“What happened to you here? It’s like I don’t even know you.” He stood and pointed at the bookshop. “Are you sleeping with that guy in there? Is that what’s happening here? Because if it is, I can get over it.”
“You can get over it?”
“I can. I promise I can. I can forgive . . .” His voice trailed off because even he must have heard the complete absurdity of his pleas.
“Ryan.” I stood to face him. “This”—I waved my hands between us—“is never happening again. We don’t always get a second chance.”
As Mimi would say, for gravy’s sake, I thought he was going to cry. His eyes filled and he turned away. But it was his ego that was dented, not his heart. A woman shuffled by, dragging her big-wheeled cart, just as I’d done the first day in town. Two little girls were in the back playing with yarn and trying to make Jacob’s ladder. I greeted them and they waved at me. It was the simplest expression, but it was also so grand—community.
“Second chances,” Ryan said, repeating me. “We all deserve one.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I’ve needed second chances and I’ve had them. But not us. This won’t work, Ryan. I don’t want it anymore and it wasn’t all that great to begin with.”
“I don’t get it.” He sank back onto the bench.
I glanced at him. “Neither do I, really. Because honestly, if you’d shown up even two weeks ago I would have fallen into your arms.” I sat next to him and this time I took his hands. “Don’t be sad. You have at least a million girls running after you.”
“But none of them are you.”
“No, they aren’t.” I leaned forward to kiss his cheek just as Fletch opened the door of the bookshop to check on me. It looked bad. I knew that.
Ryan wound his hands around the back of my neck and pulled me in for a real kiss. I strained backward and shook my head.
He dropped his hands and sank into himself. “Okay. Got it.”
Together we stood and I hugged him. “I’m sorry you drove all the way here,” I said.
“Me, too.” He yanked his keys from his front pocket as if they had been screaming for his attention.
Fletch reached my side and Ryan stared at us as Fletch dropped his arm over my shoulder.
“Really? This is your guy?” Ryan rolled his eyes.
“He is,” I said.
“Rebound,” he said with disdain and a curled lip.
I moved closer to Fletch. “No, it was you who went after a rebound.”
A train whistle sounded far off and a motorcycle gunned around the corner—the perfect soundtrack to announce Ryan’s departure. He exhaled in defeat and walked off.
“You okay?” Fletch asked.
“Yep.” I kissed him, lingered there for a moment and felt the thrill of his touch. “I’m more than okay.”
“Did you make him leave because of me?” Fletch glanced at the empty corner. Maybe he thought Ryan wasn’t gone, that he would come back.
“No.” I kissed Fletch again, pressing my lips against his. “I did it for me.”
“Even better,” Fletch said. “Even better.”
chapter 39
BONNY BLANKENSHIP
If a month back, someone had told me of the crowd I would have at my river house, I wouldn’t have believed them. Mimi and her beau, Harrington. Ms. Loretta, who had been Clara’s best friend. My daughter, happy and laughing. Lainey and Tim with their children. And Owen, who had stayed in town. So far.
The days after Mr. Rohr’s death, there’d seemed to be a secret I didn’t know, a habit I’d never formed, a friend I’d forgotten to call, a repair I hadn’t known needed doing: I’d been adrift. Yet all those previous weeks at the river house I’d been able to keep the reality of my part in his death at bay, hold back the possibility with the flimsiest of walls. Because there’d been the chance it wasn’t true, I’d been able to live on that little chance, nurture myself with its optimism. No more. I lived in the truth now.
It was the dinner party that night that kept me moving forward—a goal. I shaped my day with the to-do list and, like my leather binder, it became a structure for me, a kind of holding cell to keep the questions out and keep the focus in. Lainey had me do yoga with her that morning, and I only fell over twice. She taught me a ten-minute meditation, which felt like four and a half hours, honestly. Sitting still had never been my thing. My thing was going to change. It must.
The dining table in the main room was set for ten. I’d arranged seashells and candles in the center, and a basket full of pictures from not only the past weeks, but also our childhood summers I’d found in the attic. Our Girl Detective notebook sat on the coffee table.
The menu: Shrimp and grits. Biscuits. Pound cake and bourbon for Mimi. A salad with every fresh vegetable I could find at the farmers’ market that morning. The guests would all arrive soon and I was ready, which felt like a small miracle because when I’d woken that morning the panic had spilled out from inside me.
“I can’t do this today,” I’d said out loud to my empty bedroom.
But I was wrong, because you don’t know who you can be, or what you can do, until you have to be and do.
The screened porch fans whirred their whispers and I went out to sit on the wicker couch, to stare at the river. The house would fill up any minute—one by one they would arrive and voices would fill the rooms as I’d bustle around the kitchen and life would continue.
“Mom?” Piper’s voice called.
Piper and the kids burst onto the screen porch from the house. Piper held up her hands. “Promise you won’t be mad.”
“What?”
And then I saw what she meant: in Daisy’s arms was the tiniest little bundle of brown fur, and at first I thought it was a bunny. Then she set it down and it emitted a tiny little bark and scurried between Daisy’s feet.
“A dog?”
She flinched. “I took the kids to the animal shelter because Lainey asked me to keep them busy for a couple hours and . . . and we couldn’t help it. Daisy went crazy when we left without it. And the poor dog cried and cried and cried.”
“Daisy? George?” Lainey’s voice called, and we turned to see her and Tim walk onto the porch. When Lainey saw the puppy, she dropped to the ground and picked it up, rubbed her fingers behind its ears and nuzzled its face. “Where did you find this little bundle?”
“Mom.” Daisy’s voice rose with such pleading. “You have to let us keep it. You have to. I found him with Piper and it imprinted on me.”
“Imprinted?” Lainey looked at her daughter. “What?”
“That’s what the lady at the shelter said. That when he started following me around, he’d imprinted on me.”
“Oh,” Tim said. “I bet she says that to all the girls.” But he, too, petted the now quiet puppy. “He’s awful cute.”
“His mommy died when she had the puppies and there were six of them and he was the last one left without a mommy. And could you imagine not having a mommy? We have to keep him.” Daisy pulled at the edges of Lainey’s sundress and buried her face in it. “Say we can.”
“We can,” Lainey said. “Right, Tim?”
“Who am I to disagree with imprinting?” Tim held his hands out in surrender.
“One rule,” Lainey said.
“Anything,” George piped up.
“I get to name him.” Lainey pulled the puppy closer.
“What is it?” Daisy asked.
“Ned.”
All the people I loved most in the world were in one room.
Piper and Mimi were huddled together in a corner of the couch, scrolling through photos on Piper’s phone. Tim, who’d been there for three days by then, and Lainey stood with Loretta, Owen and Harrington at the table where the jigsaw puzzle had been all summer without anyone fitting another piece in. They sorted the edge pieces from
the center ones and made two piles before they began. Beach music played from Piper’s iPod and candles cast shadows against the walls.
I could even feel my parents’ presence. I felt them in the river house so strongly, the scent of lilacs pervading the room, that I almost turned to call for my mom. If they could see us all here, gathered around in the house they’d bought for just this reason, they would have been so proud. They’d given it up because of a tragedy and I’d come here because of a tragedy. But now it was shelter. It was home. But it was because of the people here, not just the structure that surrounded us. If I’d been homesick, it had been for these people.
One by one we’d all leafed through the Girl Detective notebook, and laughed, or shook our heads. Although it was true that we’d unwittingly gone where we shouldn’t have gone, seen what we shouldn’t have seen, written what wasn’t ours to know, we hadn’t caused Clara to leave. It wasn’t the notebook that had changed our lives; it was Clara who’d changed our lives.
By the time we sat for dinner, twilight had folded into darkness. Owen sat next to me, and Piper on the other side. The conversation ebbed and flowed.
“Isn’t it strange,” Loretta said from the far end of the table, “how Piper arrived at my door with Fletch? How y’all returned here so you could find each other again?”
“Destined?” Piper asked.
“Oh, it’s just that river out there,” Mimi said and waved her hand toward the backyard.
Harrington shook his head. “All of you and your magic. I’m just happy for Bonny’s logical, scientific mind.”
When the plates were emptied, it was Lainey who brought out the homemade pound cake for Mimi. We retired to the porch to eat it on small flowered plates while the river flowed behind us.
Mimi rested her empty plate on the coffee table. “I just can’t believe this is real. That I’m sitting here with all of you. It feels like a begin-again.”
“Begin-again sounds so wonderful,” I said as I peered around the room. “And we all have to do it at different times. But what no one ever tells you is that there is this horrible, gooey, mud-sucking, scary-as-hell middle place that you have to slog through before the begin-again gets to start.”
“Exactly,” Mimi agreed.
“Can I ask you something?” Lainey said to Loretta.
“Of course, darling.”
“Why is Mom buried at the AME church? How did she come to have a place in that sacred spot?”
“With every question you ask, you will learn more and more of her,” Loretta said. “Your mother was very dear friends with a woman named Opal Harrison, another seamstress in town. It was Opal who would go to the house and pick up your mom to take her to church on Sundays. She became part of that African American church. She knew more gospel music than I did, and I grew up in the Baptist church. They became family to her, and she to them. When she passed, Opal placed your mother in the Harrison family plot, making room for a woman she’d met a year before, sharing revered ground with a woman who’d never told her the full truth of who she was. They knew she had secrets; they knew her name wasn’t Rosie; and they loved her all the same.”
Lainey let out a small sound of sorrow, a whisper almost. “Oh, Mom, why wouldn’t you let me be your family?”
Lainey had told all of us the story that Mimi and Loretta had told her. She’d taken Owen to the gravesite and told him the same way she’d been informed. Together they’d been trying to piece together their mother’s story, small inch by very small inch.
I reached across the table and took Lainey’s hand, and she smiled at me, but only with sadness.
“And why are you now living in her house?” Lainey asked.
Loretta glanced at Mimi and Mimi nodded as if giving permission for this part of the story. “Mimi and I bought it for her, and she was paying us back in small but consistent increments with her sewing money and by working in the bookstore to chip away at the payments. I’d been living in town and was frankly quite tired of it so I sold my house and moved into hers.” Loretta leaned back in her chair. “But every flower, every vegetable, every small and lovely thing there belonged to her.”
Lainey nodded and repeated Loretta’s words. “Every small and lovely thing. Maybe that should always be enough. If that is how she made her life, out of those things . . .”
Where once there were overlapping conversations and interruptions, there was only silence. Piper made a little noise in her throat that sounded like she might start to cry.
Owen glanced at me, as he’d been doing all night. Our gazes grounded us in the middle of a new world that had been created out of chaos and hurt and uncertainty. But what universe had ever been created out of anything but chaos? That was how everything began.
Mimi lifted her glass, now with only a thin line of bourbon on the bottom of it, and said, “To begin-agains.” Harrington lifted his glass and then it began again, the symphony of mixed voices that had come from every corner of my world to this one place. A porch full of people I loved, and had hurt, and who had hurt me. No one knew what would happen next or how. There were personal narratives so convoluted and yet there we were filling a house with talk and food and drink, with stories and laughter—and love, most of all. Maybe that was all that mattered, not the untangling, not the fixing, not the “figuring it out,” but the love itself. And the forgiving—that, too.
A smile spread across Mimi’s face. It occurred to me that if I did believe in such things, I would believe that she’d conjured this dinner party. That a month before, when Piper strode through the bookshop door, she’d begun to gather her books and her witticisms into a transformational magic that brought us together.
chapter 40
THE ART SHOW
lainey
The Sea La Vie living room thrummed with music and Bonny and I bustled around, trying to grab everything we needed before we left for the art show. Bonny gently placed a few vases of wildflowers into a box. “I think we’re ready,” she said.
“I’m never ready for something like this,” I told her. “Never. It’s very nerve-wracking to stand in a room full of people with the art you created. Sort of like being naked with a spotlight on your worst flaws. You know I don’t do very many of these, but having it here, in this town, feels right.”
Things were still tenuous between us, but we weren’t going to let it destroy our friendship. The loss of George had made clear what Bonny had been talking about all along: draw close to you what really matters. And Bonny really mattered. “Bonny,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I think when you came here you unleashed the past.”
She laughed. “Not exactly what I meant to do. In fact, I meant to do the opposite. Start a new future.”
“My brother. Your daughter. Tim here now. My art . . .”
Bonny came close to me, her voice soft. “Lainey, in the busyness of getting ready for this art show, I haven’t been able to say what needs to be said.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” I told her. “I know.”
“I’m going to say it anyway. I must.” She sat on the sofa and patted the seat next to her. “I should never have kept it from you that Owen and I talked so often, that he was so important to me. I could hardly admit it to myself, let alone another person. I know now how much I’ve hurt you, and others, while trying to survive in a lonely marriage. Deep inside I knew that it wasn’t going to work, but I rationalized.”
“Do you still love him, Bonny?”
“Yes.” She looked away and pressed her forefingers into the corners of her eyes. “But not everyone or everything we love is good for us.”
“What will you do? Will you go back to your job? Back to Charleston?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I love that city and the hospital wants me back. That job was the only place where I knew who I was, but in the other places of my life I’d
become someone I didn’t like or admire: I was living with a husband who didn’t really love me but wanted the safety of family. I was keeping secrets from my best friend and loving a man I couldn’t have and couldn’t change. I set a terrible example for my daughter. I don’t want to go back to that way of living. Now that I have exactly what I couldn’t live without—my career—I still don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Isn’t it funny when we get what we want?” I asked and then stood to look at her.
“What do you mean?” She also stood.
“So often, our wishes are fulfilled and then we see things altogether differently. You have your job and Owen is here for you, and yet you’re confused about what to do. But you’ve always seemed so sure of everything you decide.”
“Right now I’m completely unsure. But also right now we are late for the party and it’s all about you tonight.” She squeezed my hand. “Let’s go!”
It was an odd thing to stand in a room full of people with the art created in solitude and then shared in community. I held on to Tim’s hand as we moved through the party.
Ever since his disappearance, George had been my shadow. He stood right behind me, his little hand in mine or else holding the tail end of my shirt. Daisy was attached to Piper with fierce loyalty. They took turns carrying Ned around the room, or running after him under patrons’ feet.
When a quiet moment offered me some space, I turned to Tim, who stood next to me. There were things I needed to say, and that was as good a time as ever. “Sweetie, you’re the one who has suffered because I’ve felt incomplete without a mom. I’ve believed that I couldn’t be fully me without her. But I now know that’s not true. I’m all of me. And all of me loves you. I was waiting for something that I already had: a full sense of myself. I wish I could take back every minute you didn’t believe I was committed to you, or you thought I didn’t want our family just as it is. I wish I could take back every minute I searched for her while neglecting you or our kids.”
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