She smiled and nodded, realizing I had overheard their conversation.
She always knew the right thing to say. Always. Which is why I would never understand. I had needed her advice, her encouragement, and her fortitude for all those months when it felt like I was suffocating, when it felt like Carter wasn’t the only one who had died.
Now she was dying. And I didn’t have much time. So I took a deep breath. “Mom,” I said, “all these years, I’ve never brought it up, but I can’t let you go without asking. Why didn’t you help me when Carter died?”
She smiled calmly at me. “Look around you, darling. Look at the life you have, the life you built.” She leaned in closer to me. “You. Not me. Not Daddy. You.”
I began to understand then that we were different parents. But her methods weren’t selfish, just how she showed love.
“You built this life for yourself, honey. Your store. Your town. Your friends. You raised those girls and you fought through your pain and you came out the other side. You survived. Hell, you thrived. And you did it all on your own.”
Mom sighed and said, “I know it came between us. But, Ansley, if you had come home and wallowed in your self-pity and your fear, that’s all you ever would have done. Look at you, my girl. You are magnificent.”
That day she told me I couldn’t come home was the scariest day of my life. I had this jewel of a house my grandmother had left for me, but that was it. I had no job. No plan. No idea where the world would take me. But I had to wake up every day. I had to get out of bed and take care of my girls.
I thought of Sloane, and I wondered if maybe I had done the wrong thing. Maybe my mother was the one who had known how to handle tragedy and adversity. Maybe I should have taken a page from her book. But there was no right way to parent. We all just have to do our best.
She smiled at me sleepily, and I knew she was about to drift off. “That’s a good girl,” she said.
“Can I take you to bed, Mom?” I whispered.
“No, darling. I need to be here with the sea and the stars and the sky.” Then she fell asleep, breathing heavily, no doubt dreaming of the near-perfect day she’d had on the beach. I put more pillows around her so she wouldn’t fall. I sat by her for quite some time, and I’ll admit it, I prayed. I was still ambivalent at best about God’s presence, but I prayed for her safe passage into another world, where she could be with Daddy and check on Carter, where she could be happy and out of pain.
I didn’t know that was the last conversation I would ever have with my mother. But it was perfect. It wouldn’t have felt right for our last conversation to have been dripping in “I love you’s” and “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me’s.” No. She told me what she thought, gave it to me straight, and left me with something to chew on. She was making sure I would be OK after she was gone. It meant more than anything else I could have imagined.
She should have had weeks longer to live. Hospice wasn’t even coming until the next day. But that night, my mother closed her eyes and didn’t open them again. None of us was with her, but she wouldn’t have wanted us there. In fact, I’m quite sure that if we had kept vigil over her bedside, she would have held on longer, too long even. I love that the last memory I have of my mother is her smiling, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, on the beach. I love that she closed her eyes for good in Peachtree Bluff, one of the places she treasured most in the world. She would have told us not to cry, would have told us to dance instead. But how could I dance when my mother was gone? Simply knowing she was there made me feel like I had someone.
The last person on the planet who loved me unconditionally was gone. Forever. I would never see her again. At first, it terrified me to my core. But then I realized that was my job now. My job was to love the other people in my life unconditionally. I could give that so fully because I had received it so very well.
If anyone had asked, I would have told them that was the thing my mother taught me best of all.
OUR HOUSE HAD BECOMEa command center. So many people were filing in and out that I couldn’t remember everyone’s names. As it turned out, the Peachtree “Funeral Fairies,” which were instated when my grandmother was alive, were still thriving. They were here to help, like it or not.
They stuffed the already full freezer with yet more casseroles, defrosted frozen lemonade for the funeral punch, and generally made a lot of noise to keep me from hearing my thoughts. I was most appreciative, as my thoughts were not ones anyone would want to hear.
Well, except for one. The one I kept hearing over and over again, between the bouts of crippling devastation:you have six months.
“Ansley, dear,” I heard Mrs. McClasky say. My skin crawled. I wasn’t wild about having all these people in my house.
I heard the back door open and saw Hippie Hal with a bucket of wildflowers in one hand. He took one look at Mrs. McClasky, made a horrified face at me, and jetted back down the steps. I had to put my hand over my mouth to keep her from seeing my laugh. Hippie Hal and Mrs. McClasky were on-again, off-again mortal enemies because, in addition to a variety of other very useful skills, Hal refurbished bikes—and generally had no fewer than 150 of them scattered about his front yard, which Mrs. McClasky found reprehensible and deemed it appropriate to say so at every single town meeting.
If she noticed my laughter she didn’t let on. “Darling, the altar guild brought these dreadful black napkins. I thought your mother would much prefer white linen.”
I smiled supportively. “Thank you so much. I appreciate your attention to detail. I have 150 linen napkins starched and hanging in the coat closet.” I paused. I needed to give her a job, preferably a time-consuming one, if I was going to make it through this. “Mrs. McClasky, would you be so kind as to fold them for me?” I whispered behind my hand, “I’m certain none of these people knows how to do it properly.”
She smiled authoritatively. “Oh, of course, darling. I’ll do them all myself.”
I peered into my dining room where there were women polishing silver, women arranging flowers, women standing in the corner admiring or criticizing my light fixtures, women fussing over the punch bowl. In the living room were yet more women, who I assumed were waiting to receive gifts, food, and flowers from whoever stopped by. I wanted to tell my mother about it. She would find it terribly funny, all these women making such a fuss. And then I remembered my mother was gone. I would never talk to her or laugh with her over one of life’s little absurdities again. I wanted my mother. It was as though the rest of my life was stretching out in front of me, long and bleak and empty.
I suddenly felt so sorry and so stupid that I had wasted time resenting her for not being there for me. And now she was gone. All I wanted was the time back. The typhoon of all those emotions washed over me.
I knew all these people meant well, and in some ways, I was grateful for them. In others, I just wanted a quiet house where I could mourn my loss. When no one was looking, I opened the pantry door, thankful I had opted against the French style with the glass panes, and sat down on the overturned mop bucket, my head in my hands.
My mother was gone, and I was all alone with these three daughters who were my responsibility and, in some ways, that felt harder and bigger and even crazier.
I heard a hand on the doorknob and wiped my eyes. I don’t know who I expected to see. One of my daughters, my grandchildren, Jack maybe. One of the dozens of women who had invaded in the march of the Funeral Fairies. But nothing could have prepared me to stand up and nearly run right smack into a teary-eyed John. When he saw me, he didn’t say a word, just engulfed me in his massive hug. He was tall, broad, and strong, and much to the chagrin of Scott and me, the most attractive of the siblings. He had these bright blue eyes and long eyelashes that were balanced out by his masculine features. He was stoic and a giant ass, so it was a tad shocking to be standing in my pantry with this hulk of a man sobbing onto my shoulder.
For just a moment, a beat of a beat, it was as if we were children again. John was my protective big brother. I was his vulnerable little sister. As we stood there in the closet, crying together, I forgot for just a second that we were at odds and he had scarcely talked to me in the past several years.
