’m s—”

  “And I’m thinking I don’t need a repeat of that. I mean, I get it. I’m a shit. I did you wrong. I ruined your life.” He cleared his throat and added, “So was there something else you wanted to talk about, or can we just leave it at that?”

  He was right. She had said all those things. And she’d said them right after he’d told her he loved her, that he’d never stopped loving her.

  The trouble was, she hadn’t been ready to listen. Not then. Then she still had not gotten over all he’d done. How he’d gotten married three months after their divorce.

  How he’d had a child with her, the new woman. Abigail. Even though he’d refused to have one with Penelope.

  How he’d come back to Penelope only after the other woman had left him.

  But he was hurting now, she could see that. Despite everything, she wanted to make him feel better.

  “Actually, yes, there is something more I wanted to talk about.” She straightened her spine. “I’m sorry I was so, uh, harsh, at our last meeting. There were reasons. I wasn’t ready to hear you. I was…surprised by you, by everything you said. Probably a lot like you are with me now.” She chuckled awkwardly.

  Glenn was silent, but she thought his expression had grown softer.

  “I appreciate that,” he said finally.

  She exhaled.

  “So can we get together?” Her hands gripped her purse at her side and she forcibly relaxed them.

  “You know? Catch up?”

  “Penelope, we’re together now. Why don’t you just tell me what’s up?”

  He moved to the recliner he’d been in when she’d looked through the window and sat down with a huff.

  She tried to gather her thoughts, but she had a hard time getting past the fact that he hadn’t asked her to sit down. He just sat there like a judge before a defendant.

  “Penelope, I know you. I know how you are. We don’t need to try to be friends, if that’s what you’re thinking. We don’t have to play the annual catch-up game so you don’t feel like you’ve been mean, or irresponsible, or whatever.”

  “I don’t feel irresponsible, Glenn. I’m not doing this because I feel guilty about anything. I was just thinking about our last meeting. About what we talked about. And I’m sorry I closed the door so firmly that day. I…I would like to talk about it now. I mean, you know, not here. But soon. If you want to, that is. Still.”

  He frowned, eyebrows drawing together over skeptical blue eyes. “Are you talking about the meeting where I put my heart on the table and you shoved it back down my throat?”

  “Okay, I suppose I deserve that. But, for me, I’m talking about the meeting where you made a suggestion that I was not sufficiently over our history to consider.”

  There, she thought. That said it. Maybe things could be different this time around, because she was different. She was stronger. Smarter.

  “Are you ‘over’ our history now?” His brows rose.

  “I believe so.” She made an effort to maintain eye contact. “Would you like to come over for dinner?”

  That clearly took him by surprise. “Dinner? At your house?”

  “Yes. Dinner, at my house. I’ll cook.”

  “When?” He asked the question as if she’d informed him of a murder he hadn’t known about.

  “Friday night?” Inexplicably, Penelope’s confidence had returned. Keeping Glenn off balance seemed to be good for her. She hadn’t planned on dinner, but once the invitation was out it seemed like an excellent idea. Dinner, on her turf. She was a good cook.

  “I, uh, I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said slowly. One palm rubbed along the side of his pants, as if his hands had gone sweaty. “I was supposed to babysit that night, but Abigail said something about wanting to switch weekends with me. I can let you know tomorrow.” He looked back up at her.

  Babysit.

  She ignored the emotional speed bump and smiled. “Okay. Let me know.”

  “Okay. Well, uh, thanks. I guess.”

  “You’re welcome.” She turned and took a few steps toward the door, knowing full well her butt looked fabulous in these jeans. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow then.”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, sure, tomorrow.”

  He watched her go, she could feel his eyes on her, so she turned at the door and flashed him a smile, swinging her hair just a little more than necessary, and stepped out into the balmy fall night.

  Victory, from the jaws of defeat, she thought, practically skipping down the walk to her car. Now all she had to do was plan the perfect menu, and she’d be on her way.

  “Pen, you’ve got to give this little guy a name,” Lily Tyler said as the puppy squirmed in her hands. “He’s like a giant cotton ball!”

  “I know,” Penelope said, smiling into the dog’s bearded face. “But I just can’t find the one that fits. Griffin?” She leaned toward the brown-and-white fuzz ball. “Jiminy? Scout? He doesn’t respond to anything.”

  “Of course he doesn’t.” Georgia used one hand to pull her curly blonde hair behind her head in the fall breeze. “He doesn’t know it’s his name yet. You’ve gotta drill it into his head like a mantra. He’s a male, you know. It’s gonna take some time.”

  “Wimbledon responded right off the bat to his name,” Pen said, remembering her late Labrador wistfully. He had died, far too young, of cancer the previous June.

  “So did Peyton.” Megan, the veterinarian, nodded.

  “What kind is he again?” Lily asked.

  “A Havanese. From Havana. Cuba. Well, not him. But the breed,” Penelope explained.

  “Maybe you should call him Fidel,” Georgia said.

  “Or Castro.”

  “I am not naming this little innocent puppy Castro!” Penelope laughed.

  The four of them sat at the picnic table at the dog park, a warm breeze blowing leaves and the occasional bit of trash across the open space. Lily’s French bulldog, Doug, pursued every blustering thing maniacally.

  Penelope’s puppy—Chopin? Sunday? Heck, Fluffy?—watched intently with his birdlike eyes, but did not chase anything even though Lily had placed him back on the ground near Penelope’s feet. He was intimidated, Pen thought, by the bigger dogs.