Paris Is Always a Good Idea - Jenn McKinlay Page 0,124
We were quiet for a while, enjoying the dappled sunlight, the gentle breeze, the companionable silence.
“Okay, Martin, your turn,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Now you know why I work at the ACC, but why do you? What’s your origin story?”
I snorted. Leave it to Jason to make a backstory sound more like a superhero’s journey, but then again, maybe it was. I plucked a blade of grass and considered it.
“I told you my father was remarrying,” I said. “But I don’t know if I mentioned that he’s a widower.”
“Oh, shit, Chelsea, I’m sorry,” he said.
“Yeah, that crushing loss I mentioned to you in Paris? It was my mom. Seven years ago,” I said. “Pancreatic cancer. I was here, actually, working at the vineyard, when I got the call.”
Our gazes met, and the look of understanding on his face, as if he knew exactly how devastating that call had been, almost undid me. I hadn’t cried over the loss of my mother in a while, but his gentle sympathy almost brought it bubbling up to the surface. I shook my head and tossed the sliver of grass into the air and watched it pinwheel back to the earth.
“You know what was weird? When I got home, she seemed fine,” I said. “She and Dad picked me up at Logan. My sister was away at college, but she came home shortly after I arrived, and we had a family meeting about our new reality. The thing I remember most was thinking that it had to be a mistake, because she looked totally normal.”
Jason didn’t say anything. He just listened. Given that most people tried to change the subject when the loss of my mother came up, Jason’s acceptance was a welcome change.
“The disease moved swiftly, however,” I said. “She was already stage four. The cancer had spread to other major organs when it was discovered, so it wasn’t resectable, but she held on a lot longer than we thought she would. She was stubborn like that.”
“How long?” he asked.
“We had a little over three months from the time I arrived home until she passed away,” I said. “We tried to make the most of it.”
He nodded, and I knew he understood how differently you start to view time when the grains of sand start dropping in the hourglass faster and faster and there’s nothing you can do to slow it down.
“My mom was my best friend. I suppose that’s odd, but we had a special connection. My younger sister, Annabelle, was a daddy’s girl. If he was fixing a toilet, well, then she was right in there with him, handing him a wrench. But for me, it was all mom all the time. I was her shadow. Saturdays were our baking days. We both loved to bake elaborate cakes for all occasions. I remember one Christmas we made a cake that when you sliced it, a Christmas tree appeared in the middle.
“Then there was the time we made a peanut butter cake. After hours of being so good, our golden retriever, Sally, jumped up on the counter and bit into the cake.” I laughed at the memory. “Sally bolted for the door with half of the cake in her mouth, and my mom ran after her. I have no idea what she thought she was going to do.
“Sally managed to eat that enormous chunk of cake while running, and there was my mom chasing after her with her apron flapping in the breeze for the entire neighborhood to see. It took her years to live that down. I always wondered why she chased the dog. Surely she didn’t think the cake was salvageable. When Sally spent the night vomiting the cake back up, my mom told her it served her right, but then she slept on the floor and stayed by Sally’s side all night, rubbing her belly so she’d feel better.”
I smiled and Jason returned it, which was what I’d hoped for. It hurt me to see him hurting. I was humbled that he’d told me about Jess, and it felt good to tell him about my mom. So few people really understood, but I knew now that he did. There was an emotional connection between us that I’d never felt with anyone outside my family before. Maybe it was the bond of having survived great loss, or perhaps it was being in charge of such a major gift, or maybe it was a combination of the two. Either way, I