“Our lifestyle was sick. You got that before we did.”
My mother looked baffled, but I wasn’t being distracted.
“I want you to see my home. This is a perfect excuse—maybe even God’s plan.” She made a sharp slash with her casted hand. “Okay,” I backed off, “maybe not His plan, but it’s a good one. Think about it. It’d be like being on vacation. When was the last time you got away?” I didn’t expect an answer to that. “You’d have everything you need, plus good people. My friends will love you.”
“They’re your friends.”
“Some are way closer to your age than to mine.” I was thinking of Joyce, but Cornelia would qualify, too. She would be onboard in a heartbeat. “They’d be thrilled to have you there.”
She struggled, eyes moving here and there in search of an excuse. Finally, she just sank into herself. “It’s too much. Really.”
Not for me. This made more sense than anything had in a long time. It made perfect sense, actually, and the more I got into it, the more sense it made—the more I imagined it, the better I felt. The prospect of having my mother in Devon made me feel happy.
“It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive,” I said. “We could leave right after your PT session. Front seat, back seat—you can sit wherever you’re most comfortable. We can stop every half hour to get out and walk. Edward is a safe driver.”
“That’s not the issue,” my mother tried.
“And here’s another thing, Mom.” She hadn’t gotten up to walk away and end the discussion, which she would have done in the old days. I could blame her hip for that. Or not. Hopeful, pushing it, I said, “Devon is small, it’s do-able. It’s refreshing.” I was thinking of the days when I had first come, way before the media had, but the media had pretty much exhausted itself, hadn’t it? That was the art of the dream. “And it’s different. You need a change. Devon is a change.” I straightened and smiled. “It worked for me.”
“And for me,” Edward said.
She was torn. I could see it in her eyes, which went back and forth between him and me. I was startled to see shame. “You owe me nothing.”
“Not owe,” I insisted. “Want. I want you to come, Mom. It would be fabulous. For both of us.”
“I don’t know—”
“We could talk.”
“Oh, Mackenzie—”
“Dad would want you to do this. He would want me to do it.”
She seemed heartened by that, but only briefly. “Would he? I just don’t know any more. Too much of what I want is different from what he wants.”
“What do you want?”
My mom had always been a woman in control, but she had zero of it now. I’d never seen her bewildered. In a broken voice, she said, “I want to think. A little space, please?”
21
After tucking the afghan around her, I sat by my mother’s hip. She wanted space, but I couldn’t walk out. We didn’t talk. I didn’t even hold her hand, just wanted her to know I was there.
And honestly? The fact that she allowed it was a gift. Did I still want more? Absolutely. But I would have been naïve to think that our relationship would pick up where it had been before the accident. Too much had happened; we were different people now from the ones we had been then. Actually, if I were to dream, I would return to what our relationship had been when I was growing up. It wasn’t all showy with hugs and kisses, more a meeting of minds. She was independent; I was independent. She was disciplined; I was disciplined. If I walked into the kitchen while she was making dinner, I set the table, not because she asked but because it needed doing. If I was cramming for an exam, she brought me tea, not because I asked but because it would help.
Things changed once I hit college and even more after I married Edward. I remember, though, that when the accident happened, she had dropped everything and come.
Then she had gone back home to get my father, and by the time she returned, she was distant. So maybe the real problem was Dad. Maybe Liam was right. Maybe she was simply the enforcer. But my father had been dead for more than four years, during which time she hadn’t reached out on her own.
I wanted to ask whether she still blamed me for his death. But what we had here, now, was too