Page 10 of Spectacular Things
Training Days
Except for the coldest winter days when the temperature falls dangerously low, mother and daughter rise early to get a touch on the ball and a step ahead of everyone else.
Most of the year, Mia returns home with wind-chapped cheeks, but in the summer she walks back from the beach suntanned and smiling.
Everything is better in the summer: They train barefoot on the cool sand at sunrise with the ocean as their captive audience.
Liz brings her portable stereo and blasts the burned CD her high school soccer team played during warm-ups.
Mia feels like an adult, breaking a sweat with her mother, listening to “Get Low, Fly High” while mimicking her mom’s calisthenics.
When a disjointed army of homemakers and caregivers arrives on the beach, weighed down by ruddy-faced children and baskets full of battered toys, they openly stare at Liz and Mia warming up with high knees and butt kicks, Frankensteins and crab walks.
“Cold muscles are as dangerous as great white sharks,” Liz says, shimmering with sweat and oblivious to the women watching them.
The onlookers—tented in their husband’s rust-stained work shirts, the collars stretched and buttons missing—take in Liz’s toned legs and perky, twenty-one-year-old breasts, and pray to sweet Jesus that the new babysitter twisting herself into a pretzel is only a problem for some rich mother who can afford to be elsewhere right now.
The handful of men traversing the beach this early in the day are always solo, unburdened walkers and joggers, although their pace tends to slow considerably when they clock Liz performing deep lunges across the sand in her high school soccer shorts, rolled twice at the waist band.
Once they finish their warm-up, Liz claps her hands together and tells Mia, “Let’s practice first touches.
” She uses clumps of seaweed for cones, collects driftwood for goalposts.
As Mia receives ball after ball from her mother, she doesn’t complain that she’s hot or thirsty, or that the slant of the sun is now blinding her.
Instead, she uses her hand as a visor and tries not to get distracted by the other kids squealing at the water’s edge.
“Good job adapting,” Liz says, passing the ball back to her. “You’ll face bad weather, lousy field conditions, and half-blind refs, but you’ve got to stay focused and play through every obstacle if you want to be the best, and you know how I know you’re going to be the best?”
“How?”
“Because you’re a Lowe, not a quitter.”
Sometimes, after Mia passes the ball to her mom, Liz will flick it up from her foot and into the air, juggling as Mia counts each bounce. As talented as a trained seal, her mother is worthy of her own circus act.
“Keep going!” Mia pleads when Liz volleys the ball back to her.
“You try,” Liz instructs. “You want the ball to feel like it’s a part of your body, like it’s as responsive to your brain as your fingers.
” But the ball doesn’t float in steady bobs or graceful arcs when Mia tries to juggle.
She can only string two, maybe three connections together before the ball bangs off her knee and lands in the ocean.
As she runs to retrieve it, Mia notices a girl her own age wearing a yellow swimsuit and hunched in the sand, humming to herself as she inspects a mussel shell.
She seems content doing absolutely nothing.
Mia feels the girl’s eyes on her as she slides her mom the ball, now slick from the ocean.
Liz begins to juggle once again. “It’s all about practice,” Liz says.
The ball bops happily above her knees—left, right, left, right—as steady as a metronome.
“You’ll be doing this before you know it,” Liz says, heading the ball once, twice, three times in a row.
“You’re still too young to practice heading, but when it’s time, just remember: You can only use your head if you keep your eyes wide open. ”
After the beach, mother and daughter walk toward home, passing a long line outside the local bakery. The promise of fresh croissants lures groggy adults out their front doors and into the queue. Liz hands Mia the water bottle they share and reminds her to hydrate properly for a quicker recovery.
Everyone waiting in the bakery line looks up at Liz because she is tall, but they continue to stare because her face is the same irresistible invitation as a turned-down bed, a glass-surfaced lake—you can’t help but fall into it.
She is young and beautiful and magnetic.
And while Mia frowns at the truck drivers that honk, the construction crews that whistle, and even the old ladies who bless Liz for her figure in the CVS checkout line, she delights in the captivated inquiries from strangers about Liz’s arctic blue eyes.
They are such a singular, startling blue that Mia once asked her mom, after reading a children’s book on Alaska, if she was part Siberian husky.
“I’ve got the resilience of a sled dog,” Liz had replied thoughtfully. “The tenacity, too.”
It’s true.
When she’d fled Virginia, Liz drove straight to Victory, stopping every three hours to feed Mia in the back seat.
She pulled into a Hannaford parking lot just after seven a.m., and dreamt with her eyes open about sleeping forever.
But it was the first day of her life in Maine, a big day, and so Liz snapped the hairband on her wrist, retied the red ribbon around her high bun, and approached a well-dressed woman unloading a cart full of bagged groceries.
“Good morning,” Liz said with a small wave and a big smile as she held Mia against her chest. “I’m Liz Lowe, and this is my baby, and we’re new in town, like brand-new—”
“I can see that,” the woman said warmly, nodding at the infant.
Her name was Sally Green and, as a mother of three, she recognized Liz’s situation in her bones.
Sally’s oldest was in college, her youngest about to start middle school.
Just then, Mia let out a hunger cry and Sally fought the instinct to pop a finger in the baby’s mouth.
“I’m sure this is going to be the craziest interaction you have all day,” Liz was saying, “but do you know of anyone hiring?”
Maybe Dr. Green said yes because she had grown up racing Siberian huskies in northern Maine and Liz’s eyes bred instant familiarity.
But more likely, it was the ambitious capability shining through those ice-blue irises.
Even with breast milk stains on her shirt and panic in her voice, Liz Lowe was clearly a go-getter with something to prove and a desire to learn.
Dr. Green hired Liz on the spot to work her front desk.
“And the baby?” Liz asked.
“Is adorable,” Dr. Green smiled, reaching out for Mia while saying the baby could come to the office, no problem.
Dr. Green had made the same accommodation for her last assistant before she’d moved home to Ohio the previous month.
“There’s even a chance,” Sally thought aloud in the parking lot, “that we still have a Pack ’n Play buried somewhere in the storage closet. ”
After her first three weeks in Maine—and having grown tired of the less-than-reputable Victory Motel & Car Wash off I-95—Liz sold the luxury SUV her father bought her for UCLA.
She used the cash for a down payment on a bungalow that was advertised as “full of potential.” Dr. Green cosigned the mortgage, already understanding the strength of Liz’s character and her determination to “win” at all things—whether it was fitting in one more patient before the holiday weekend or actively building her credit to attain a perfect FICO score.
On a regular basis, Dr. Green found herself wishing that her own children demonstrated more of Liz’s formidable can-do-it-ness.
Meanwhile, the bungalow provided mother and child an immediate safe haven.
But it also gave them a mold problem and a leaky roof.
On Mia’s first birthday, the oven suddenly quit with Liz’s half-baked cake inside, and then, just after Christmas, the refrigerator started gasping for its life.
Liz shed tears of all kinds in those early Victory days—scared, frustrated, irate, self-doubting—as there are only so many home repairs a single mother can tackle with one hand mixing Jell-O for her sick kid and the other dialing dental patients to remind them of their upcoming appointments.
Within two years of moving in, however, Liz saved up enough to buy some time: She beat back the mold, replaced the oven igniter herself, and hired her neighbor’s son to patch the roof for next to nothing.
Together, Liz and Mia painted each room in the house a different hue of the same sunny optimism that had taken them thus far and outfitted every square foot of their space in well-loved wares from the local swap shop.
The pink floral couch they rescued from a curb over in the nice part of town fit in the living room like it was custom-designed for the space.
Stepping back to admire her work, Liz knew that even her own mother would be impressed.
Not that they’d spoken since Liz’s pregnancy, and not that Liz cared about her mother’s approval anymore—only her daughter’s.
While Lenora had treated Liz as the competition, Liz championed Mia as her first-round draft pick, her number-one teammate.
In Mia’s bright brown eyes and death-grip hugs, Liz recognized what she’s yearned for all her life: the promise of unconditional love.
Which is why, four years after arriving in Victory, Liz continues to serve as the eternally grateful and fiercely loyal front desk receptionist at Dr. Green’s dental office.
On a daily basis, she expertly assuages the anxieties of cavity-prone patients and laughs off their personal questions that always dance around the same core argument: Shouldn’t such a capable and beguiling young woman be the center of attention, not submitting insurance claims and scheduling teeth cleanings?
“I have a young daughter,” Liz tells them, and the patients nod with understanding, because this makes sense—regular hours, health insurance, et cetera.
But then Liz elaborates: “And I’m training her to become a world-class soccer player.
” At this, the nervous, nosy patients continue to nod with understanding, but only because they suddenly remember that the most beautiful people tend to be a little bit nuts.