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