Free The Do-Over by Kathy Dunnehoff Page B

heels of both hands together. She pushed toward the center, and the cream rushed over her fingers like a slippery river.
    In the middle of the bowl she felt the tangle of his fingers as they brought the batter inward. She watched the ripples of it, like art unfolding before her, a study of working hands and cream blurring together.
    She moved to cup the inside of the bowl and brought more warm silk back to the center, watching his hands shape it.
    “It’s great, huh?”
    Mara jumped as her attention came back to Celia standing beside, and she pulled her hands out and took the towel Celia offered her. “Lost myself for a minute there.”
    The man lifted a hand full of batter from the bowl and palmed it into a rough ball. “Lost. Found. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.”
    Celia opened a cellophane bag, and he dropped the butter ball in. She twisted it closed with a silvery-blue tie and held it out.
    Mara took it in her palm, felt the warmth through the cellophane, and met his green eyes. “I’m Mara.”
    He smiled and continued to work, filling the indentations of a metal tray with the batter. “I know.”
    “I’m married.”
    He didn’t slow, just continued to form the soaps. “There are only two kinds of women who need some Abundance. Single women. And married women.”
    Her head lowered, and she stared at him over the top of her sunglasses.
    Celia patted the top of her bag, and Mara jumped again at the crinkle of cellophane. Celia smiled at her. “Tell us what you think.”
    About his eyes? “Oh, the soap. Right.” She pushed her sunglasses back on the bridge of her nose, leaving a delicate smudge of soap on two rhinestones. The phone rang at the desk, and Celia pulled on her arm, taking them both toward the front with perky chatting. “The almond’s pretty new, but I think it will be really popular because it just smells so good. I can’t really smell it now, but I did earlier, and it was great.”
    Mara tried to focus on Celia and get out of the workroom without looking back, but despite her best intentions, she glanced over her shoulder and saw him smile as if he knew she’d take one more look. “Happy Independence Day.”
    Celia tugged, and Mara tripped around the corner.
     
    She paced the loft, moving from the windows to the kitchen bar, where a few odd chocolates still clustered in the bag. She popped one in her mouth and studied the teddy calendar. It was the fourth of July. Independence Day. That’s all the man meant. How had she not known? She’d never missed a holiday before. Her mother-in-law had given her flags for most of them, little garden ones with bunnies or pumpkins or snowmen. God, wasn’t it just one more thing to keep track of? She even had a red, white, and blue one just for the fourth.
    She reconstructed her flagless day. She’d slept through half of it, recovering from her reading bender the night before. Then there’d been the bad lunch with Dan. She was going to think of the trolley fiasco as three breadsticks and a plate full of guilt . Then, well, she’d plunged up to her elbows in a vat of vanilla with a stranger. What kind of woman did that kind of thing?
    She’d left the United States on Canada Day and then on the anniversary of her country’s, well, anniversary, she’d found herself swapping soap with a nameless Canadian.
    She was in trouble. A woman in trouble was the kind of woman who did that. She needed to ground herself. She’d call Logan and remember her real life, her real country, her real job… raising an American child to adulthood. Adulthood. That’s where she lived. That was her home country. She was fine.
    She dialed her in-laws and sat back on the best couch she’d ever had. There, gratitude. Gratitude was grounding, even on Independence Day.
    “Mulligan residence.”
    “Hi, Lois. It’s Mar… Janie. Just calling to check on Logan.”
    Mara waited for the usual quick update, the efficient grandmother status report and then the