By midnight, with a hard yawn and somewhat blurry eyes, she finally pulled into Mistletoe Harbor. To her right, Steven had long since fallen asleep, and despite his youthfulness, she smiled.
“Ain’t got anything on your mom.”
The house was dark as she quietly drove into the driveway of her childhood home, a place she’d rarely visited since leaving years earlier. “Where is Emma?”
Seeing no sign of her sister's car and feeling frustrated, Angela nudged her son to wake up and got out of the car. “All those kids probably held her up.”
“Who?”
“Your Aunt Emma. Come on, let's go inside. I still have a key, unless he changed it.”
A numbness she hadn’t expected settled into her bones the moment she drove into town. Still feeling it, Angela tried not to think about her father, or Evander, or how she felt, for fear she’d crumble from it.
Steven was right behind her as she rummaged for the old key she had strangely kept all these years, hoping it would work. When the door finally clicked open, she pushed with all her might and flicked the light switch she remembered being next to the door.
The memories of her last moment with her father, Jack, arguing in the very kitchen she stood in, flooded her system. Stepping back, she ran into her son. “Oh, sorry, Steven, you can go on in.”
“Wow, check this out. Grandpa really had a quirky taste. Look at that clock over there. What’s got you so freaked out, a ghost or something?” His laughter echoed through the dull, brown, and yellow kitchen, which never quite received the updates it needed when she was a kid.
“You could say that, ghosts from the past.” Angela forced her way through the door, ignoring the smell of cigar smoke mixed with mildew. “Your grandfather had a thing for cuckoo clocks. You’ll see them everywhere in the house.”
“Right on.” Angela wasn’t surprised when he threw open the refrigerator, then quickly shut it again. “Ugh, something stinks badly in there. Guess there’s no late-night eats for me.” He laughed, catching Angela off guard.
“You might find something in that cabinet there. He used to keep his stash of snacks he wasn’t supposed to eat in there unless he changed it. If you don’t find anything, you can get the ones I bought from the trunk.”
After a few brief comments, Steven found the mother of all snack wagons and took his chips, dip, candy, and sodas to the living room. “Wow, crazy, he really did like cuckoo clocks!” His voice echoed through the quiet house.
With no idea where to start, Angela stayed in the kitchen, hoping to get her bearings before sleep took over. Her muscles were sore from sitting too long. She knew that slipping into a bed and getting rest would be her only relief.
“Oh, Dad.”
The tears came before she could control them as she slumped in a chair with its flattened seat cushion and began to cry. “I’m so sorry that we didn’t move past this, Dad.”
Pained by her loss and overwhelmed by the loneliness she’d buried for so long, Angela stared at the spare bedroom door for a few seconds. Then she crept into the spare bedroom, grateful her son had taken the other spare room and not her father’s.
The scent of fresh linen lingered on the quilt she hadn’t bothered to crawl under. Remnants of old habits. She fell into a deep sleep, the day's events too much to bear, without even taking the time to look at her phone.
She had hardly glanced at it since leaving Chicago, confident her employees could handle anything that arose.
The scent of coffee woke her, along with the loud slam of a door. Startled, she remembered all the things she’d been through with her son Steven over the years, and she sat up instantly, alert. “Steven? Are you here?”
The sound of footsteps coming down the wood-floor hallway grew louder, and then he was there, opening the bedroom door and staring at her. He smiled, a boyish grin she hadn’t seen inyears. “Thought I snuck out again? I can assure you, Mom, I’m not doing that here. Nothing here but a bunch of stick trees and that raging ocean beyond. Unless I feel like throwing myself in today, which I don’t—we're good.”
He said no more and walked away. Angela quickly calmed her nerves, still struggling to accept that he was a twenty-one-year-old man after everything she’d been through. Her will had become as hard as nails after years of therapy, endless late-night conversations with him, and finding him in city dwellings better off burned to the ground.
“Do I smell coffee?”
She didn’t fuss much with her personal hygiene, as there was a lot of work to do as she maneuvered through the house. A fluff here, a splash there, and she was ready to go. Too often, she’d eaten and operated on the fly in recent years, making it second nature.
“Over there.”
“Thanks. So, I don’t know when Emma is?—”
The back door to the kitchen, leading to the patio, slammed shut. Confused why her son would want to go outdoors in this brisk weather, the worried mother inside her moved to the window to watch.
“What is going on in his head?”
Slowly, Steven moved across the yard and disappeared into her father’s shed. Curious, her heart pounding in her chest, her first thought was to run to the shed, throw open the door, and see what was going on.
