“Can I put one more thing in there?” I asked.
He gave me a nod, stepping aside.
“Thought you might like some depressing reading,” I said as I crouched down next to the hole. I set my manuscript inside, standing it up next to Dad’s urn. “It’s about a man lost at sea. Bit of a self-insert, but it’s funny, I don’t think it was ever really me.”
I looked at the urn for a moment; the clean lines of it in the hole so stark and final. I wondered, for a moment, if my father could see me. If he knew how many mistakes he made and wished fervently I could stay, just a moment more.
Maybe I’d come back one day. But for now, I stood, my heart a little bruised but my shoulders light.
“See you, Dad,” I said, before telling the guy he could go ahead and fill the hole.
CHAPTER 35
I Think You’d Love Him, Mama
WINONA
“Yes, leather seats, Pad Thai, a paraffin hand wax and… what else…” I looked around the cabin. “I think that’s it?”
“My god,” Sarah said on the screen. “That’s it?”
I laughed. “Oh, and the fact that I’m video calling you from a kajillion feet up in the sky?”
“Right,” Sarah said. She glanced somewhere off camera. She was on site at the Rolling Hills. Apparently things had been going relatively smoothly for the past few weeks.
I didn’t tell her I’d had a chat with Jamie’s son Seamus a few days after Jamie’s blow-up in her office back in the fall.
“Everything okay down there?” I asked. “At the reno, I mean. Cher’s told me a little about it, but she hasn’t let me sit in on more than the weekly staff meetings since we started the paperwork.”
“She’s doing that for you, you know,” Sarah said.
“I know.”
Cher had been firm about me stepping back from Heartbreaker Plumbing. Just like I’d asked her to be, on Mitchell’s suggestion.
After the incident in the road, where Cassandra had explained to me what had happened to his father, Mitchell had parked outside my house.
“You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “I just… I need some time to process, and I don’t want… I don’t want our last moments together to be sad, Winona.”
“Too late,” I’d said, through watering eyes. My heart broke as we stepped out of that car, for Mitchell, never getting to gain any kind of closure with his father. He didn’t even get to show him his book.
But mostly, selfishly, I cried for us.
I didn’t ask him to come in. I knew he had to go. The news from his brother had been followed up by a911call from Sal, who said they actually needed him several hours earlier in Zurich. We both knew it was over. We stood there on my porch, with Mitchell brushing the hair from my eyes and thumbing the tears from my cheeks.
“Don’t wait with Heartbreaker,” he said. “You’re ready now.”
“But the renovation…”
“Cher can finish it. You said she’s competent, right?”
“Beyond.”
“Then you’ve waited long enough. Sal got those contacts for you on the west coast when you’re in California. But I promise I’ll be hands off from here.”
“You mean besides the prepaid lawyers, accountants, and administrators?”
