“Remember the Portal to Hell?”
“How could I forget?”she answered with a soft laugh.“We thought by outfitting this office for you and Noelle, and the office next door for the boys, we’d buy ourselves some peace.”Her smile holds a hint of ever-present melancholy.“And you turkeys dug a hole through the drywall to get to each other.”
“We got in big trouble for that,” I mused.
“Of course, you did,” she snorted, leaning forward, her face animated.“You dug through a wall!”She looked toward my fish tank.“It was right there if I remember correctly.”
“It’s still there.Hawk commissioned a special door for it.”
“Oh,” she breathed, a look of wonder on her face.“I love that, honey.I love that you preserved that craziness.What made you bring it up?”
I shrugged.“Just the way you looked coming in here.We saw you, you know.”
“Me?”
I nodded.“You and Christine.You closed yourselves in this office and were laughing like loons.We all saw you.”I laughed and rolled my eyes.“We watched you through the hole.”
She slaps her hand over her face.“Of course.”
“Hunter—” I cleared my throat.“Hunter was delighted with your laughter.I can still see his little face.It was him and Max who came up with the idea to make a portal to each other’s room.”
“But Hawkley took the fall,” she added.“He always took on far too much responsibility.”She pressed her lips together.“Or perhaps we put far too much on him.”
“No, Mom.Don’t go there.We had a fairytale childhood.”I smiled to reassure her.“The happiness on your face just now reminded me of how you looked when you and Christine were in here busting a gut laughing.It’s how you used to look all the time.”
She dipped her chin to her chest.
I watched as her chest rose with her deep inhale.Watched as it fell again.
“Children change you,” she began softly.“You go into the hospital as a woman and come out as a mother.And a mother is a completely different animal.You think your children are vulnerable when you’re carrying them inside your body, but then they come out and it’s so much worse.These little bodies I grew inside me, kept alive by the beating of my heart,” she slapped her hand over her heart, “out there exposed to all the evils of the world.”
My mom rarely spoke like this.Half of me wanted to leap from my seat, hold her close, and assure her we didn’t need to go down this road.
The other half yearned to share in her grief, to know I wasn’t alone.
Her hand dropped down to the arm of the chair.“And I had to go about my day, a constant prayer on refrain in the back of my mind, that the good in the world might outweigh the bad and bring all of you home to me at the end of each day.”
She looked up, her face shiny with tears.“And then one day my prayer went unanswered.The loss—” She stopped to gather herself together, swallowing hard and giving her head a little shake.“His loss is a constant, agonizing emptiness that never fades as I have to go about my day being a wife, a mother, and now a grandmother.”
“I lived in the agony of his loss for a really long time.And I’ll never forgive myself for leaving you alone in your grief, baby.In that dark place, on my worst days, I’d think about what a relief it would be to not have to carry the pain of his loss.It took everything I had in those hours to simply survive.”
She inhaled deeply and held her hand up to ask me to let her finish.“I started out that day as a mother with three children.I ended it as a mother with two.There is no word for what a mother becomes after such a loss.I am not the same woman I was when I woke up that morning.”
Tears clogged my throat and stole my voice.
She cleared her throat.“You changed too.But lately, darling girl, I see more of the Harley you used to be.And that makes me happy.”
I didn’t know where to go from there.
When she first came in, I knew exactly where I wanted the conversation to go.But she’d thrown so much at me, I lost direction.
“Even back at the Christmas party, I saw him watching you with Paul.He had this deep frown on his face,” she mused.“That was the first inkling I had that he was interested in you.”
“That’s because he thought Paul was a dick.”
“I don’t know,” she murmured.“It seemed like more than that.It doesn’t matter.”She grinned at me and pulled her shoulders up to her ears as her eyes lit up.“When did it start?Susie told me Krippy told her that Michelle saw you together at Mary Lou’s.”
She dried her face with her palms and sat forward on the edge of her chair.“Tell me everything!”
