hard ground. Too dry to absorb anything. To let anything in.
“That so?” she asked, finally, no indication of whether or not she cared was reflected in that flat voice.
“Yes. He did a great job of taking care of me.”
“This your boyfriend?” Her mother asked, gesturing to Gage.
Rebecca didn’t quite know how to answer that. He wasn’t her boyfriend, not really. And even if he were, that word wouldn’t seem like quite enough.
“He’s a friend,” she decided to say.
Because she was discovering what all her friendships meant to her. How much they had saved her. The degree to which they had supported her over all these years, even when she hadn’t given equally in return.
Calling him a friend didn’t minimize him at all.
Her mother nodded, taking a drag on her cigarette. “Yeah, I had a lot of those friends.”
Rebecca gritted her teeth. “He drove me here to see you. To support me. I don’t know if you have any friends quite like that.”
Her mother laughed. “Did you come here to make up?”
“I can’t do that on my own,” Rebecca said.
Her mother said nothing, crossing her leg over the other, jiggling her foot, rocking back and forth as she put the cigarette into her mouth again. “Guess not,” she said, talking around it.
“I wanted to say that I forgive you. And I think I can do that without an emotional reunion. It’s not really about you. It’s just about what I want to hold on to now, and what I don’t.”
Jessica Bear shrugged her bony shoulders. “You can’t forgive things like that,” she said, drawing more tightly in on herself. “I never forgave your father for leaving us. There’s no reason for you to forgive me.”
“No, there isn’t,” Rebecca said. “But I’m doing it all the same.”
“I don’t want you to.” Those words were full of spite, confusion.
As if Jessica Bear needed her daughter to be angry at her.
“I didn’t ask,” Rebecca said. “I need to do it for me. This has nothing to do with you. But I needed to come here. I needed to let it go. So I’m doing that. My store is called the Trading Post. If you ever want to come see me, you can.”
Then she turned, walking out of the trailer, the first breath of cold, fresh air like breaking the surface of the water after too long under the surface.
She could feel Gage following behind her. She got into the truck, buckling herself, leaning her head against the cold window, willing herself not to cry. She wasn’t going to shed any more tears. Wasn’t going to let any more anger build inside of her.
Gage got into the truck then, starting the engine. “Do you want me to wait a second?”
“Just in case,” Rebecca said. They waited, but her mother didn’t come out of the trailer. Finally, Rebecca took a deep breath. “We can go.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Rebecca laughed. “I don’t know what I expected. You can’t really expect a woman who abandoned her children to receive one of them with open arms after seventeen years, can you?”
“I don’t know. I mean, my own family didn’t exactly open their arms to me, but it wasn’t like that.”
“Yeah, but you’re the one that did the leaving. Not them. I know she doesn’t feel things quite the same way other people do. Or maybe she does, and she just doesn’t know what to do with it. I’ll tell you one thing—I think she’s angrier at herself than I’ve ever been at her.”
He nodded slowly. “Accepting forgiveness when you know you don’t deserve it isn’t easy.”
“If you’re talking about yourself again...don’t. You do deserve it. We both deserve to move forward.”
“I do accept it. If only because I just saw what rejecting it looks like. And how little it helps.”
“Thank you.”
“So,” he said, his tone lighter, like he was trying to put a Band-Aid on the situation. For some reason that bothered her, and she couldn’t pinpoint why. “You want to go see a movie? They have a movie theater here.”
She laughed, reluctantly. “I’m not exactly in a theatergoing mood.”
“Fish and chips?”
“That I would take.”
This hadn’t gone quite the same as forgiving Gage had. She didn’t feel free or light, not immediately. But she felt like something was changing. Like something important had just taken place. Even if it hadn’t been a magic fix.
She looked to the side, at the man she was sharing the truck with. The man who had driven her all the way down here, who