Jane Austen Girl (28 page)

Bobby Jack helped Grier inside and shut the door, walking around to the driver’s side and climbing in. He drove slowly all the way to the Inn.

When they pulled up in front, he said, “We could go back to my house.”

“I think I’d rather stay here.”

“Then I’m staying, too.”

He expected her to argue, but she didn’t. They walked inside and up the stairs to her room. She handed him the key and he opened the door.

Bobby Jack sat down in the chair next to the bed. “I’m here, Grier,” he said, “and I’m not going anywhere.”

“When the hurt is so big and so seemingly endless, the only thing that will ever get us through is love.”

Grier McAllister – Blog at Jane Austen Girl

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Grier heard the cell phone ringing in her purse.

Bobby Jack said, “Do you want me to get that?”

She rose up on an elbow, wanting to say no, to turn it off, close out the world, but then she remembered all the responsibilities she had waiting and the fact that she hadn’t shown up for the meeting this morning at the Inn. She knew she couldn’t put it off. “Yes,” she said.

He reached in her purse and handed the phone to her.

Caller id flashed Elizabeth Arbon. Grier tapped the answer button and said, “Hello.”

“I just heard what happened last night, Grier. And about your mother. I’m so very sorry.”

Grier wondered who had told her but then realized Timbell Creek wasn’t the kind of place where anything stayed unknown for long. Even when you were an outsider.

“Thank you, Elizabeth. I just need a little time to get myself together.”

“Of course. We can go on this morning without you. That’s not a problem.”

“I appreciate it,” Grier said.

“I’ll check in with you later, okay?”

“Yes,” Grier said and turned off the phone. She dropped back against the pillow then and stared at the ceiling. “I think I need to be alone for a little while,” she said, looking at Bobby Jack.

“Are you sure?” he asked, sounding uncertain.

She nodded, biting her lip to keep the sob in her throat from slipping out.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No. But thank you. For everything.”

“You don’t need to thank me. I’m a phone call away,” he said and left the room.

It felt quiet and empty after Bobby Jack had gone. Grier felt drained of any recognizable emotion at all. It didn’t seem possible that this could really have happened. She wanted to wake up and discover that the whole thing had been a dream. That she had come to her senses far sooner than she had. That she’d taken the chance to say the things to her mother that she needed to say.

But that wasn’t to be.

Self-accusation after self-accusation circled through her mind until she felt limp with remorse.

How many times had she heard about other people who left important things unresolved in their lives until it was too late? Over the years, she’d had numerous friends tell her of regrets, things they wished they’d done sooner, not put off.  But somehow, she’d never applied it to herself. Never thought, even for a moment, that she would regret not making peace with her mother. Logically, she knew that her anger had been justified. Somehow, right now, knowing that her mother was gone forever, none of it seemed to matter.

The only thing that mattered was the huge gaping hole in her heart, and the absolute knowledge that she would never again have the chance to fill it.

She thought about the days that lay ahead, of her mother’s funeral and burial and she honestly didn’t know if she could go through with it.

But then what choice did she have? She had failed her mother in the one thing that she could have given her. And she wouldn’t fail her in this.

GRIER HIT REDIAL
on her phone and made the call before she could give herself time to reconsider.

Elizabeth answered on the first ring.

“I’m so sorry to ask this,” Grier said, “but can you find someone to replace me for the final judging?”

She heard the other woman let out a long breath. A couple of seconds passed before she said, “It won’t be easy, Grier, but I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing in your place.”

“I never dreamed I would be in this position,” Grier began.

“I know,” Elizabeth interrupted.

“If you could give me a few days—”

“I wish I could. But with the schedule, I really can’t.”

“I understand.”

“Just take care of yourself, okay?”

“You, too,” Grier said, before ending the call.

THE ROOM FELT
too small.

She changed clothes and then walked to the parking lot where she got in her car with no destination in mind.

She cranked the music on the radio and just drove, aiming for some mindless zone where pain could not be felt. But no matter how fast she drove or how loud she played the music, there was no such place.

She felt raw to her very soul, every nerve ending blaring in protest.

She drove for two hours or more, finding herself at the entrance to Bobby Jack’s driveway, turning the car onto the gravel road as if she had no ability to deny where she needed to be. It was late, dark now, and she pulled up in front of the house, Bobby Jack’s truck the only vehicle in sight. She sat in the car and stared at the front door, telling herself if he didn’t come out in the next sixty seconds, she would leave.

But just then, the door opened, and he stood there, looking to her the way a lighthouse might have looked to a lost ship. He walked out, opened the door of her car and all but lifted her from the driver’s seat into his arms.

He held her tight against him, her feet not touching the ground. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in the curve of his shoulder. She wanted to sob there against him, but the tears would no longer come. She felt empty and wanted nothing more than to be filled with the presence of him.

He bent and looped an arm at the back of her knees, swinging her up fully into his arms and walking into the house, kicking the not fully closed door open with a booted foot and then just as quickly shoving it closed behind them.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked down at her, his eyes saying the question he didn’t need to ask with words. She nodded once, and that was all he needed. He carried her up the stairs as if she weighed nothing more than a bag of cotton.

Grier felt as if she had been standing on the other side of a glass window where nothing but sadness existed. The thought of ever seeing through to the other side again seemed impossible, until now, until this moment when Bobby Jack’s hard, fit body absorbed some of the pain from her, his embrace telling her how willing he was to carry as much of it as she would let him carry.

He took her to his bedroom, again closing the door behind them and deftly reaching out to turn the lock. He walked to the bed then and lay her down near the center. He sat on the side and smoothed the back of his hand across her cheek.

“I think I willed you to come here.”

“What do you mean?” she asked softly.

“I wanted to come back. But I wanted it to be your choice. Coming here. Being here.”

She wanted to say the words logic prodded her to say. But she couldn’t force them past her lips. Truth, instead, won out, and she said, “I need you.”

His green eyes darkened with a look so pure and powerful that Grier felt the force of it to the core of her very being.

“Grier,” he said, her name ragged on his lips.

“Will you hold me?”

He folded her against him and leaned back against the headboard. “Forever if you want me to.”

Lying there with her cheek against his chest, she wondered if even that might not be long enough.

“We think we know a person. But we only know what we see. We can’t know what is hidden.”

Grier McAllister – Blog at Jane Austen Girl

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

The funeral was simple. No service. Just a graveside memorial with exactly four people in attendance. Grier, her mother’s friend Hatcher, Bobby Jack and Andy.

The pastor spoke what were supposed to be words of comfort, only to Grier, they weren’t. They felt empty and hollow.

Among the few things recovered from her mother’s room at the retirement home had been a note requesting that this service be exactly what it was. Plain and to the point.

She didn’t cry. She listened to the verses the pastor read, absorbing each word. She stood by the grave, dry-eyed while his words fell like a rain too late to save the harvest.

Grier wanted to absorb them, take comfort in them, but the truth was she knew she didn’t deserve the comfort.

When the service ended, the pastor walked over. “If there’s anything I can do for you,” he said, “please, just call.”

“I appreciate that,” Grier said.

Bobby Jack and Andy each hugged her, neither saying anything. She suspected they had no idea what to say.

“Thank you for coming,” she managed. “I think I’ll stay a bit.”

“We’ll wait for you,” Bobby Jack said.

“No. Please. I’m fine. I’ll call you in a while.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, but she could see in his eyes that he was worried about her.

Bobby Jack reached out then to where Hatcher stood just to the side of Grier and shook his hand. “Can we give you a ride back to town, sir?”

Hatcher shook his head and said, “Thank you, Bobby Jack. But that yellow taxi over there’s for me.”

They left the graveside then, heading for the truck, Bobby Jack reluctant, Andy slipping her arm through his as if to lead him on.

Grier folded her arms across her chest and turned to Hatcher. “Thank you for coming today.”

“Your mama and I got to be pretty close friends over the past couple of years.”

“I’m glad she had you,” she said.

Hatcher looked off across the graveyard and then with a troubled expression, said, “I might be overstepping my bounds here, but I can see you two didn’t get things tied up before she passed.”

Grier looked away, feeling the instant sting of hot tears. “No. I guess we didn’t.”

“We had a lot of long talks,” Hatcher said. “I think you should know your mama would have given anything to be able to go back and change some of her choices. But you know we don’t get to do that in this world.”

“No, we don’t,” Grier said.

“She loved you. And there wasn’t a day that passed that I didn’t hear her say something about you. Something you used to like to do. Or something you were good at.”

This surprised Grier. It would have been easier to think that her mother had closed her out of her thoughts in the years since she left Timbell Creek.

Hatcher drew in a deep breath and leaned hard on his cane as if it weren’t easy for him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just old.”

“Would you like to sit for a minute?” Grier sensed that Hatcher wanted to talk, and she knew somehow that he was the last lifeline she would ever have to her mother.

They sat on two folding chairs next to the casket, Grier holding Hatcher’s elbow as he cautiously lowered himself onto the seat.

The sun felt warm on her face, and the sky was a beautiful clear robin’s egg blue. From somewhere, Grier had a flash of memory, a day very similar to this one when she and her mother had gone to the public beach on Clearwater Lake. Grier must have been five. Maybe six. This memory of her mother was one in which she had been so young with a beauty unmarked by the ravages of alcohol.

“She told me a few things she never actually told you,” Hatcher said in his raspy voice.

“What things?” she asked.

“Did you know that she was accepted to the Atlanta School of Design?”

Grier frowned and tilted her head. “No. What do you mean?”

“Her senior year in high school. That was her dream, I guess. To be a designer. And she had planned to go there on scholarship, actually.”

“Why didn’t she?”

He hesitated a few moments before saying, “Because she became pregnant with you. Your father, the boy she was dating, wanted her to. . .not have you, I guess. That wasn’t something she would ever do, she said. And at first she still planned to go to school. But right after she had you, your grandparents were killed in that car wreck, and your mama all of a sudden didn’t have anybody to help her. She let the scholarship go. I think maybe she thought in a couple of years she could go back to that dream. But it just didn’t work out that way. Your mama never touched a drop of alcohol until she was twenty-three or so. She went out on a date with some guy who basically got her drunk and took advantage of her. She said she hated what the alcohol did to her, but it was kind of like once that button was turned on, it would always get the best of her, even when she had every intention of resisting it. I don’t guess anyone can understand that better than I do. I had a good wife. Great kids. And I threw all of it away. I can’t even explain my own addiction to the stuff. Much less your mama’s. I just know what kind of hold it had on me. And from what she told me, the same is true of her. Being an alcoholic doesn’t excuse wrongdoing, and your mama did some serious suffering after you left home.”

“That was two of us then,” Grier said softly.

“I don’t doubt it. But she was a different woman from the one you knew who drank. I tried a bunch of times to get her to go up and see you. But then when she became sick, it really wasn’t an option anymore. I think she was too ashamed to face you.”

Tears welled up in Grier’s eyes and tipped over to slide down her cheeks. “I wish I could—”

Hatcher reached over and took her hand. “I know, honey,” he said. “But you can’t torture yourself with that for the rest of your life. Your mama understood why you left home. And why you never came back. She knew she was to blame for that. Sometimes, we don’t get to tie it all up with a pretty bow. But we need to make our peace with it. And I think Maxine did that. She forgave herself. Maybe there will be some comfort in that for you.”

The sobs came up out of her before she realized they were even there. Once they started, Grier had no power to stop them. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees and cried like a broken-hearted child.