Page 59 of Summer Longing
She kicked off her Converse and settled into the couch with Mira nestled in one arm. Elise found a bookmark wedged between the cushions, moved it aside, and set the diaper bag next to her. There were so many supplies involved in baby care, and managing them was, if not half the battle, certainly a good quarter of it.
Mira sucked on the bottle, her hands curled in tight little fists. Elise brushed her finger over one of them and smiled. She felt she could exhale for the first time all day. The only blight on the otherwise perfect moment was the persistence of the rash on Mira’s cheeks. She knew now that it was harmless, but it did look terrible and she was frustrated she couldn’t do anything to make it go away.
She heard the back door open and close and then the sound of someone in the kitchen putting away groceries, cabinets opening and closing and the distinct click of the refrigerator door. Elise was tempted to call out hello but didn’t want to startle Mira with a loud voice. The baby’s eyes were closed, and Elise marveled at the delicate translucence of her eyelids.
“Looks like you’ve got the hang of things now.”
Elise looked up to see Ruth smiling from across the room. “Some things, yes. Others are still a work in progress.”
“It’s always a work in progress,” Ruth said, looking pointedly at the room Olivia had moved into.
“Can I ask you something?” Elise said. “Do you remember if Olivia had baby acne?”
“Baby acne?” Ruth said, walking closer. “I don’t think so.” She peered down at Mira. “Is that itching her?”
“No, it just looks awful,” Elise said. “The doctor said it will go away on its own.”
“Maybe she has sensitive skin. You know, you really have to watch what products you use. A lot of things are labeledall naturalbut they’re not. I’m very aware of that sort of thing because I was in the cosmetics business for years.”
“Oh,” Elise said.
“I’ll make some soap and lotion for you,” Ruth said.
“Really?”
“Sure. It’s what I do. Or used to do.”
Elise knew Ruth had owned a cosmetics company and sold it for a lot of money. Fern had made a big deal about the fact that she’d paid all the rent for the house up front and in cash. “Were the products organic?”
“Not initially. That came later. My sister got breast cancer ten years ago, and I became much more aware about the potential toxicity of everyday beauty products. I created a nail polish that was free of the five major toxic chemicals, then started a line of organic skin-care products.”
“That’s really impressive, Ruth.”
“Oh, well, it sounds more complicated than it was,” she said. “Really, it just happened gradually. Ingredient by ingredient. But I do miss it. So I’m happy to whip up something for little Miss Mira here.” She reached out and gently stroked the baby’s dark hair before heading up the stairs to her room.
Elise felt, for the umpteenth time since the baby’s miraculous appearance, that she was incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by women she could count on. She’d never imagined that Ruth—someone she’d tried to push away—would become part of her support system.
She just wished her own wife could become more of a part of it too.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ruth woke up at seven, sent off a quick text to tell Amelia that she wouldn’t make it to class, and headed down to the kitchen to organize her equipment—a double boiler, a crockpot, measuring cups, and a few resealable tea bags that she’d picked up from Elise’s shop.
She felt bad about missing the mosaic class, but she told herself it was for a good reason. And if she didn’t finish her starfish, well, the hours she’d spent in Amelia’s studio had gotten her back to working with her hands. Now, thanks to Elise and the baby, she was reminded of what else she could be doing.
Her search through the local shops had been surprisingly fruitful, and she’d managed to track down the ingredients she needed to whip up a batch of organic soap: olive pomace oil, shea butter, castor oil, colloidal oatmeal, bentonite clay, and a pack of Egyptian chamomile buds. The hardest thing to find had been silicone cupcake molds, but a quick call to Lidia Barros led to a friend of a friend who had a few to spare.
Ruth had been tempted to start mixing and heating last night, but she didn’t want to disturb anyone—she would have been in the kitchen until the earliest hours of the morning—so she’d waited.
Her first task was infusing the olive oil with the chamomile. The olive oil was moisturizing, and the chamomile had calming/anti-inflammatory properties. Chamomile was one of her favorite go-to ingredients. She poured a little over fourteen ounces of the oil into the double boiler, then measured out two tablespoons of the chamomile buds, put them into a tea bag, and sealed it. She put the packed tea bag into the oil, set the heat to medium, and stirred gently.
How long had it been since she’d created a product from scratch? Years. A decade. She would have sworn that she’d been hands-on until the very end at the company, but really, she had become a conference-room chemist. A figurehead. It had happened so gradually, she hadn’t even noticed. But wasn’t life like that? One minute you’re a teenager, the next you’re a bride, the next you’re an exhausted working mother with a husband you barely have time to smile at over coffee in the morning. And so it was with her career—one minute she was mixing ingredients in her kitchen and the next she was signing off on multimillion-dollar ad campaigns for a company with her name on it.
She shook her head, thinking that she’d never had a road map to the life she wanted. But to be fair, neither had Ben. Four years of college had disabused him of the notion that he might be the next great American playwright. If this was a difficult reality for him to accept, he’d never complained about it. Although, Ruth realized only looking back on it later, he also never again wanted to visit Provincetown and stopped going to see shows. It was like he was trying to forget he’d ever had artistic ambitions.
But they needed an income while he was in medical school, and so she’d ended up with the company, working around the clock even after Olivia was born. Her one indulgence was getting manicures. At the time, a single brand distributed polish to the salons. It held all of that market share, but then they changed the formula and it started chipping sooner. It drove Ruth crazy so of course she had to try to create a better formula—and she did. She launched with a red called Cherry Hill, put it in a unique, square bottle instead of a round one, and labeled it Liv Lacquer. By the end of the year, she had a hundred different colors and her polish was in every nail salon in New Jersey and Philadelphia. The following year, it was in 90 percent of salons across the country. Ben was a year into his residency when she was able to pay off all of his student loans.
“Wow, what’s going on in here?” Olivia said, walking into the kitchen in a T-shirt and drawstring pajama bottoms, rubbing her eyes.
