her, quickly greeted by Tucker, her large golden retriever. He prances around me, his cold, wet nose pressing against my bare legs, making me giggle. “I know,” I tell him. “I’ve missed you, too. Yes, I have.”
Diane wipes her face with a wad of tissues that are wadded in her fist, confirming she’s also expecting this to be an emotional visit. “I made some biscuits and gravy for breakfast. I thought you might want to eat out on the back patio since the bluebells are starting to bloom.”
I nod, my throat growing tight again when I look at her.
Diane and I fix our plates inside and carry them outside with Tucker close on our heels. Diane, like my mom, has been a steady bachelorette. She married twice, once when I was a toddler and the second time when I was twelve. Neither of the marriages lasted for more than a year.
The sun splays across my legs but spares my back as I take a seat at the patio table, every noise seemingly magnified as we set down our plates and glasses, and scoot our chairs in.
“You must have so many questions,” Diane says, reaching across the glass-top and placing her hand over mine. “I know your mom worried about this—about what to say and how you might find out.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
Diane shakes her head, her gaze dropping and then rising to meet mine several times. “Your mom loved you so fiercely. We knew Ellen. Her dad lived over off Piedmont, and she’d stay with him every summer. My grandparents lived over there, and so your mom and I would spend our summers at their community pool, sunbathing and flirting with all the neighborhood boys.” She smiles, her gaze unfocused as she lives in the memory. “We met Ellen when we were maybe eight?” She shakes her head again, her lips pursed as she tries to recall and then laughs, her eyes finding mine. “Before the days of sunbathing and flirting. Ellen wanted to be an actress. She was always putting on a show, always smiling and reciting lines from movies we’d watched together. Her love of acting and wanting to put on plays is what inspired my love for the theater.” Diane pauses, taking a sip of coffee.
“As Ellen got older, she’d tell us about her auditions for TV commercials and print ads. She was always beautiful—long and willowy with dark hair and light eyes that always caught people’s attention, just like you.”
I roll my shoulders back, uncomfortable with her comparing me to Ellen when I’m still unsure if I want to share any similarities—even physical ones.
“She stopped visiting after high school, and then one day, she came and knocked on your mom’s door. Your mom was still living with your meemaw and was in her junior year of culinary school, and Ellen showed up six months pregnant and crying because she didn’t know what to do. She’d just landed a big role on a TV series that she thought was going to pave her way into Hollywood—her dream—and she didn’t know what to do.”
“My mom went to culinary school? Why didn’t she tell me? Why’d she stop?”
Diane smiles. “Ellen had to go to LA for the show—a soap opera. Your mom dropped out, so she could take care of you. She never made any qualms about it—to her, it wasn’t an either-or. It was just you. You were her top priority from the moment you were born.”
I imagine someone telling me they were pregnant and not being able to care for a baby and what my reaction would be. Would I be willing to drop out of college and care for an infant? Would I even know how?
“At twenty-one?”
Diane nods. “Your mom had only two loves in her life, you and food.”
“I remember Ellen,” I admit. “Not a lot, but flashes of her from when I was little.”
“Ellen would come and visit, and each time, your mom was so terrified, waiting for the day she’d ask to have you back. But the first couple of seasons of the show she was on did amazing, and then they got a new writer, and it fell apart. The show was canceled in the third season, and Ellen spent a full year away, trying to get cast for other gigs. After that, she came back and wanted to be a part of your life, but she had a drinking problem, and your mom wouldn’t allow her to be around you