Invisible AnnaFalling in love started with finding herself
Coralie Moss
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
About the Author
Sneak Peek at Elaine’s novelette
Copyright © 2018 by Coralie Moss
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, objects, and incidents herein are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual living things, events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Published internationally by Pink Moon Books, British Columbia, Canada
ISBN: 978-1-7752646-0-6
Cover by Elizabeth Mackey
Dedication
For MJK
my rock
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to my editor, Jeni Chappelle.
Her early suggestions gave shape to Anna’s story.
My beta readers: Connie Kuhns, Felicia Grossman, Jody Price, and Katrina Ariel.
The cheerleaders and instigators: Ava Quinn, Deana Birch, E.C. Farrell, Evie Drae, Felicia Grossman, Lily Michaels, Meka James, MJ Marshall, Taralynn Moore, Taylor Fox, Tia Barber, Yaffa Seraph; and Grace, for planting the first seed.
Cover Design: Elizabeth Mackey
And for her counsel and generous offerings
of wisdom and cupcakes:
Meghan Ciana Doidge
Chapter One
Turning fifty wasn’t so bad. It was the turning invisible that sucked.
One day, you felt reasonably attractive. You were having a conversation with a guy, and next thing you knew, he was scanning the room and walking away mid-sentence. Then it was just you, a wall of bad art and a half-filled glass of wine in the corner of yet another gallery opening or book signing.
“Mom.”
On the way to invisible, sales women handed you one-size-fits-all caftans when what you really wanted was the adorable eyelet mini-dress on the mannequin in the window. Your adult children begged you not to wear a two-piece bathing suit. Better yet, they suggested, why go to the beach at all?
On the way to invisible, you began to understand why many women of a certain age dyed their hair fire-engine red and stopped giving any kind of a fuck, whatsoever.
“Mom!”
Anna floated out of her reverie, a gentle hand patting her upper back. The linseed-oil finish of Gary Jr. and his wife, Suki’s, porch glistened in the late afternoon sun while the cluster of family and friends ringing the circular metal and glass table held their collective breath.
“Mom,” Anna’s daughter, Gigi, repeated. “Your candles are dripping.”
Anna pursed her lips, ignored her children’s worried glances, and managed to blow out all five flames. Everyone applauded. Suki plucked the smoldering tapers out of the buttercream frosting, placed them on a painted tray, and handed Anna a silver cake knife and a stack of dessert plates.
The rest of the birthday celebration passed in a blur. Gary Jr. drove Anna home afterward. She mounted the steps of her narrow side deck, the vase of flowers from the party propped against her hip. The key she kept meaning to recut stuck in the lock. Again. She moved a set of salt-and-pepper shakers aside, and put the generous bouquet of farm-grown poppies in the center of the kitchen table. Before her husband died, everything in her modest home had its place. And each of those things continued to have its place.
Five years ago, she and Gary had begun to find a new rhythm to their married life. They had made plans to travel away from their home in coastal British Columbia and to expand Anna’s sewing business.
Then Gary had suffered a massive heart attack.
Anna put her client orders on hold, helped her two newly adult children grieve their father’s passing, and mourned in private for future grandchildren who would never sample Gary’s walnut penuche fudge or spend a summer night stargazing with him from the top of Mount Maxwell.
She started at a knock at her door and exhaled when Gary Jr. stepped inside to hand her a gaudy gift bag stuffed with cards and gifts. He placed a bakery box—which box promised the leftover dessert she’d eyeballed when Suki removed the cake stand from the table—near the flowers and opened his arms for a quick hug.
“Love you, Mom.”
Anna drew the shade on the door when he left and opened the cardboard container. Her thoughtful daughter-in-law had added a thick schmear of frosting to the paper plate. She swiped the added, unused candles one by one through the mocha confection, sucking the sweetness off the blunt ends before lining them beside the plate. She rinsed off the candles in the basin of the chipped porcelain sink and set the slender sentinels of her five decades on the windowsill to dry.
She wasn’t tired, and she wasn’t about to give in to the tug of melancholy pulling her toward the couch, a sad movie, and a glass of wine…and another. She brought the bag of birthday goodies to a side chair, tugged on the pull chain of the old milk-glass lamp, and sat.
The rosy red envelope from her best friend, Elaine, beckoned to be opened. Inside the enclosed card, she’d written, “Anna Banana, Time for a couple of old birds to learn some new tricks! Happy Birthday, Love, E.”
A gift certificate, decorated with stylized pen-and-ink drawings of nude bodies, dropped into her lap. Anna flipped the rectangular paper and read a jumble of words informing her she would be attending a workshop on Intimate Breathing the following weekend. When she unwrapped the accompanying pink-striped package, a wave of prickly heat flushed over her neck and cheeks. She ignored the chirp of an incoming phone call and fanned her face with the birthday card.
Elaine, that paragon of wild womanhood, had given her an assortment of palm-sized vibrators in sorbet-colored silicone, along with a sampler of personal lubricants. Her friend must have charged the sex toys
