by Shirley Jump
Probably explained why they’d barely touched the subject of his mother’s leaving.
“So, you want to help me with this place?” Mack asked. His father had come this far, had ventured out of the house long enough to go to the store and drive over here. Dare Mack hope for more? “I sure could use an extra pair of hands. And it’d be good for you to—”
Roy rose. Put the soda he’d had only a sip of on the floor and left the cooler beside Mack’s feet. “No. I’ve got stuff to do at home.”
Mack bit back a sigh. “What stuff, Dad?”
“The landscaping. Your mother will get mad if I don’t get those spring flowers planted. You know how she always likes to have her impatiens in the ground by the first week of June, and here it is nearly July. I want her to see them when she—” He cut off the sentence. Just let it go like a child releasing a balloon into the air.
Mack’s heart broke. He stood, too, and reached forward, but let his hand drop. His father wouldn’t want the sympathy. He’d brush off any attempt at connection.
Even though Mack knew that had been his mother outside the Drop Inn, that didn’t mean anything had changed, that she was going to return and want to see her impatiens. She had left his father a year ago, with another man. Walked out on their marriage, given him the clearest sign a woman could that it was over. She hadn’t made any promises in the True Value, and Mack wasn’t about to raise any false hopes.
The sooner Roy accepted Emma was gone for good, the sooner he could move on. Mack thought of arguing with his father, of reminding Roy that Emma wasn’t coming back to their marriage, but he didn’t have the stomach to do that. Not when he could see the puddle of tears in his father’s eyes, the whispers of hope that lingered there still, that little part of him that believed a ring of pink and white flowers could be enough to bring his true love back. “Yeah, Dad, you do that. If you want any help…”
“I’ll call you.” Roy cleared his throat, then nodded and turned away. “You should give up on this place. Tell that girl to let you build her a place. Sometimes you just got to know when to give up on a lost cause.”
“Yeah, Dad, you do.”
But his father had already walked out the door.
Work. She’d work. And somewhere, she’d come up with an answer. Uh-huh. Like they popped out of the trees, like cherry blossoms.
Alex’s hand strayed to her stomach, then away. She shook her head. No, she wouldn’t think about that. Not now. It was way too much. Besides, she was feeling better. Not nauseous at all. Maybe the tests had been wrong. Both of those cheap store-brand things had been faulty. Yeah, that was it. “Inspected by No. 121”—some assembly line flunky.
Alex drummed her fingers on her desk, trying to concentrate on her assignment. She flipped through the file again. Still no ideas came to mind on how to get Willow Clark to talk, without having to do this painful trading-one-question-at-a-time thing. She reached forward, fingered the petals of the white roses Steve had sent her that morning—he’d sent her a second dozen after she’d told him she’d brought the first dozen to the house—and kept on brainstorming.
And kept coming up empty.
Joe’s shadow loomed over her. “How’s that thing with the writer who lives in a cave going?”
She turned and gave him a smile. “Getting warmer by the second.”
“So’s my bullshit meter.” Joe scowled. “Get me something concrete quick or you’ll be back to boleros and bandanas faster than the Victoria’s Secret models can change their panties.”
Alex sighed, then picked up the phone and made two appointments. One with Willow Clark. And one with a doctor.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Willow Clark was humming.
Alex had learned she didn’t like to be interrupted when she did that, so Alex sat in the chair across from Willow’s and waited. There was no way she was leaving without what she needed. Joe’s deadline freak-out at the editorial meeting later that morning had made it clear Alex had to put up or get back to plumping lipsticks. She hadn’t known the human face was capable of that many shades of red.
Short of sticking Willow with an electric cattle prod, Alex saw no way of moving this thing along and getting her story done. She had two pages of interview notes, but they were a jumble. Fits and starts of questions and answers, not enough to pull together a whole story.
She picked up one of the porcelain pigs from the shelf beside her and ran a hand over his smooth back, her fingers slipping down the chinalike surface, sliding along the curves, then up and over the curlicue of a tail.
Dread pooled in Alex’s stomach, along with the saltines and flat soda she’d had for breakfast. Undoubtedly, Willow was going to have some more of those my-question-for-your-question games today. Was it writer’s curiosity? Some weird interest in Alex’s personal life? Or was Willow mining Alex’s past for her next book?
Either way, Alex kept coming back. Partly because she wanted to know more about Willow Clark. Alex was hooked—like a reader of a suspense novel. Partly because she needed the story. And partly because, now, she needed the additional income, not just to pay for the house repairs, but also for the extra expenses if she—
No, she hadn’t decided that yet. Hadn’t decided yet what to do.
She couldn’t even call this pregnancy her child. Not yet. It was too surreal.
Once she knew for sure how she felt about the whole thing, then she could decide whether to—
“Hold on or let it go,” Willow said.
“What?” Alex jerked her head up. “What did you just say?”
“The pig. Hold on or let go.” Willow smiled.
Alex shoved the pig back onto the shelf so fast, he clattered against his porcine partners. “Are you ready for our interview?”
“Certainly. I feel much better now.” Willow waved at the tendrils of incense, wafting the smoke over herself. “Everything has been cleansed.”
“Great,” Alex said.
This was her childhood idol? The woman who had written the book that had defined her teen years? How could that be? How could such a loony also be such an insightful author?
“Now, where were we?”
“Today? We, uh, didn’t talk about anything. You’ve been humming since I walked in.”
“I meant on Thursday. You asked me a question. I didn’t answer it. If you could ask it again, I could give you a response.”
Alex flipped through her notepad, down the long list of questions. Only thirteen had been answered so far, so she could start anywhere. “Who was your biggest influence as an author?”
“Nope, that wasn’t it. Try another one.”
Alex asked a second question, a third, getting the same response both times. She sighed, put the pad in her lap. “I don’t remember what I asked you on Thursday.”
“Oh, well, you should have said something then. I could have told you.” Willow smiled. “You asked me how I thought Jensine’s story related to yours.”
Alex racked her brain. Ran down every mental recollection of the last two conversations with Willow. “I don’t remember asking that.”
“It’s not like you used words, my dear. But I heard the question, all the same.” Willow leaned forward in her chair, propping her elbows on her lap. “And now I’ll tell you. Jensine keeps searching for herself throughout The Season of Light, first in other people, then in the journal that she keeps, then finally in the relationship she begins with the old woman down the street who becomes her mentor. She finally realizes that the only way she can find out who she really is, is to look deep inside. And she does that—”
“With painting.”
Willow beamed like a proud parent. “Exactly. She gets all her feelings out on the page in that art class. It’s a breakthrough for her. She breaks down and weeps right in the middle of her first art show at school, it’s such a big moment.”
“The light, that’s what she sees,” Alex said. “It’s in the paintings she does. They show her the way out of
the darkness she has felt all that time. The darkness that has kept her from feeling happy, because she never knew who she was.”
Willow nodded, excited now, waving her hands as she talked. “Well, being an orphan, adopted from another country, with no record of who her parents were, she literally had no heritage. She had to build one.”
Alex jerked to attention. “I should have been writing this down. I just missed a bunch of great quotes. Damn.” She flipped open the pad, got to a blank page, then started scribbling. “Can you repeat some of that?”
“No.”
Alex paused and looked up. “Why not?”
“I’d rather you capture the essence of it, when you put yourself into the story. Sort of like when Jensine put herself into her art.”
“Miss Clark, this is a feature story for the newspaper. I’m supposed to be impartial. And accurate.”
Willow rolled her eyes. “Save me from the middle-of-the-roaders who never have an opinion. Life is all about taking a stand, Alex. Having feelings. When you do, that’s when you really live.”
Alex snorted. “That’s when you get hurt, if you ask me.” She turned back a page, to her other questions. “Do you see Jensine as a role model for young girls?”
Willow cocked her head and studied Alex. “When did you get hurt?”
Back to that again. Alex barreled forward, refusing to get detoured. “Because I see Jensine as providing a great example of strength for girls in those pivotal tween years. That’s when they have a hard time standing up for themselves. Being true to who they are.”
“It must have been someone you really loved. Those are the ones who have the longest knives. Even if they don’t mean to.”
Alex shifted in her chair. “Jensine’s best friend. She’s not drawn as strong in this book. Did you have a reason for making her a weaker character?”
“Was it…your mother?” Willow’s voice was soft, almost like a song, floating across the room, the words curling around Alex, reaching out their syllabic tendrils just as the incense did.
“I think Jensine has a…” Alex cleared her throat. “I think she, uh, has…” The words on her pad swam before her eyes. She blinked twice, but they kept on swimming. “I wanted to know if she…”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t want to answer. Didn’t want to dip into this. Wanted to avoid the subject, let it die, make it go away. She tried to press her lips together, to force the word back into her throat, but it slipped out all the same. “Yes.”
“My mother was the same,” Willow said. “That’s why Jensine was so easy to write. And so hard. She was…me.”
Alex’s gaze met Willow’s. The kookiness was gone from her eyes, and in its place Alex saw honesty, and the kind of connection that came from a shared past. For the first time since she had met Willow Clark, she realized she was seeing the real woman, the true person behind all the karma and the incense. “You?”
Willow nodded. “I was given up for adoption when I was three. My mother was a single mother, and in those days, well, raising a child on your own just wasn’t done. She tried, I know she did, but she couldn’t raise me and go to work. She had no support system because her parents didn’t approve and my father, well, he was doing whatever he wanted to do, which wasn’t being a parent. So she let me go.” She got up and motioned for Alex to follow her out of the back room and into the shop. They began to meander down the aisles, going nowhere in particular.
“At three? But you were so…old.”
“And she was still so young. She had a life to live, and I wasn’t part of it.” Willow tried on a smile, but it didn’t fit. “I found her again, years later, and she had her regrets, but it was late. Too late.”
Alex toyed with her pen. Twirled it over and over, the City Times logo spinning by so fast, she couldn’t read it. “I never knew my father, either, but mostly because my mother dated…a lot…and wasn’t sure who my father was. My mother was a party girl, and she had a lot of boyfriends. She got pregnant, thought she could keep me and make it work, and still keep on living the way she had before.”
“The parties? The staying out late?”
Alex nodded. “Not a way to raise a kid.”
“Not a way to raise so much as a puppy.”
Alex laughed, and the sound scraped her throat. “Yeah, well, no one could tell her that. She had a falling out with my grandmother, and wouldn’t talk to her. I think that hurt my grandma a lot.”
She drew in a breath, let it go. As the air left her chest, everything hurt a little less. Had Willow been right? That talking would make this easier?
She never had talked about it, not really. Not to Mack, not to Grandma, not to anyone. She’d just kept it all inside, in this little mental box, and left it there, as if leaving it locked away would make her forget what had happened. Forget how hurt she had felt. Forget everything from the first five years of her life.
“What happened to your mother?” Willow asked.
“She died. In a drunk driving accident.” Alex fingered a fake plant, running her fingers down the silky flowers, dyed an unnatural bright blue.
“I’m sorry,” Willow said, reaching out, her touch lighting on Alex’s knee. “What was your mother like?”
Alex ran a hand through her hair and prayed for the bell over the door to ring. For the phone to jangle, for anything to interrupt this quid pro quo game. What was it with this store? It seemed that whenever Alex was in here with Willow, no customers came in. No one to rescue her from this torturous line of questioning. “Can we pick another Jeopardy! topic?”
Willow smiled. “How about that man you’re falling in love with?”
“Steve? Oh, well, I don’t know…”
“Not that one.”
Alex blinked. “I’m not in love with anyone else.”
Willow didn’t say anything. That Mona Lisa smile took over her face again.
“I’ve answered tons of questions, so now it’s your turn,” Alex said. “Who were some of your inspirations for writing?”
“Oh, that’s an easy question,” Willow said. “All the greats, of course. Dickens. Shakespeare. Twain. But then there were the little, unknown authors. The one-hit wonders who have those books no one has heard of, the kind you find in the back of used bookstores, dusty little volumes that have hardly been read. I call them treasures, because I feel like I’ve discovered a secret no one else knows about.”
“Was that what you thought you’d be? A one-hit wonder?”
“I wanted more,” Willow said softly, drifting over to a display of porcelain floral vases. She picked up one and traced its rose pattern, her fingertip outlining the delicate red flower. “I dreamed of publishing dozens of books. Of becoming a Joyce Carol Oates. Going on speaking tours. Teaching at colleges.”
“What happened?”
“The fame hit me harder than I expected. Reporters started delving into my past. And it brought a lot of things up that I wasn’t ready to talk about then.”
Alex ventured the question, even as she was afraid it might trigger the end of the interview. “Why are you talking to me now?”
“Because it’s time. And because I’m getting too old to keep on hiding in this little shop. I’ve written a lot of words since The Season of Light, words that should”—Willow looked up and smiled—“see the light.”
“Good. Because you’re a great writer.”
“If not a little odd?”
Alex laughed. “Just a little.”
“That comes from spending too much time alone, I’m afraid. I had only me and my imagination when I was growing up, so I cultivated my sixth sense.” She shrugged. “Anyway, that’s a lot of questions and answers from me. You still owe me one. So choose one. You can either tell me what your mother was like…or about the man you’re falling in love with.”
Willow’s ESP radar was definitely off regarding Alex’s love life, but Alex let the subject drop. Arguing the point would only lead to more questions,
and Alex didn’t need that. What she needed were more answers. The sooner she gave Willow what she wanted, the sooner she could get what she needed. She’d gone through her notes last night, and she was halfway to a story. Maybe after today she’d have enough to write the piece.
She sucked in another dose of patience. “My mother was beautiful,” Alex said, the words surprising her as they escaped her mouth. Of all the things that she could have said, that would have been the last sentence Alex would have expected to hear out of herself. She thought of the picture, of her mother’s smile, and realized it was true. “She was young and pretty and she laughed a lot.”
Was that really what she remembered the most? For years, Alex thought she’d remembered only the bad. The days when her mother had been gone, leaving her with one friend or another, or the times her mother had forgotten to buy groceries, leaving Alex with nothing of substance to eat. The parties that lasted long into the night, the strangers sleeping on the floors, sometimes even on Alex’s bedroom floor—
But no. When she closed her eyes and reached into her mind, she heard—
Laughter.
“Then what made her so bad?”
“She forgot what was important. Like me. And my sister.” But had she always? Every single day? Alex reached again into her memory, striving to find more, more clues, more images, but her mind drew a blank. She felt as if she was missing a key somewhere, to a door she hadn’t opened.
“I know how you feel. There was good among the bad, light among the shadows,” Willow said softly. “And you saw that in my book, didn’t you?”
Alex nodded. “Probably why I read it so many times.”
“And probably why I can read you so well. Sometimes, people’s auras are fuzzy. But yours, it’s clear as a bell.” She laid a hand on Alex’s reporter’s pad. “I think, if you look over your pages, you’ll find that you have what you need.”
“I still have a lot of questions—”
“I didn’t mean for your story about me. I’m willing to talk the rest of the afternoon and give you the inside scoop on Willow Clark.” She smiled. “I meant for your story. You came here, whether you knew it or not, seeking answers for yourself, too. You’ve already got what you need inside your heart. Now all you have to do is finish writing the tale in your heart.”