“Oh no,” Vonnie said. “What’s that look for? Did something not go well?”
I waved a hand in front of me and then considered getting up to decide what I wanted to eat out of the bakery case, but didn’t have the strength for it yet. “No, I just forgot to tell Riley I didn’t deliver the box.”
“What box?” Pearl asked.
Before I answered, a bell attached to the bakery door rang as someone held it open. A particular someone I’d been avoiding since I returned to Pelican Bay, or possibly she’d been avoiding me.
“Mom?” I asked because while I was sure it was my mother, she looked so different.
Her hair, normally dark and flat into her head, had volume and shine. Her eyes were bright, and she had on a dark red lipstick. If you held a picture of this woman next to the parent I left in Pelican Bay, you wouldn’t recognize her as the same person.
My mother never looked bad when I was a kid. She prided herself on her looks because she said it was the one thing she had control of her life. Yet, now she looked so different. Better. She radiated energy rather than the tired and worn woman I’d seen last time she visited me.
She adjusted the sunglasses on the top of her head and turned to glance at me. “Cassandra?”
From the sounds of it, my mother was as surprised to see me. We shouldn’t have been, though, because Pelican Bay wasn’t a large town by any means. “I didn’t believe you were actually coming and you never called to say you were here.”
Yup, there was the guilt I worried I’d have to face the next time I saw my mother. Whose job was it to call? Mine or the parent? I suppose now, as an adult, I played a part in not connecting with my mother. I could’ve called her just as easily as she could pick up the phone for me.
“Can we talk?” I asked her and motioned to the chair across from me at my two-person round table.
She glanced around, stopping at Pearl, Katy, and Vonnie for increasingly long bouts of time. “Not in here. Is the bench still a dead zone?” she asked Katy.
The woman nodded. “For voice, yes, but not on image.”
My mother nodded her head once, as if she understood that weird answer. “Good enough.”
She stepped back outside the bakery and I followed her to a bench further down the sidewalk. The streets were still mostly empty, the tourists not up to enjoy the day yet, and for a moment we sat in silence. It’d been so long since I’d shared a space with my mother, and I wasn’t sure how to act.
“What’s this about?” I asked, pointing toward the bakery when my curiosity got the best of me.
My mother sighed and stared out across the street at the old bed-and-breakfast, which looked like it had received a new paint job in the last few years. “Do you really care since you’ll be leaving again soon?”
Did I? “No.”
She lifted one of her eyebrows, pinched her lips together, and shook her head in a classic Cindy Cable look of disapproval. She’d given me the exact same look when I got caught doing anything bad.
“Exactly,” she said, as if she held the answers to life’s problems. Something else we often argued over.
If I planned to have a relationship with my mother, we needed to clear the air on things, and both of us needed to quit assuming we knew what the other planned to do, think, or feel.
“No, that’s not what I meant. I might not be leaving soon.” I exhaled, unsure of exactly why I said that except for the thought rattling around in my head more often lately. “Well, I’m just not sure yet.”
“Does it have something to do with Riley Jefferson?”
More conclusions. “Maybe.” Unfortunately, sometimes she was right.
She went back to staring at the bed-and-breakfast. “He’s a good kid, and if you decide to leave, try hard not to break his heart this time.”
She sounded so much like she did the first few months after I left town. Everything was my fault, and I was heartless for leaving the Jefferson boy alone. I never understood how she felt that way because in my mind I was saving Riley, but now I saw the selfishness of my actions.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Dad?”
My mother shrugged. “When did you want me to tell you? You never call.”
“You never call me either,” I lobbed back quickly. And just like that, we fell into the same pattern of passing blame back and forth. That’s the way it’d always been. Maybe a decent relationship was too big of an ask.
“You never wanted to hear updates, Cassandra. You’re always too good for us country people.”
