“I know Janette and Michelle,” he said.
“Korby, Maggie and Terri are my friends—one writer, one florist, one teacher. They all ditched their families for the day, knowing it would be Mom’s last Thanksgiving. And instead of being dark or sad, it was awesome. I didn’t sleep that night, even though I had a full stomach. I just wanted to be with her till the sun came up. She did great. She totally had a good time. A few days after that she began sinking. Her last three weeks were pretty hard. You remember.”
“I remember.”
She stroked Tux. “She wanted to talk about it and I wouldn’t let her.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Oh, she said things like, ‘You know, when I’m gone, you should...’ And I would cut her off and say, but you’re not going, so don’t say that. I kept begging her to be positive, to fight it. But she had been fighting it and didn’t have any more fight in her. I wish I could have let her talk. Who knows what she had to get off her chest?”
“Don’t worry about that, Kaylee. I think she was at peace. She told me she’d been proud of her life, that it was a good life, that she had very few regrets. And why should she have regrets? She was nearly perfect.” He glanced at the kitty she was holding. “Is that the stray you found?”
“Tux,” she said. “He’s not the only one I found. I found a dog and her four puppies tied up in the woods not far from here. My neighbor is a part-time trainer and has a kennel and lots of supplies so she’s over there, her puppies safe from predators. I go visit with her; we call her Lady. She’s very well behaved and there’s just no reason for a person to treat her that way.”
“I’m impressed; you always avoided animals.”
“Not all animals, but I was always scared around big dogs. Especially big dogs I didn’t know, until I rented a little house from a dog trainer. He helped me get past my fear. When I found Lady, my heart melted. I’m thinking of keeping her.”
“I worry about you being alone out here,” he said.
“Actually, one of the reasons I came up here to finish the book is because people were dropping in at Mom’s house all the time. Friends, neighbors, even the UPS guy came to the door to see how I was doing. If I didn’t have someone drop in, the phone was ringing. Add that to living in my mom’s house and I couldn’t escape the overpowering grief—it never left me. I fell asleep to it at night and woke up to it in the morning. I’m anxious to get home, but even though I sorted through Mom’s things and gave a lot of stuff away, I’m afraid it’ll be just too familiar again. It’s a very contradictory feeling—don’t want it to go away, I don’t want it to be so constant in my life. It can be overpowering.”
“Why don’t you make some changes?” he suggested.
“I’ve thought about that,” she said. “I feel like I’m cheating on her. She loved that house and decorated it from floor to ceiling.”
He shook his head. “That house should reflect your taste. Maybe a few choice things to remind you of Meredith tossed in. You should hire one of her decorator friends to help you. I can help with the cost, if you need me to.”
“It’s not necessary. I have what I need. And the house is mine now.”
“Then if you find the memories aren’t letting you move forward, you can always sell it.”
“I know. I do love the house, I just loved it better when my mom was in it.”
“I feel the same,” he said. “Sometimes I drive by to look at it because I miss her.”
“Just out of curiosity, when did you realize you missed her so much?”
He chuckled, but it wasn’t an amused chuckle. “It didn’t take me too long to realize I’d made a mistake in leaving my marriage to your mother. It took a long time beyond that for her to decide she didn’t hate me for it. My second marriage was difficult and my third was a freak show. The kids seem to be good and well-adjusted in spite of that. Those marriages were supposed to make everything better, but they only served one purpose—to make me realize what a fool I’d been. Why do men who have everything blow it off and lose it all? When you can answer that one, you should write it up and charge a million dollars for it.”
“Weak ego?” she suggested.
“Half a brain?” he said. And they both laughed.
They spent another hour talking about Meredith, what a comfort she was to each of them. Over the years, Howard continued to talk to her about his business problems or work frustrations. But never his family problems. “She flatly refused to listen to any of that. She said I had made my bed and I should lie in it.” And she never mentioned any romantic problems of her own because, as she told him, that was not his concern. “But at least we were friends.”
Kaylee talked about how encouraging her mother had always been, how supportive when she wanted to change careers from something as stable as teaching to something as unreliable as writing fiction. “But she always encouraged me to take a chance. That’s what she had done with her business.”
It was growing late in the day when he said, “Is there any hope we can have a closer relationship?”
“I don’t know, Howie. Like I said, it’s been a long time since I fantasized about having a daddy.”
“Where would we have to start?” he asked. “Because I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”
“I don’t think we can recapture that father-daughter thing now. You just don’t know what it’s like.”
“Tell me, Kaylee.”
“I’m not sure you really mean that,” she said with a rueful laugh.
“I do mean it. Tell me where I failed you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you can possibly understand. Try to picture your six-year-old daughter whose daddy is coming to pick her up. She’s in her favorite outfit and even has a purse, and of course that stuffed rabbit that went everywhere with her.” Kaylee paused for a moment and took a deep breath before continuing. “I sat on the chair in the foyer for what seemed like hours. You didn’t come.” She shook her head sadly.
“You took me to your new house when I was about ten and there were so many people there, I sat on the sofa until it was time to go. Your wife wanted me to call her Mom; your mother-in-law wanted me to call her Mimi. I’d never met them before and they had a big fight in the kitchen before we left. Then there was the father-daughter dance when I was in junior high. You weren’t available for that. I spent most of my childhood either waiting for you or being stood up by you.”
He frowned. “I remember going to your house to see you on a regular basis,” he said. “I walked you down the aisle at your wedding.”
“Most of the time if you came over I would go watch a movie in my room and you and my mom would talk in the kitchen. As for the wedding, thank you for that. And thank you for not bringing your third wife.”
“You must feel you never really had a father...”
“No, what I felt was that I had a father and my father left us. I’m sorry if you were unhappy, but I learned at an early age that I couldn’t make you happy. And Howie, I’m having a little trouble being happy right now myself. So if you’re counting on me to make you happy now...?” She shook her head. “My mother asked me to be kind to you because despite all evidence to the contrary, you love me.”
“I do. And I think there’s hope for us. Maybe down the road a bit. I’m going to keep trying.”
“Maybe. But I can’t help you with your grief over losing my mother because my own grief is just so heavy.”
“If there’s any way I can help you, will you tell me?”
“Of course. Thank you for asking. But I need to be alone to finish my book now.”
* * *
The Monday before Thanksgiving, Mel called Kaylee to remind her about putting together the charity baskets. At that precise moment Kaylee felt like she should stay home and write like the wind to get her book finished. She was close and it was finally going quickly. But she liked Mel and didn’t want to let her down.
When she got to the bar, she saw an assembly the likes of which she had never seen before. The tables were all lined up against the walls, forming a big circle around the room. In the center of the room were boxes and boxes of groceries. Huge boxes of groceries. The place was full of men and women, mostly women, many of them she knew or recognized. Jilly and her sister Kelly, Vanessa Haggerty, Paige Middleton. She saw the pastor’s wife, Ellie Kincaid, and Nora Cavanaugh, the wife of a local orchard owner. There were also a few townsfolk she’d met, Connie from the store and a couple of the Riordan men. And Mel was standing at the center of the room, barking orders.
“We have lists of what goes in each box. Some of our families have six kids, some are widows or solitary men, and we’ve stocked their boxes accordingly. We have turkeys and hams, cooked and frozen, and the rest is nonperishable. Take a list, fill a box, and check it off my master list. And Vanessa and Paige have made plates of cookies and bars and those are a sweet treat for us! Let’s do it.”
Mel saw Kaylee and came over and gave her a hug. “I’m hoping you’ll come with me to do a little delivering, some today and some tomorrow,” she said.
“How many boxes will you fill?”
“Oh, I think fifty. At least as many as we can.”
“Is the poor population so high around here?”
“No, it’s not too bad. But we do have working families who feel the strain and we want to help them as well. The very poor get assistance from the county, but it’s never quite enough.”
Mel handed her a list and she got to work. She wrote the name of the recipient on the side of the box and began to gather the groceries. She learned that Jack and Colin Riordan had gone to one of the big box stores on the coast and filled up their truck beds with supplies. And the gift boxes weren’t limited to food—they also had soap, toothpaste, feminine hygiene products, diapers, baby wipes, bleach and shampoo.