I was torn between trying to figure out what was actually going on and thinking that Carmen and Larry and the whole local news situation was so cute. Larry laughed. “You never let me forget it, Carmen,” he said. “And I can tell you what. We’ll be paying a lot more attentionto the Tar Heel baseball stats here onCape Newsnext season.” He tapped his stack of papers on the news desk, something I wondered if he knew he did at the end of every broadcast. It made the most satisfying sound.
“That’s right, Larry,” Carmen said. “Well, Mason, if you’re watching, we’re so proud of our hometown boy. We’ll miss you, but we’ll be cheering you on every week.”
Miss you. We’ll miss you. I looked up at Amelia, who was standing, motionless, staring at the television, her jaw slightly agape.
So, it was true. He was leaving. “So, this is not fake news?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood, trying not to cry for Greer’s sake.
“What’s fake news?” she asked in that little singsong voice that was far too shiny for how I felt.
“This is not a conversation you should be having with me,” Amelia said.
“But it is. Because you’re the one here.”
“He just found out,” Amelia said. “He’d been trying to talk to you about it because he wanted to work things out.”
I shook my head and sniffed, trying to steel myself. The man I was falling in love with was leaving town, and he hadn’t even bothered to tell me. I had acted a fool—no, not a fool. I had acted unconscionably, putting my needs before the needs of two children. Some would say that maybe we were even, that this was common ground, and we could build a bridge. But I was too proud.
I stood up, knowing I had about two minutes of composure before I completely fell apart. “Well, ladies, thank you so much for the visit and the dinner. I’d better get a little catnap before Maisy’s next feeding.”
“I can stay,” Amelia said. “I can take a feeding for you, let you get some sleep.”
The true concern in her voice was all it took for one tear to slide down my face. I wiped it away. Quickly.
Greer flung herself into me and wrapped her arms around my waist, pressing her head into my stomach in that full-fledged way that I loved so much. This was not a girl who would keep secrets or keep up appearances. “I love you,” she said.
I picked her up and kissed her cheek. “I love you too.”
Amelia reached out her arms to take her daughter from me. A perfect pair they were, a mother and a daughter who didn’t share one strand of DNA. (Well, okay, I mean I knew we all sharedsomeDNA. Hell, we shared most of it with a mouse…) What they had is what I thought Maisy and I had. What Amelia and Parker and George and Greer had is what I had allowed myself to be delusional enough to imagine I could have with Mason and Maisy. But no. Maybe it wasn’t in the cards for me.
Somewhere, there was a girl inside me who would never give up on her dreams this easily. But that girl had grown up. That girl was working twelve-hour shifts and single parenting and brokenhearted, and she couldn’t quite muster the energy to fight.
“Call me,” Amelia said. But I knew I wouldn’t. The only way for me to survive my humiliation was to separate myself from the Thaysden family.
I had wanted to be one of them. I knew that in their family, when the chips were down, when times were tough, that was when you came together. But I’d never seen that. I didn’t quite know how to do it. So, now, it was my turn to model what I did know: running away.
TILLEYButterfly
It was official: Tilley was in love with Dolly Levi. With her character, her words, her voice, her song, and, today of all days, she found herself practically swooning over what must be the very best part: the costumes. As she ran her hands down the sides of the gold beaded dress, Kate, her costumer (okay, so that was a fancy word for a girl from the community college with an aptitude for thrifting, but Tilley could be grand if she wanted to be), said, “Tilley. You look like a million bucks in that dress. No, ten million.”
She turned to look at herself from another angle. Tilley was a nearly sixty-year-old proper Southern woman. She would never be caught dead in a getup like this that was formfitting and showed her quite ample cleavage. But, then again, wasn’t that part of the joy of acting as someone else? She thought, briefly, naughtily, that she couldn’t wait for George to see her in this dress.
“Do you think I have the figure to carry this off?” Tilley asked demurely.
“Well, I think that’s for others to decide,” Kate quipped.
They both laughed, as they were parroting a scene from the show.“But, darling,” Kate said grandly, “you are not carrying it off. You arerockingit.”
Kate placed the stunning feather headdress on Tilley’s head. “Kate, dearest, you are a woman who can make a twenty-dollar thrift-store find look like the finest fashions on Fifth Avenue.”
Tilley had always had a penchant for the big city.
Kate smiled. “Well, that’s the job, I suppose. It’s both of our jobs, really. Making things into something they are not.”
As Tilley stared at herself in the mirror, the light flashing off her gold dress, glinting in the reflection, the headdress standing at least twelve inches off her head, she realized that what Kate was saying was true. Here, on the stage, she was Dolly Levi. Outside, were she wearing this, she would be Crazy Aunt Tilley having another one of her episodes.
And that’s what gave Tilley the idea. “Kate, could I take this home? Just for the night?”
Kate looked confused. “Well, Tilley, it’s sort of against protocol…”
