Around the Bend (13 page)

“That’s because my specialty is doing the exact opposite.” I returned her smile with a watered down version of my own. “And look where that got me.”

She drew in a breath, smoothed over the comforter again, then looked at me. Really looked at me, her gaze so piercing, so deep, that I knew she was seeing me in a way she never had before. She seemed to peer past the T-shirts she hated, the flip-flops, the raggedy jeans, the unfulfilled life, and see the daughter I was, for better or worse. I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable, bracing myself for her judgment.

“Hilary,” she said, biting her lip, then going on, the words coming out of her with a catch on the end of the syllables, “I am so proud of you, of the woman that you have become—”

A lump formed in my throat, thick and hard. I didn’t think I could ever swallow again. I had never heard those words from my mother before. For a second, I wanted to tell her to stop, to not finish the sentence, because I wasn’t sure I
could
hear it, as weird as that sounded. I didn’t want her to add a
but
, to take it back with a conjunction that could sweep it all away.

She didn’t do that. She went on, not even aware that three decades of unspent emotions were clogging my throat and stinging my eyes, completely oblivious to how utterly unprepared I was to hear her speak these words.

“—You may not have become what I thought I wanted.” She let out a little laugh. “Okay, not at all what I had dreamed, what I imagined or what I planned when I got out my silly little spreadsheets and lists. But you became what
you
wanted to be, which is exactly what should have happened. You were living your life, not mine. And well…it turned out not to be so bad in the end. You’re happy, right?”

“Yeah. I am.” But was I? Hadn’t there been this ache for more? This constant wondering if this was all there was? And yet, fear held me back from moving from my spot, as if holding on to the bus could keep it from moving to the next stop.

My mother’s smile widened, this one strengthening and becoming more like the usual Rosemary Delaney. “If there’s anything I have learned in this week we’ve been together on the road, it’s that
that’s
what’s important. That we’re truly happy, not just pretending to be.” She looked down again at the bedding, tracing the outline of a green leaf with a finger, her nail skating along the edge of the reed-and-lily-pad pattern. “We get so few of those days. So few when we are
really
happy.” She lifted her gaze to mine. “And we had some of those days, didn’t we? Not just this week, but before?”

I rose, crossing to the bed, sinking down beside her. “Of course we did, Ma.”

Her eyes glistened, and I wondered again at this woman that I didn’t seem to know, who hurt, like everyone else, and who maybe had a few secrets of her own, a need to be loved, to be told it was going to be okay, just like I did.

Who wondered about what had happened behind that closed door every single day of her life. What could have been done before that door shut. Just like I did.

She covered my hand with hers, a bond forming between us that went beyond a cup of coffee. “I want you to have more of those happy days, Hilary. Marry Nick, honey. Take a risk.”

Fear returned again, beating like a flock of birds in my chest. “I don’t know, Ma. The whole thought terrifies me. Too many what-ifs.”

“I know that feeling, that fear.”

“You? What have you ever been afraid of?”

Her gaze drifted off into the past. “I never tried for another baby because I couldn’t face losing another one. And I was afraid of making things worse.”

“With Dad,” I finished.

She nodded, then gave my hand a squeeze. “If you live your life by what-ifs, Hilary, you’ll never find out what could be. And I really want you to find that out.” Ma leaned over and pressed a kiss to my cheek, lingering for a long moment against my face.

My mind rocketed back to when I was five, six, little enough to be tucked in bed by my father, to still take a bear
with me, to still have a night-light, to still believe in Santa Claus. My mother would get home well after my bedtime, because she’d been immersed in studies at Suffolk, or working long hours in her internship.

More often than not, I’d be asleep, but once in a while I’d still be awake when she’d come home. And when she did, she’d always stop in my room, her shoes in one hand—those pumps, always pumps, as if she was dressed to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court even when she was just going to school—her nylons swishing in the quiet darkness, the scent of Chanel No.5 carrying lightly in the air as she bent down over my bed and pressed a kiss to my forehead.

I’d keep my eyes shut, my breathing even, my body still as a statue. For just that moment, I wanted to be caught up in that magical embrace of my mother’s. Because that was the only time she would let her guard down and be a mother, not a taskmaster, not a judge and jury, but just a mother, an ordinary mother, inhaling the scent of her daughter’s hair, and holding a kiss for a long, quiet moment in the dark.

“I love you,” she whispered now, her lips against my skin, soft and tender. A mother’s kiss.

And one of us began to cry.

I’d worried that without Nick to serve as buffer, my mother and I would slip right back into what we had been before—adversaries. But as we drove through the rest of the Rocky Mountains, a never-ending vista of beauty, our conversations became, well—

Conversations.

Good thing, too, because it helped take my mind off how badly I had screwed things up with Nick. How he was flying back to Massachusetts as I drove in the opposite direction—the very metaphor for our relationship. Just a few days ago, everything had been wonderful with us, and now, we’d diverged. I didn’t see a way to bring us back together without giving Nick the one thing he wanted, and I didn’t.

“Did you always want to be a lawyer?” I asked my mother, focusing on her, instead of my deplorable love life.

She laughed. “I did. You know me. I could argue the price of peanuts with an elephant.”

“That’s true.”

“I drove my mother crazy, always arguing back with her and breaking all her rules.”

I shifted in the driver’s seat to stare at her. “
You?
You’re kidding me.”

“Believe it or not, but I was quite the hellion when I was younger. Why do you think I tried so hard to keep you in line? I knew what could go wrong. Because I’d…Well, I’d done a few of those things myself.”

“Yeah, right.” I snorted. “Ma, you’d make Miss Goody Two Shoes look like a juvenile delinquent.”

“I’m serious. I broke a few laws in my day. Nothing that got me put in jail, but still, I wasn’t perfect.”

I found that hard to believe, especially given how tight my mother toed the legal line now. “What’d you do? Commit jaywalking? Spit your gum on the sidewalk?”

“Try grand theft auto.”

I sent a sharp glance her way, and saw a smug, almost conspiratorial smile on her face, as if she was proud she shared a little mischief in her past. “No way!”

“Yep. I stole my grandmother’s car when I was eleven. I was running away from home after a dispute over my bedtime. I got as far as the telephone pole in front of Mrs. Feehan’s house four doors down.”

I laughed so hard, I nearly had to pull over because tears were streaming down my face and blocking my vision. “You really did that?”

She held up three fingers on her right hand. “Scouts’ honor.”

“That almost makes my own car theft pale in comparison.”

Whoops
. I hadn’t meant to let that one slip out. But I couldn’t reach out and shovel the words back into my mouth.
They sat there between us, like a third passenger. I sidled a glance my mother’s way to see her reaction.

“1998,” she said. “When you stole the landscaper’s truck, went to Niagara Falls and got married.”

My jaw dropped, nearly hit my chest. “You knew?”

“Why do you think your annulment went through without so much as a blip? And why do you think the landscaper didn’t press charges?”

I swallowed those tidbits. Digested them, churning them around with the surprise already there. The biggest secret of my life, the one I’d gone to elaborate work to keep from my mother. I’d done a lot of things in my life that I didn’t want her to know, but breaking laws hadn’t been on the list—except for this one time. I’d thought I’d dodged a bullet when the landscaper had either not noticed or not reported the truck stolen, and that my mother, the lawyer, wouldn’t end up defending her own daughter in court.

“Don’t end up in jail,” had been Rosemary Delaney’s biggest piece of advice as I’d been growing up. Because she knew what jail was like. Knew what kind of evil lurked there. And I’d known the last photo she’d want to see of me would be a mug shot. So I’d kept the secret, begged everyone I knew never to say a word to my mother. Snuck back into the house, done extra chores, been on my best behavior for weeks, and never mentioned that boyfriend’s name again.

Until now.

“But I thought you hated Tommy McGrath. Didn’t even want me dating him.” He’d been in that bad-boy category, the kind of guy who stomped on my heart and treated it like dirt.

In other words, not a Nick kind of guy. Who my mother considered a keeper, but I hadn’t exactly done a good job in the keeper category, either. Thankfully, my mother hadn’t leaped on criticizing me for that today.

“I did. But your father kept telling me that the more I harped on about Tommy, the farther and the faster you’d run away.”

“Which is exactly what I did.” I thought of the fight I’d had with my mother, that last night I’d spent in my parents’ house. I’d packed a bag, stolen the truck, because my mother had hidden my car keys, and taken off for Niagara Falls. Picking up Tommy on the way—because he hadn’t been able to hold down a job, and thus, didn’t own a car.

Right there should have been a good clue that he wasn’t Mr. Right.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything about what I did?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t want you to run again.” Her eyes met mine, misty with a two-decades old hurt still lingering in them, and I could see the worry, the pain I had put her through, for my impromptu, selfish decision to run away.

“I’m sorry.”

She smiled, and the mist disappeared. “I know.”

“I’d been so convinced he was the man for me. I thought I’d convince you, too, by marrying him.” I laughed. “
That
backfired.”

Back then, I’d had the crazy idea that marriage would save a relationship. Prove something about how much a guy loved me, and I loved him. But as I’d gotten older, and seen the end result of an unhappy relationship, I became more and more skittish around gold rings, like a horse that had been locked too long in the barn.

“What finally changed your mind about Tommy?”

“When I had to pay for my own wedding. Or maybe it was when he tried to slide a beer tab on my finger instead of a wedding ring. Or could have been when he had the bright idea of embarking on a life of crime instead of getting a real job. He had issues with the whole nine-to-five thing.”

My mother’s mouth formed into a little O. “Not exactly Mr. Perfect, was he?”

I shook my head. Thinking of Tommy made me miss Nick even more. Nick wasn’t perfect, but he had a lot more going for him in the Mr. Right category than Tommy had ever had. If only Nick didn’t come attached to so many expectations…

“Tommy wasn’t even Mr. Perfect’s ugly second cousin. I clearly drew the short straw in the frog lottery.”

“If he didn’t have any money, why did you run off and elope with him?”

“Tommy had a plan, all right—turned out he thought he could pay for the wedding with a little help from the casinos. He had five bucks on him and lost it all in a few pulls of the quarter slots. After that, he tried to talk me into robbing a convenience store. I guess he figured if I could steal a truck, I’d have no problem with knocking over a gas station or two.” I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Actually, I wasn’t thinking at all. You were right about him.”

My mother cupped a hand around her ear. “Did I just hear you correctly? Did you say I was
right?
”

“Maybe,” I said, teasing her, laughing with her. “Okay, yes, you were right. There. I said it twice. Mark the occasion in your Day Planner.”

We looked at each other, and I knew in that moment that
we were sharing the same thought. When had she and I ever laughed together, just us, without my dad serving as joke teller, comedian, entertainer? When had we ever found a moment of camaraderie, of such solid agreement, before this trip?

“I’m glad we did this, Ma,” I said, the lump in my throat so thick, it nearly blocked the words from getting out.

“Me, too.” She reached for me, her hand so like mine, only with the wisdom and lines of age and experience. I saw my future in that hand, and for the first time, it didn’t look so bad. “Now, how about a cup of coffee?”

“Sounds like a good idea.” I squinted against the glare of the sun and the lingering sting in my eyes. “A really good idea.”

We made it all the way to Utah. To the painted purple mountains, the stuff of songs, before the petals began to fall off the rose.

I noticed the swelling first. My mother’s left leg, taking on a life of its own, becoming nearly twice the size it should be. She gave up wearing shoes at the Utah border, kicked off her slippers after the first rest stop.

“You’re feeling bad again, aren’t you?”

She didn’t bother lying, nor could she cover the flush in her cheeks, the way her face scrunched up every few seconds when a fresh wave of pain hit her. “I think the Coumadin has stopped working.”

I missed Nick more in that moment than ever before. His steady, even keel, the way he could lay a palm on my shoulder and make it seem like everything would be fine. But I’d screwed everything up with him and now, he’d stopped taking my calls. I could hardly blame him. He’d said it was over—

And when Nick was done with something, he was done. The man recycled, for God’s sake. He didn’t hold on to mementos. Or dead-end relationships.

I glanced again at my mother. “Maybe it’s time you went in for that catheterization thing the doctor talked about.”

Why had we decided to keep going? Why had I let her talk me into continuing toward California? I should have kept her in Indiana, or brought her back to Massachusetts, not driven her through state after state full of nothing but desert and mountains.

She shook her head so hard even the hairspray had trouble holding on. “No. We have to keep going.”

“Ma, your health is more important.”

“I won’t have another opportunity like this.” Her hands went to her purse, again in her lap. The all-business, travel posture. But her fingers fluttered over the clasp, and the flush in her cheeks deepened to a darker crimson. “I promise to go to the doctor as soon as we get home.”

I sent another glance at her leg, at the ballooning, reddened skin that used to be a calf. Not good. Not good at all. Panic rose in my throat, expanded my chest. I could handle this alone. I had to. “I don’t have to be Marcus Welby to tell you don’t have that much time.”

“Hilary—”

I jerked her purse away, yanked the road atlas up from its place on the floor and laid it on her lap.
No
. “Find the nearest damned hospital, Ma. And don’t argue with me anymore.”

She blinked in surprise. “Now
you’re
the mother?”

I gave her a grin, but it was only a mask for the worry mounting with every mile passing under our wheels. Miles that brought us farther from home and deeper into the
remote, vast boondocks of Utah, light years away from anything resembling emergency medical personnel and the comfort of a big blue H sign. “I think it’s about time somebody told
you
what to do for a change. And, even better, about time you listened.”

I pressed harder on the accelerator. To hell with speeding tickets, with rules of the road. In fact, I could use a police escort right about now. Or at the very least, those miracle pigeons that had carried Brigham Young over the mountains.

Ma shifted in her seat. Pain flickered across her face. Sweat beaded on her brow, and her eyes fluttered shut.

“Good,” she said on a staggered breath, “because I think I need someone else to be in charge for a while.”