For so long, I had kept this to myself. For so long, we had. Now, finally, came relief.
* * *
I had no idea how long we stayed there. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that my mother waited, that Liam would be growing impatient, and that I had to think up some way to get Grace to a meeting with Ben. But when the tears finally slowed, I had neither the strength nor the desire to leave Edward’s arms. I was totally spent.
So we sat on the floor, me nested in the bend of his legs, saying nothing, just … being. I cleared my mind of negative thought, just settled into the here and now. Lily was before us, but it wasn’t as painful as it had once been.
In time, my mind wandered. One of my first, cohesive, non-Lily thoughts, was of clay. I felt a strong compulsion to feel, touch, shape. I needed to escape into it. I needed to create.
But that had to wait. When we finally separated, it was to neaten up the Lily-things in Nana’s box, close the lid, and slide the box back under the bed. We didn’t speak, but there was no anger in the silence between us. Rather, I felt an unexpected calm where Lily was concerned. And where Edward was concerned? Shared tears had cemented a bond.
Over the last days, I had sensed that things would never go back to how they were before he had come. For the first time, now, I realized that I didn’t want them to. I did love him. I did want him in my life.
I also did fear that when the next crisis arose, whether having to do with my mother, with Grace, or with something completely different, we might botch it again.
That raised the stakes.
23
As Edward and I talked it through, I realized that getting Grace to the meeting with Ben Zwick might be the easy part. Her last appointment on Sunday was a fifty-minute massage that ended shortly before four. In advance, Edward would leave a handwritten note at the Spa asking her to drop by his office when it was done. “Drop by” was casual, and something handwritten was less of a threat. Even then, our plan assumed that I would be talking with her beforehand, because Grace would likely assume he was planning to fire her. I could assure her he was not. I could even tell her that he had invited me to his office at four, too, which wasn’t the whole truth, but would work.
So no, I wasn’t worried about getting her there. Keeping her there once she saw Ben Zwick might be something else. She could be impulsive. And headstrong? Totally. I would have worried more—might have agonized that she would see my part in this as a betrayal—might have done something rash, like beg her to tell me about her past then and there, or make my case beforehand that she should hear Zwick out, or even enlist Jay to help—if I hadn’t been preoccupied with Margaret.
Back at the Inn Friday night, I didn’t sleep well, and not because of texting with Edward, though that went on for a while. After cementing a plan for Grace, we talked about ourselves—where each of us was physically and what we were doing, where each of us wanted to be and to do. Our tears had been cleansing. I felt closer to him than ever. I wanted him in my bed right now, and yes, I wanted sex.
But my mother was in the very next room—my mother, with whom my reconciliation was fragile and new. Lying awake in the dark, where things were always ten times worse, every possible glitch crossed my mind. For starters, I realized that Grace wasn’t the only one who would be working this weekend; I had to work, too, and while Ronan Dineen might be willing to sub again, he wouldn’t do it both days. And what about next week? I couldn’t leave Margaret alone for hours on end. I could be with her between appointments, but how would she feel about my running in and out? Or about waking up in a strange place and realizing that she didn’t know anything about it, or even about me? And how would she feel physically? There was the chance that when she woke up in the morning, her hip might be worse because of the drive, that we would have to rush to see the doctor Joe Hellinger had contacted, or that she would spike a fever and we would end up in the ER, all because I had insisted she leave her own home.
So I huddled between the soft white sheets that covered the pillow-top on the gorgeous big bed in my pine-scented room, and listened for sounds from hers. At one point, I crept across the hall and cracked open the door, needing to hear her breathe so that I would know she was actually there.
Naturally, in the dark where thoughts loomed, I thought of mothers and daughters—specifically, whether a mother was still a mother if her child died, which was my version of what Margaret had asked in Connecticut.
For the first time, I had an answer, because despite having been a hair’s breadth from Lily’s ashes, she felt more alive to me than ever. She was with me as I stood at Mom’s door, pressed to my hip with her arms around my waist, just like she used to do. She was five, would always be five, and while that fact should have crushed me, it no longer did. The time I’d spent with Edward tonight had changed me. I accepted that she was gone—acceptance being different from simple admission. I found a peace in her presence now that I hadn’t felt since her death. She was in my thoughts. No one could take her away ever again.
Secure in that knowledge, I finally fell into a dead sleep and awoke with a jolt as daylight ghosted through the drapes. But how to confuse my home bedroom with a room at the Inn? My watch said seven, which was later than I’d planned. Bolting up, I went for my mother.
She was already in the living room. Wearing an Inn robe and slippers, she had a hint of natural color on her cheeks. If the trip had set her back, it didn’t show. She was typing on her laptop, but stopped, hands suspended, when she saw me.
She didn’t smile. But neither did I. Being here together, after all this time and all that had come between us, was awkward. We were feeling our way along.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked.
She put her hands in her lap. “Very well, thank you. It’s a beautiful bed.” Her gaze circled. “A beautiful suite. Too generous of Edward.” Before I could argue, her eyes were on me, speaking in advance of the words. “You look more like you now.”
I’m sure I did to her. “You’re the first person here to see me like this.” Well, except for Liam now, but he didn’t count.
“I like it.”
I snorted. “No one else would. One look at my scar, and they’d run in the other direction.”
“They would, or you would?” my mother asked. And hadn’t she hit that nail on the head? I was going back and forth, totally unsure, when she said, “It’s faded.”
“I see it every morning. I need to. Sometimes life here is too comfortable, y’know?”
My mother didn’t answer at first. Her eyes, such a fragile green, grew puzzled. “Is that wrong?” she finally asked. “To find happiness?”
Two soul-searching questions at seven in the morning was too much. Honesty was super when you knew what to say, which just then I did not. Thanks to Edward—and yes, to my mother—I had come a long way in the guilt department, but that didn’t mean I was completely free.
“First, how does your hip feel?”
“Sore, but not enough to take a pill.”
She had been typing with both hands. I eyed the left one, which lay still now.
She turned the cast over and back. “It’s fine.” As if to demonstrate, she reached for the nearby teacup and held it with the fingers of both hands.
“Oh, good. You got tea.” I was relieved to see the top of the walker behind the sofa. I didn’t care if she hid it, as long as she used it when she was alone.
“And I took a shower,” she said with some defiance. “They told me to wait until the stitches came out, but it’s been over a week, and I felt disgusting.”
I had to smile. “You weren’t.”
“Well, I feel better now.” Her face gentled some. It struck me that she, too, may have had her moments in the dark last night, imagining all sorts of negatives about coming here. “The flowers are beautiful,” she remarked and, lingering on the nearest tulips, said, “I thought you’d be up before me. You always were.”
“Usually am,” I said, “but I d
idn’t fall asleep until late.” I crossed to the Nespresso, touched that Edward had thought to bring tea pods from his office. My own tea was brewing when I hitched my chin at her laptop. “What’s today’s special?”
“Cherry turnovers. Not your favorites, but Annika did the choosing.”
“Would you have picked something else?” I asked, making it sound teasing, when really it wasn’t.
She didn’t blink. “I’d have picked salted caramel brownies. Or honey scones.” She knew I loved the latter. I barely breathed when she added, “You didn’t have to come for me yesterday. But you did.”
“I’d have come sooner if I’d known,” I said, and she did smile then. But what started shy turned sad, before fading into regret. She seemed about to say something, but stopped.
“What?” I coaxed.
Drying on its own, her hair was waving in a gentle way. Her furrowed brow was something else. She was struggling.
“Say it,” I said. “Please?”
She took a breath, and in a voice laced with sorrow, said, “He was wrong.” My father. “But it was wrong of me not to tell him he was wrong. The thing is, that isn’t how it was between us.”
“How was it?” I would never, ever, have asked that back in Connecticut—would never, ever, have asked it growing up. To ask would have been to challenge, which wasn’t in the nature of our relationship. But that life was there, and we were here.
She must have felt the same distance, because she said, “Traditional. He was the head of the family. My job was to support him.”
“You were the enforcer.”
She made a small sound. “So to speak. Your father…” She studied her tea.
“Please.”
“I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.” She shot the sky a timid glance. “Not that He doesn’t already think ill of me.”
She was speaking of God this time, but I wasn’t going there. “Why was Dad so angry at me?”
“Well, I often asked him that. He loved you, loved you very much.” She sipped her tea.
Taking mine from the Keurig, I slipped into the armchair kitty-corner to her. It was too early in the day for this kind of discussion—but really, was it ever too early to discuss matters of the heart? What if the moment passed and never returned?
“Then why?” I asked.
“You did things he didn’t understand. You made decisions without consulting him.”
I waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, I said, “That’s it? He was offended?”
“Threatened. You broke the mold.”
“But you did, too.” If ever there had been an example of someone following her dream, it was my mother. “Look at the bakery.”
She sniffed. “He barely knew about the bakery.”
“Of course he did. You went there every day.”
“He didn’t see me there. I might as well have been cleaning toilets at the Town Hall. My bakers did the early morning work, so that I could be home and cook breakfast and make the beds. By the time I left, he was already at work. I got back before he did to cook dinner. He never saw anything different at home from how it was when you and Liam were first born.”
“But you earned money. We couldn’t have rented a place at the shore those summers without it. I couldn’t have gone to college without loans. Liam couldn’t have. The money you earned was crucial.”
“We didn’t discuss it.”
I was floored. My face must have shown it, because she actually laughed. “Oh, Mackenzie. Your generation takes so much for granted.”
“You’re only sixty-five, Mom. Hadn’t the women’s revolution already begun by the time you were married?”
“For some.” She considered. “Even for me. I was able to get a loan to start the bakery. Vendors would work with me, whereas twenty years earlier they wouldn’t have.” She returned to the crux of the discussion. “But your father was old school. He was uncomfortable with the idea of his wife helping support the family. Breadwinning was his job, and if he didn’t do it, he would feel less of a man.”
“It was ego, then?”
“It was the deal. He worked. I raised the kids.”
“But how could he not see what you were doing?”
She shot me a did-you-not-hear-what-I-just-said look, and there was something so familiar, so normal about it that I nearly laughed. This was my mother. She didn’t waste time repeating things. She was efficient, which was how she accomplished as much as she did.
Emboldened by the frank back-and-forth, I asked, “Did you love him?”
“Of course, I loved him. That was my job.”
What I had meant was, had she loved him like I love Edward, meaning in ways that had less to do with expectation than a wildly beating heart. But that felt too personal, like I was asking about sex. So I went to what haunted me still.
“And when he died? Weren’t you freed?”
She rested the mug on her cast. “I should have been. But he was my husband, and he was suddenly dead. I thought I was honoring what he would have wanted. I thought I owed him that. I wasn’t thinking straight—” She stopped short. “Actually, that’s not true. I was thinking exactly the way a woman with my marriage history would think. Now I’m not.”
“What changed?”
“Your brother leaving,” she said so quickly that I knew she had given it plenty of thought. “As long as he was around, I could tell myself the problem was you. When he up and left, too, I realized it was me. My failing. My fault. I couldn’t even blame your father. He’d been dead too long by then. And suddenly I was alone, for the first time in my life, totally alone.”
Now I was feeling sorry for her. “You have friends. And you have the bakery, you have Annika and the bakers and the high school girls who come in after school.”
“Not the same,” Margaret said with a dismissive wave of her casted wrist, and suddenly the way she looked at me was jarring. Mothers had answers. Right now, mine did not. There was uncertainty in her expression, in her semi-slouch, even in the generic Spa robe that was way too big for her frame. “The old model isn’t any good, but I’m not sure what the new one should be.”
“Nor I,” I said with feeling, then qualified. “I mean, I can say the same thing about myself. I had it all figured out. Now I don’t.”
“If you’re worried about the meeting with that reporter and your friend—”
“I am.”
“Have a lawyer there,” said the woman who might have lived a charade at home, but had single-handedly founded and managed a thriving business.
* * *
We ordered breakfast, which arrived in less time than it took me to shower, put on makeup, and dress. When I left my bedroom, the round eating table was covered by a crisp white cloth that held two formal place-settings and double servings of maple bacon, scrambled eggs, thick wheat toast, fresh berries, and clotted cream, not to mention garnishes of grilled tomato, three kinds of jam, and butter in its own small tub with the Inn logo embossed on the top. And almond milk for my mother. A full glass. I set it in front of her in a way that said I expected her to drink the whole thing.
It wasn’t until we began to eat that I saw Margaret studying my made-up face, my knotted-back hair, my navy scrubs. “You’re going to work,” she deduced.
Had the statement held accusation, I might have called in sick, which would have been ridiculous, of course, since I would be immediately seen as a fraud when I went out, which I would definitely have done. I wanted to drive my mother around town. I wanted to show her my life.
But her voice held no accusation. She was a workaholic herself. I remembered once when I was home from college, I had found her in her sewing room late at night, typing on her computer while my father slept.
And didn’t that take on new meaning now?
“Yes. Work.” I bit into my toast, chewed and swallowed, then said a nonchalant, “You know what I do, don’t you?”
“Makeup.”
I nodded. “There’s an
event at the Inn this weekend. It’s a statewide political thing, apparently boring, because the Spa is booked solid.”
“You, too?”
“I get spillovers from treatments. So yes, me too.”
“Will your friend be free by four tomorrow?” I was slow to follow, I was that good at denial. “Grace,” Mom specified. “She does massage.”
I was amused in a wary way. “How do you know that?”
“It was in one of the articles I read.”
“Ah. Got it.” But I really did not want to talk about Grace. The thought of meeting with Ben Zwick upset my stomach.
“Did you ever do massage?” my mother segued from Grace to ask.
“I actually started with it before gravitating to makeup. Makeup is more artistic.”
“Why that and not clay?”
I studied my toast, before setting it back on the plate and raising my eyes. “I couldn’t. I needed something different.”
“Do you sculpt at all?”
If she hadn’t been here, I might have been at the pottery studio right now. My sculpting Maddie Kalmbach felt like a corner turned. After last night, I might have sculpted another child, maybe even eventually Lily.
But not clay, not today.
“Only for fun,” I said, adding quickly, “Makeup is kind of like working with clay. Every application involves a person, so in some ways it’s more rewarding. But it’s demanding. When you work at a resort, weekends are the busiest time. I have someone to help, but I’ll still have to go back and forth today.” I pulled out my cell. Joe Hellinger had done double duty. “Your physical therapist texted while I was showering.” I scrolled to that text. “Her name is Janet Bolan. She’ll be here at eleven. If you don’t like her—”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Liam will be around. Edward will come by. And I’ll come up between appointments.”
“I’ll be fine, Maggie,” she insisted and, with barely a breath said, “I’m sorry you don’t sculpt anymore.”
I resumed eating. “Well, I do sculpt, just not on the same level.” Between bites, I told her about the pottery studio. “I’m sure Kevin will come by, too. He’s dying to meet you.”
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