All Dressed Up by Lilian Darcy Page A

shrinking the space between them on the
garden bench. It was the big moment, and they both knew it. The
naked meeting of glances, the zing in the air, the molding of flesh
into a new shape just because they were both in the same space
together.
    Lainie
couldn’t believe they were managing to use God as a series of
pick-up lines. At their age. Or that they were negotiating the
future of their relationship so soon. “I – I don’t think so,” she
told him finally. “I don’t think I need you to work out a strategy,
Mac. I think the God thing is a bit too much of a barrier.”
    “Because we
would keep needing to have these trite conversations?” He made the
trite God conversations sound like something to want, like an
adventure. He seemed more at ease with her wobbly belief systems
than she would have thought, which felt okay for a few moments, but
then pretty fast turned into a new reason to mistrust. He saw her
as a conquest to be made on God’s behalf.
    “And then you
talk me round to a position of defined faith, and then what?” she
asked. “The challenge is gone, and you’re onto the next lonely
middle-aged female agnostic with good legs.”
    “Eyes,” he
said.
    “What?”
    “It’s your
eyes. Your brown eyes. And your rusty hair.”
    “Right.”
    There was a
second of silence, then he asked in a lower voice, “What is it
about me?”
    “Your size.
Your beard. Your voice,” she blurted out. “Your eyes, too.”
    “And always a
few things you can’t put your finger on.”
    “Always.” She
closed her eyes for a moment, feeling an absurd sense of loss. “But
sorry, no. It’s not going anywhere this time. I just don’t think
there’s a good place for it to go.”
    She listened
to the silence that greeted her decision and felt like a total
idiot and a masochist for crushing that lovely feeling she’d had –
and obviously he’d had, too – since Friday afternoon. The
breathlessness. The disbelief. The suddenness. Even when she was
otherwise so down about Emma and Charlie, the giddy twinge of
knowledge that Mac McLintock liked her had still been there, and
lovely.
    Just
lovely.
    Why couldn’t
she have let both of them live in a fool’s paradise for a little
longer?
    “Sorry,” she
blurted out. “Sorry. I’m such an idiot. I just go headlong into
things, sometimes. You asked me across for coffee and I skipped
right on to our grounds for divorce.”
    “What do you
want to handle next week, then? The property settlement? Custody? I
warn you, I’m keeping the hymn book collection.”
    “Sorry. I’m so
sorry.”
    “It’s mutual,
Lainie. I’m divorced from one atheist, it’d be crazy for me to get
involved with another one.”
    “I’m not an
atheist,” she said quickly. “Not at all. I think God is very
important, I just think He’s a lot more unknowable than you do,
maybe not all that helpful to us when we ask, and I don’t like
bringing Him into conversations.”
    “Can I get
back to you on it, then? Now that you’ve clarified? On whether your
theology is compatible with my needs? I could work up some dot
points.”
    “Oh… no… no,”
she apologized in an anguished way, then realized too late that he
was joking. She felt so awkward. She got herself away, leaving the
coffee unfinished and feeling certain that she wouldn’t see him
again.

 
    Chapter
Five

    “Well, okay, I
won’t push the idea, but what did you think of it?” Angie asked
Brooke, about Emma’s dress.
    “Oh God, I
thought it was beautiful!” Brooke wore her maroon nurse’s scrubs,
and had a bagel spread with cream cheese in her hand. She looked so
young and pretty with her highlighted blonde hair and her blue
eyes, but she was going to get hippy soon if she wasn’t careful. It
had already started.
    “You see,
that’s ironic because I didn’t care for it all that much,” Angie
told her, instead of warning her to stop eating. She hated that she
wanted to warn her, hated her own narrowness about things