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,