Before and Again

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Is he artsy?”

  “Very, and gay, which his parents don’t know, so he could use a mother.” I watched for her reaction now, just as I had watched her meeting my friends at the wedding. Those friends had run the gamut when it came to sexual orientation.

  She had been neutral then. Now, with quiet insistence, she said, “I was not the homophobic one.”

  “Good. Because Kevin is special to me. I don’t want him hurt.”

  * * *

  My mother could not have been nicer to Kevin, who came with my honey teapot, which, without my knowing, he had bought at the studio store, and a loopy scarf he had made of variegated green yarn, which she promptly put on. And to Joyce, who came with a basket of goodies from the Spa, tales of my pets, and enough praise of me to nauseate anyone other than my mother. Or to the physical therapist, who texted me immediately after their session to say how pleased she was to be working with Margaret.

  I raced back to the suite between appointments, though it truly wasn’t necessary. Between those guests, and Edward, who brought lunch and a bag of readables from the bookstore in town, and Liam, who brought purchases from my favorite clothing boutique along with the same argument I had made to him two weeks before, that what worked in Connecticut did not work in Vermont, Margaret was well-tended. She slept; she used her laptop for bakery business, and for personal business, a cane left by the physical therapist; she seemed content. By the time dinner rolled around, wearing her new jeans and sweater, Kevin’s loopy scarf, and a relaxed smile, she was looking like a different woman.

  Making up a new persona? Of course. That was what we did in Devon. I had done it. Edward had. Now my mother. And Grace? As the weekend went on, that became more and more evident. After she blocked the first Santa Fe number, other calls came from the same area code. From the same person or a second? She didn’t know. Though she blocked those, too, she figured it was only a matter of time before more came.

  She told me these things in short whispers in the locker room, the hallway, the relaxation lounge, then outside the makeup studio just as I arrived Sunday morning. Her hair was pulled back for work, and she wore soothing celadon scrubs, but her eyes were strikingly copper and frantic. In a voice that was higher than her normal high, she told me about her summons from Edward, and yes, she was convinced he was firing her. I told her I had been asked there, too, but she wasn’t mollified.

  “He wants you there as a witness in case I go looney and accuse him of something,” she said. “Someone from Santa Fe must have called him—I mean, I knew lots of people there. Maybe I shouldn’t have blocked those calls. Maybe I should have talked and denied it all and been polite and confident, or … or threatened to sue for harassment or something. If Ned finds out, that’s the end, absolutely the end.”

  “Hey, guys,” sang another of the massage therapists as he breezed in from the parking lot.

  “Hey,” I said with as normal a smile as I could muster, even as Grace urged me into the makeup studio and shut the door.

  “I really like it here,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to have to leave. Talk with him, Maggie? Tell him there are jealous women in Santa Fe who just want to make trouble for me. I’ve only always wanted to protect my son. Ned’ll listen to you. He likes you.”

  I could have told her there and then what Edward was to me, but something held me back. Feeling like a heel, I simply said, “I’ve already talked with him. I told him he couldn’t fire you, and he won’t, but we’ll have to wait for that meeting to know what he wants. Relax, Grace. Work. Actually, if you start worrying, go up and see my mother. I’ve talked about you a lot. She wants to meet you.”

  “Good God, no,” Grace cried, as though the suggestion was preposterous. “I can’t do that. I am not the kind of person you want your mother to meet.”

  “And you think she’s innocent?” I shot back. “You think I’m innocent? You think neither one of us has done things wrong? Ask yourself why I’ve never talked about her or why she’s never been here before. Grace,” I said. “Everyone in the world is guilty of something.”

  “Not like me,” she said, but gave me a quick hug before slipping out the door.

  * * *

  Cornelia came early Sunday to meet my mother and insisted, Margaret later told me somewhat wryly, on staying through Nina’s visit. And how had Nina known my mother was there? Me. I had called her. I kept remembering what she had said about being totally alone, kept hearing the desperation in her words, and I figured that if anyone could handle her, it was my mother. Besides, it wasn’t like Nina didn’t already know the worst.

  After the fact, I realized that Nina’s questions might tip off Cornelia. But the questions hadn’t gone anywhere near there. They had focused on The Buttered Scone, which fascinated Nina and which Margaret was only too happy to describe.

  Then came Joe Hellinger and his wife, then Joyce again, then Edward with lunch, then my friend Alex. If I had wanted Margaret to see my life here, I couldn’t have asked for better. These people gave her a glimpse of it without her ever having to leave the Inn. By the time I was done with work early Sunday afternoon, though, she wanted to see where I lived. I told her she ought to rest instead. The woman was recovering from a broken hip, for God’s sake. She had been half-dead Friday morning.

  But she didn’t seem half-dead now. She was the Margaret McGowan Reid who kept going no matter what. She actually seemed exhilarated. And how could I fight that?

  So we put on our jackets—Mom snug in the new little quilted number Liam had brought her. She had Kevin’s scarf around her neck. The scarf was one-hundred percent merino wool, she informed me, though all I could do was wonder how Kevin knew that one of the dozens of shades of green in the hand-dyed wool would perfectly match my mother’s eyes.

  Walking slowly, elbows linked, we went down to the truck. I still had my doubts about what we were doing, but when she managed to climb up into the seat with some care but no mishap, despite the cast on her wrist and the cane that she hadn’t quite mastered, I let it go. I desperately wanted her to see my home, and while it didn’t have to be today, it actually did. I had to keep busy until four or I’d go nuts.

  It was the second time in as many weeks that I had the responsibility of a passenger, the first being when Chris popped up in my backseat. I hadn’t had a choice then; I was already on the road. I did have a choice now. I knew I needed to do this.

  But if I was just the slightest bit uneasy, my mother was not. As blasé as could be, she said that Liam had offered to drive, but she didn’t want to go with him. She wanted me.

  And how could I fight that?

  We talked more during that short drive than I believe we’d ever done in a car. She told me how much she admired Cornelia and how she sensed a lonely soul in Nina. She knew that Joe and his wife didn’t let me spend a Thanksgiving or Christmas alone, and that friends like Alex and Joyce and Kevin were loyal and kind. Hearing it in her voice made me see how rich my life here truly was.

  “They’re very different from the friends you had before,” she remarked with a flippancy that was so the old Margaret that I was momentarily taken back. I think she was, too, because she shot me an uneasy look, as if suddenly remembering where she was and why. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You’re right,” I said, because tiptoeing around didn’t work as well as it had even a day ago. Too much in the past had been misleading. What I had taken for disapproval may well have been my mother torn between what she felt and what my father believed. He had been a good man in many regards; I wasn’t speaking ill of the dead, either. But he was no longer here.

  “I loved my art school friends,” I said. “We were all different, but we accepted that. After I got married, the differences just seemed to grow.”

  “You were successful. They weren’t.”

  “Maybe not commercially. Artistically, I couldn’t begin to compare. But what I meant was lifestyle. Remember the Labor Day cookout we threw at our house that last year
? You and Dad drove up for it.”

  “Oh, I do,” my mother said dryly. “The flower arrangements were gorgeous. You had a caterer grilling everything imaginable, and the place was packed, one beautiful person after another.”

  “I thought you’d be impressed,” I said, mocking myself, then braked sharply when a deer leapt from the woods onto the road. It had the antlers of a male and was quickly followed by a doe. I hadn’t been speeding, still my heart raced, but the fear quickly ebbed. “Look,” I whispered. It was a typical spring sight in Devon, but it never failed to enchant me. I watched until the elegant creatures disappeared into the woods on the other side of the road.

  Accelerating again, I said, “My friends that Labor Day weren’t real friends. They were part of a life, like the flowers and the caterer. And the house. And the cars.”

  “And the skinny,” said Mom.

  “Yup.” I turned onto the hill road and started up, feeling an anticipation that had my heart clenching in its old familiar way. I wanted her approval, of course I did. It was only normal, right? And after all we’d been through, the years of my disappointing her?

  “You drive this in winter?” she asked.

  I shot her a nervous look, but she was more fearful than critical. And I knew that reaction, had felt it myself once or twice at the start, when the beauty of the forest had been offset by the rawness of the narrow road. Today, though, April was beginning, and I swear I could smell it in the drying mud, the new growth, the hope.

  “Roads like this are a way of life here,” I said. “So is plowing. My guy comes at least three times for each snowstorm. That’s also why I have a truck.” Only then remembering her broken hip, I asked in concern, “Too bumpy?”

  “No, no. It’s fine.” But she sounded worried. “I shudder to think of you up here alone.”

  “You hate it,” I said.

  “I haven’t seen it. Much farther?”

  When we rounded the last turn, I didn’t have to say a thing. There was only one road, one house, one forest in a dead end.

  “Oh.” She seemed surprised by the gray siding, the oak door, the gabled roof. “It’s not very rustic.”

  I laughed nervously. “That’s what I told my realtor when she first drove me here.” Hurrying down from the truck, I ran around to her side, and helped her down and then up the walk.

  There were no fanfares, but the moment felt momentous. I’m not sure I had dreamed of bringing my mother here; I’m not sure I had dared. The fact that she was here of her own free will—even at her insistence—was something. My eyes teared, which was better, I supposed, than having a chest freeze, but the tears disappeared the instant I opened the door and Jonah raced out, to which Mom said another surprised, “Oh.”

  His leaving was a good thing. By the time he returned from the woods, she seemed legitimately charmed by what she saw of the downstairs of my home, and while she remained oddly afraid of Jonah, she loved Hex and Jinx. Sensing that, they fought for space on her lap, which freed me to give equal time to my dog, while I answered questions about what it was like to live in the woods, how I got my mail, where my water came from, and whether I was ever lonely or frightened.

  My mother had always asked questions. Some were innocent, some pointed, some accusatory as rhetorical questions could be. Looking back through a different shade now, I realized that many had been couched with Your father wants to know or If I don’t ask, your father will.

  Today, she might have asked for an hour and I wouldn’t have minded. I could tell she was intrigued. There were times when I heard the same fear as when we started up the road—but hell, hadn’t I told Edward she was no scout? Weaving through the questions, though, was a thread of acceptance. To my starved heart, a thread was a truckful.

  When she absolutely, positively insisted, we climbed to the second floor. Given a choice, I’d have saved that part for another day. She had a broken hip, and while her PT encouraged stair-climbing, the jostling in the truck couldn’t have helped. And then there was my bed. Mom was a stickler for hospital corners, and there was nothing here but a tangle of sheets. The last time I slept here—Edward and I, actually, though she didn’t need to know that—was Friday morning, right before I learned about her hip, and I hadn’t wasted time neatening up before we left.

  She didn’t say anything about the unmade bed, but when she saw Liam’s belongings cluttering the loft, she wondered aloud, with distress, when he planned to get his own place. She spared me a response by asking if I had any Tylenol, which I did. I went to the bathroom and opened the medicine chest. After shaking out two pills, I closed it again.

  And there, in the mirror, my mother’s stricken eyes met mine. Her voice was a pained whisper. “Why is that there?”

  My mug shot. I swallowed. “It’s who I am.”

  “Who you were.”

  “I’ll always be that person. I can’t erase the past.”

  “Can’t forgive yourself? Can’t feel worthy of love?” she asked, capturing the gist of it in two quick questions.

  How did you know? I might have asked if the huge knot in my throat hadn’t blocked sound. My mother’s arms came around me, then, and her weight settled against my back as if for support. When she buried her face in my shoulder so that I wouldn’t see her shame, I knew she was talking about herself.

  * * *

  I forgave her. Absolutely, unconditionally, and irrevocably, I did. I now understood all she had given up of her inner self to keep her marriage intact, and I would have loved her for that, even if I hadn’t loved her just because she was my mother. The apology she made in my bathroom—a silent, stoically poignant Margaret apology—was the icing on the cake, as she would have said.

  And me? I wanted to forgive myself, truly I did. I wanted to feel worthy of love. But worthy went beyond Edward’s declarations. It went beyond the love I did feel when his dark head rose, his pale eyes held mine, and he buried himself deep inside me. It went beyond my mother’s tentative touch with the fingers that extended beyond her cast—my shoulder now, then my arm or my hand—as we drove back to the Inn. For someone who had never been a toucher, she was trying.

  Worthy was about what I felt inside, and the closer we got to that meeting at the Inn, the more that feeling was dread. Right now, I had more than I deserved. Past and present were coming together in ways I couldn’t have imagined just weeks ago. And it was good.

  One missed STOP sign, though, and it would be gone. Five years ago, the STOP sign was hidden by leaves on the side of the road. This time, it was crystal clear in the shape of a meeting that I had myself set up to help a friend. Now, turning off the Blue, passing under the covered bridge that spanned the river, and approaching the gracious stone columns at the front door of the Inn, I had the awful thought that history was about to repeat itself.

  24

  I was complicit. Of the many negatives in my mind as I waited for Grace to finish her last massage, that topped the list. I was complicit walking her through the Spa, my cocoa-brown scrubs sedate beside her amber ones. I was complicit as we entered the Inn and climbed the stairs to the business wing, and again as I lowered the brass lever, opened the glass double doors, and strode past Currier and Ives. The conference room, with its long mahogany table and Chippendale chairs, was empty, but I had known the men wouldn’t be there. Glass wouldn’t do. We needed privacy. I was as complicit in this knowledge, as I was when I guided Grace into Edward’s office, closed the door, and leaned against it so that she couldn’t escape.

  The scene inside was deceptively peaceful, as much the snapshot of a moment in time as the foxhunting oils that hung on the dark-paneled wood. There was Edward, leaning casually against the front of his cluttered desk, looking both in charge and gorgeous in a navy turtleneck and jeans. And Jay in one of the tartan club chairs, round face composed, legs crossed at the knee. Grace might have asked why the lawyer was there if Ben Zwick hadn’t chosen that moment to turn.

  He wasn’t as tall or compelling as Edw
ard, though his sandy hair and brown eyes were certainly attractive. Attitude was what gave him stature, and now, despite a glimmer of apprehension when he focused on Grace, his posture held as he left the window.

  Grace’s eyes flew to mine in alarm. I returned a tiny headshake, complicit in this, too. I might not know all of what Ben had to say, but I had certainly known he would be here.

  Her gaze returned to the men, tripping from face to face in fear. “What is this?” she asked in her Grace-high voice.

  “Thanks for coming,” Edward began and gestured her toward the large leather sofa.

  She was having none of that. Turning quickly, she reached for the door.

  I caught her arm. “You need to listen to what Ben has to say.”

  “Hasn’t he already said enough?” she cried. Twisting her head, she pinned the man in question with a killing stare. “You son of a bitch.”

  “Sometimes,” he admitted.

  “I don’t want an apology, so if you’re looking to feel less guilty, forget it. The damage is already done.” Turning back to me in accusation, she tried to free her arm, but I held tight.

  “He’s getting calls from Santa Fe, too,” I said.

  That stilled her. After staring at me for several beats, she swallowed. Then, apparently not yet ready to deal with Santa Fe, she focused on my complicity. “You talked with him. You learned this and didn’t tell me. You knew he’d be here.”

  “I love you, Grace, and I love Chris. I want both of you safe.” When she said nothing, I stressed, “You are not alone here. It’s us four against him. Edward will referee, Jay will protect your rights, and I will personally shut Ben down if he goes off the deep end.”

  She looked about to argue. Then her eyes slid to the side, where a coat tree held three very different coats, and although her back was to the men, I knew she was realizing that one controlled her job, one her son’s legal case, and one her future. Her copper eyes met mine with resentment, but behind the contacts was worry as well. Putting her back to the door, she folded her arms to hold herself together and turned her glare on Ben.