“It’s not a vacation. We’re working. Mark had to come home, I came with him.” I shift my weight, leaning against the kitchen’s doorframe, my voice lowered as I speak into the cell phone. My explanation sounds wrong, like it is something different, like Mark and I are friends and not just business associates. “So we could work,” I repeat.
“Are you having… fun?” Kate delivers the question doubtfully, and this conversation is already stretching too long.
Mark taps a spoon on the edge of the pot and I glance at him, then turn away. I ignore Kate’s question. “Did you call for something?”
“I was just checking in. I do want to talk to you about your book… the one you are writing with Mark… whenever you have a chance.”
“So talk.” Whenever I have a chance? What a dumb thing to say.
“Oh. Well. I mean, we don’t have to talk about it right now.”
Irritation flares. “You just brought it up. So talk about it.”
A long pause. “Oh-kay.” She sighs, as if she is about to step into war. “I need more information so I can prepare a pitch.”
“No.” The word falls instinctively off my lips. At some point, someone will read these words. Millions will. But not now. Not with Kate.
“No?” The word squeaks out, and she clears her throat. “Then when?”
It’s not a ridiculous question. By now, I should have sent over an outline. Kate would review it, send back some questions—and it would be packaged and sent off to Jackie—the editor of my last eight books, the editor who always loves everything, and always pays whatever we demand. But this book is different. Jackie will hate it. That’s why I picked Tricia Pridgen, an editor who likes twisted books drenched in truth and void of a happy ending. But Pridgen won’t buy a book she knows nothing about. I know this, yet I can’t bring myself to do an outline, or even a summary. I can’t deal with that emotion, and I can’t yet share this story with Kate.
“Soon,” I lie. “We need to get further on it first.” I watch as Mark turns off the burner. “I’ve got to go.”
“Okay. Be safe.”
Be safe. The last words I said to Bethany. Be safe. Did I tell her I loved her? I’ve tried, for four years, to remember. I don’t know that I did. I’m afraid I was too distracted to do more than kiss her goodbye.
“Helena?”
I squeeze my eyes tightly shut. “I’ll talk to you later.” I end the call and push the phone into my back pocket, struggling with the simple task, my hands thick and clumsy.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine.” I step into the kitchen. His home is so different from my own. Rich brown leather, burlap curtains, wood-stained walls and clusters of family photos. In my house, I’ve removed every reminder of Bethany and Simon. Here, even in the kitchen, Mark is surrounded by images of his wife, her wide body pressed to his side, her arms slung around his neck, her astride a horse, by a waterfall, and next to a puppy. Maybe he fears forgetting her. Maybe he thinks that, if he has enough reminders of her, it’s like she’s still alive.
But it isn’t. I’ve spent over a thousand nights surrounded by Bethany. I’ve wrapped myself in her sheets, smelled the clothes in her drawer, and flipped through photo albums until my fingers bled from paper cuts.
Nothing replaces having her in my life, her feet pounding down my hall, her shriek of laughter in the air. And nothing makes the loss easier. Distractions are the best we can hope for. Short windows of time when the sadness breaks.
I lean against the edge of the counter, watching as he turns on the faucet and washes his hands. “I don’t have pictures of Bethany in the house.” I have to speak loudly to be heard over the water. I should step closer, he’ll hear me more clearly if I do, but I don’t think I can support my own weight right now.
He stops the water, turning to me, his movements slow as he dries his hands.
“It’s not because I don’t love her.” I say desperately. He needs to know this. He needs to show that in his writing, in the pages of this book.
“I know.” He says softly, kindness in his face. But he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything yet. He knows I fell for a boy. He knows I had a baby. All he knows are the first lines of a song. He hasn’t even heard the melody yet.
“You don’t know.” I say. “But you will.”
My mother once told me that I was too selfish to love. I was thirteen at the time, our argument held across a sticky tablecloth in a Red Lobster. She had planned a trip to my grandmother’s house, one that would correspond with her seventy-first birthday. The trip would have caused a complete disruption of my writing calendar, one I had reviewed with her and posted on the refrigerator door, five weeks earlier. This trip hadn’t been mentioned at that time, and I was convinced it was a spur-of-the-moment idea concocted purely because of a railways promotional flyer received in the mail. I had, up to that point, perfectly followed my writing calendar. I was on schedule to finish what would become my first novel, and a week of disruption would mean the inability to finish it before school started. So I did what any enterprising young Steinbeck would do. I snuck into my mother’s room, fished my train ticket out of her purse, and destroyed it.
She didn’t handle it well. She called me insolent. Spoiled. A brat. She tried to make me feel guilty for not wanting to see my grandmother, for not wanting to spend time with my family. I didn’t understand the obligation I had to a woman whom I’d only seen a handful of times. I didn’t understand the ridiculous expectation that I should love her simply because she birthed my mother. I wasn’t even sure, in that thirteen-year-old mindset, that I loved my own mother.
But I did love Bethany. Even when I screamed and ran away and ignored her—I loved her. I used to look at her and my heart would hurt. It would swell in my chest, and there would be a sudden flare of panic—a sharp prick of vulnerability. In that moment, I would fear losing her. Maybe it’s a normal fear, one that every parent has. Or maybe, it was God’s warning to me, the foreshadowing he was writing into my story.
I should have listened to it. I shouldn’t have swallowed that fear. I should have been the right kind of mother, suppressed my instincts and selfishness, and put her first. I should have kept her a million miles from my mother, held her against me, and never let her go anywhere, do anything.
Keeping her prisoner would have been better than losing her.
On his front porch, the rocker I sit in wobbles, each forward roll creaking over bumpy boards. The blanket around my shoulders is soft, and I relax against it, the mug of hot chocolate cooling in my hands. Before us, there is a stretch of darkness, no fireflies in this space, the moon behind a cloud, the occasional click of nails giving away the dog’s location.
“You tired?” Mark sits on the step, ignoring the other rocker, his shoulders hunched over as he lights a cigar. “It’s been a long day. Gotta be past midnight.”
I am tired. Too tired to even pull back the sleeve of my shirt and check the time. It doesn’t matter. Out here, the chorus of crickets humming—we seem a hundred miles from civilization, in a place where clocks don’t exist, deadlines don’t matter, and basic needs are the only concerns. I can’t imagine sitting on this porch and caring about bestseller ranks and end-cap placements. I’m shocked Mark even knows who I am, or has read my books. It had been easy to picture Marka in an expensive high rise, her fake nails tapping out nasty emails. But I can’t fit Mark into that mold. I can’t see those terrible words coming from this man.
“Your emails to me.” I eye him, watching the muscles of his back as he straightens, setting the lighter to the side and rolling the cigar between his fingers. He turns his head and wisps of smoke frame his profile. “Why did you start emailing me?”
He looks down, and I watch the flex of his jaw as he eyes his cigar. Bringing it to his mouth, he takes a long pull before turning to face me, his face a quiet mix of emotions. “Memphis Bride,” he finally says, one leg crossing over another.
“Excuse me?” My medication makes me loopy, but I am fairly certain a fully rational person wouldn’t be able to follow that answer.