“To tell you the truth, your father and I didn’t always have the happiest of marriages. I loved him, and he loved me. I don’t want you to think anything else. But sometimes I felt sure that he wanted another life with someone else.”
“With who?” Tyler asked, frowning. These were still more details about a man he’d never really known.
“Nobody in particular,” she lied. “I was a little bit insecure. To put it lightly.”
Tyler laughed nervously. His dark hair flipped over his ears.
“Your father had dreams, too,” she said.
“Right. He was going to college,” Tyler remembered.
“He was. And I opened my flower shop, because that was my dream,” Ivy went on. “It’s still my dream. To keep it going. To help it flourish.” There were tears in her eyes that she refused to let fall. “What about you, honey? What are your dreams?”
Outside, snow had begun to stream down in a single sheet. It filled the windowpanes and brought a stillness to the air. Tyler crunched another chip, then laughed at how loud it sounded against everything else.
And then he told her, “I don’t know what I want.”
Ivy smiled. It was exactly how she’d been when she was his age. It was yet another way she felt they were in tune with one another.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to figure that out,” he said. “I want to go to college. Maybe I want to go to the same one Lily’s at, just so we can hang out sometimes. I mean, not that I want to mess up her social life or whatever. But things have been weird since she’s been gone. I think my friends are lame compared to her. And you…”
“I’ve been distant,” she said. “I know.”
Tyler crossed his arms over his chest. He suddenly looked older than his seventeen years. “Lily still calls me every day to check in,” he said. “She always wants to know if you’re doing okay. She always wants to make sure you aren’t spending too much time alone.”
Ivy’s heart felt tugged. She didn’t know what to say.
“She’s too worried about you, I think. It’s her habit,” Tyler said, his eyes welling with tears. “But to be honest with you, I’m worried about you, too. I don’t want you to be alone when I go to college. I don’t want your flower shop to fail, just because you don’t know how to ask for help.” He hiccuped, then smacked his hands over his mouth, embarrassed.
Ivy reached across the table and touched his elbow. “Honey, I hear you. I hear you,” she stammered. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been distant this month because I’m falling in love with someone.”
Tyler’s eyes glinted. Slowly, he let his hands drop to the table.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Ivy confessed, surprised at what it felt like to share this news with her son. “I’m scared out of my mind, to tell you the truth. But I want it more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time. Today, something happened with that man. Something that knocked me out of my head for a little while. That’s why I lost track of time and missed our dinner. It’s no excuse, but it’s what happened.”
Tyler stood, walked over to Ivy, and threw his arms around her. He was full-on sobbing now, as though the alcohol and the exhaustion had finally caught up with him. And then he said, “All we ever wanted was for you to find a way to move on from everything that happened. We never knew how to help you. We never knew.”
Ivy tried and failed to calm Tyler down. Pretty soon, they were both crying. By the time he did go upstairs and fall asleep, it was nearly three in the morning, and Ivy felt as though she could sleep for a hundred years. It wasn’t till she had her head on her pillow that she realized she’d never found her cell phone. It felt more peaceful not to have it, she thought. She was alone with her thoughts and her love for her children, her sisters, her foolish father, her long-dead husband, and the new man she hoped would continue to grow in love with her.
“Please,” she whispered to the darkness. “Let me figure out how to love him back.”
Chapter Nineteen
It wasn’t till the next morning, when one of the employees of the eco-lodge was shoveling the sidewalk of snow, that Ivy learned what had happened to her phone. Apparently, during her frantic run from Georgia Rhodes and back home again, she’d dropped her phone in the snow, where it had hidden from everyone until a shovel cracked its screen. Now, Ivy and Tyler set her freezing-cold and all-dark phone on the breakfast table between them and laughed about the state of things.
“I already told Lily what happened last night,” Tyler said.
Ivy winced, imagining her frantic daughter, learning more and more about her mess of a mother. “What did she say?”
“She’s really happy you’re being honest about stuff,” Tyler said. “And she says she’s coming home soon to visit. If that’s cool with you.”
Ivy’s heart gushed with love for her children. “You’re both always welcome here. No matter how old you are. No matter how many years have gone by.”
With skills she didn’t know he had, Tyler stirred up pancake batter and made them both stacks of gorgeous pancakes with maple syrup, which they ate sitting on the sofa and watching a movie. Tyler wanted to show her Zoolander, a movie Ivy had once watched with Daniel long ago, before marriage and before babies. But Tyler seemed to think he’d discovered it. Ivy pretended she’d never seen it before and remained captivated throughout, laughing whenever Tyler laughed. Tyler was pleased.
She wondered if it was an irresponsible thing to call your kid in sick from school so you could spend more time together. No, she decided. This day meant the world to both of them. When they got hungry again, they ordered pizza and watched more movies; they played games and talked about old memories. It seemed that Tyler remembered more about his childhood than she’d expected, and he spouted story after story about fishing with his grandfather, pretending to work the front desk at the inn, swimming on the coast, and eating pounds of clam chowder.
Ivy had never known her son to be so nostalgic.
