Chapter Six
A fter several days of not eating, Babs suddenly needed chocolate ice cream in the middle of the night. Soph made the store run while Em and I propped Babs up. And so it was we had a mini ice cream social in the living room at one o’clock in the morning. Babs only managed two small mouthfuls but the smile on her face when she swallowed was the happiest I had seen her since I arrived.
Soph, Em, and I camped out in chairs around her divan. At some point, we all drifted off to sleep. I wasn’t sure what woke me, but I think it was the absence of sound rather than a sudden noise. The rasping wheeze of Babs’s breathing that I’d been listening to for days suddenly wasn’t there. Instinct had me up and moving to her side.
We kept one light on beside her lounge chair, and it was by this light that I examined her. I took her hand in mine, it was still warm but I couldn’t see if her chest was rising and falling. I put my hand over her heart. She was so thin now I was distracted by the feel of hard bone just beneath the papery skin. I couldn’t tell if her heart was beating or not, but I didn’t want her to go without knowing it was okay.
I leaned in close and whispered in her ear, “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be all right.”
The lids of her eyes fluttered a tiny bit, just enough for me to see the pale blue irises and then they closed. She puffed out a bit of air not even strong enough to be called a whisper but I heard her. “Thank you.”
That final breath left her, and she slowly slipped away. I sat on the edge of the divan, feeling numb. Babs Blumer who had shaped my life in so many ways good and bad, mostly bad, was gone. The crushing pain in my chest was almost unbearable, my throat was tight, and my eyes burned. I pushed it all back by sheer force of will.
“Hey,” I whispered and nudged first Soph and then Em. Sophie lurched up, momentarily confused before blinking awake and registering the expression on my face, which I could only imagine was devastated.
“Mom—” Em jumped to her feet. “Is she better? Is she asking for me?”
My baby sister exuded optimism. It was then I realized that even though Em knew Babs was dying, she also clung to the hope that somehow Babs would recover, and everything would go back to normal. I felt horrible when I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, Em,” I said as gently as I could. “She’s gone.”
“No!” Em cried. She reached for Bab’s hand, clutching it in hers as she studied our mother, desperate for a response.
Soph leaned over and rested her cheek on Mom’s hair. She closed her eyes probably saying her own private good-bye.
Feeling as if I’d had my time with our mother, I stepped away and let them have their moment with Babs. I found my cell phone and entered the hospice nurse’s phone number. I let her know that Babs had passed. The words were harder to get out than I thought they would be, but Ashley was very kind and said a team would be there within an hour to take care of things for us.
The rest of the night became surreal. By dawn, we had a time of death certificate, the crematorium people had collected Babs’s body, and our house, the house Babs had lived in for the last forty-two years, was suddenly without her.
The twins, Hannah and Harry, came to sit with us. They kept Em from swirling into a pit of despair, and Soph was also bolstered by her children’s presence. Being the only one of us who had lived on her own for her adult life, I needed a few minutes by myself to process all that was happening.
I slipped out the sliding glass doors into the small backyard. It wasn’t quite morning yet and the sky was gray. Babs had always taken great pride in her huge lemon tree. The Ponderosa lemon filled the corner of the yard and once a year it gifted us with lemons the size of footballs. It was so plentiful that most of our neighbors scattered when they saw Babs coming toward them with a bag of lemons. I crossed the yard and sat under the tree on the far side where I wasn’t visible from the house.
This had been my favorite reading spot as a kid and hours had been spent weaving spells with Harry and the rest of Gryffindor. Just like then, I planted my feet on the ground and braced my back against the trunk of the tree.
The grief when it came was not pretty. It felt as if it was being wrenched out of me with a crowbar. Ugly crying big fat tears, snot pouring from my nose, guttural hiccups, and fish-out-of-water gasps echoed in the early morning air. It was chilly and wet grass soaked my butt through my jeans. I didn’t care. I wanted it out, all of it, the pain, the sadness, the anger, the regret—I wanted it purged from my system.
There was serious irony here. I was gutted at Babs’s death and couldn’t reconcile the fact that I was so horribly sad about a woman who for most of my life had made me feel less than. And even at the end, she had singled me out as the unlovable one. God, that hurt so much.
Logically, I knew I should be relieved that the toxic presence in my life was gone, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was destroyed by her passing, absolutely inconsolably wrecked.
I’d worked myself up with no end in sight when his arms came around me. I started, jerking away from him, not wanting anyone to witness me in this raw and vulnerable state. He gave me no choice. He swung me up into his arms as he took my seat under the tree and pulled me onto his lap, keeping his arms around me and gently pushing my head onto his shoulder.
My eyes were swollen and my vision blurred with tears, apparently tear ducts run deep, who knew, so I couldn’t see his face but I recognized the feel of him, the scent of him that was uniquely Liam Mahony, a potent cocktail of citrus, sunshine, and the sea. Powerless to fight both him and my need for comfort, I twined my arms around his neck and held on while grief continued to beat me up with the relentless pull of a riptide.
Liam rested his head on mine and let me sob and wail and weep. He never said a word. He simply gave me his warmth while he held me close, with one hand curled around my hip as the other ran up and down my back in a gesture of comfort.
The memories that swirled around me were almost as thick as my grief. How many times had we been here exactly, with me crying and Liam comforting me when Babs and I had yet another argument, usually about my hair, my lack of femininity, or, more irony, him?
Babs never said it plainly but her disappointment in me came off her in waves of pinched disapproval and now, after all this time, I wasn’t sure how I was going to define myself without the steady stream of criticism. I supposed it should have been liberating but instead, I was lost. Except with Liam’s arms around me, everything shifted and repositioned itself and for the first time since I’d arrived in Gull’s Harbor, I felt as if I was home.
I had no idea how long we sat there, but as I lifted my head from his shoulder the sun was rising, lighting the sky with a bright red ribbon along the horizon.
I pulled back from Liam. I let my crazy curls cover my face and I glanced at him from beneath them, hoping they hid my red nose and puffy eyes. He was having none of that. He leaned forward and planted a kiss on my hair.
When I tried to climb off of his lap, Liam simply scooped me up against him and rolled to his feet. He strode across the damp grass, with me in his arms, and up onto the patio where he gently set me down.
He brushed the hair away from my cheeks and our gazes met and held. My breath stalled in my lungs as I tried to figure out what I saw in his intense brown gaze. Tenderness, compassion, affection, but there was also an edge, a flash of anger and resentment that was being held in check. Or was I just imagining that?
He cupped my face in his hands, using his thumbs to wipe away the last of my tears. Then he leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. It was the sweet press of his mouth against mine, over before it began, and yet it changed everything.
Liam turned and left, striding across the small yard and vaulting over the fence that separated our homes, without ever saying a word. But now I knew, I knew where I belonged. It was as it had always been...with him. But I had absolutely no idea how to make that happen.
“Seriously, Aunt Jules, you need to tap that,” Hannah, my sixteen-year-old niece, whispered in my ear as we acted as the greeters for the reception at our house after Babs’s service.
I turned away from watching Liam across the room to look at her in alarm. “What do you know about “tapping” anything?”
“Nothing...yet,” Hannah admitted with a grin. It reminded me so much of Soph at that age that I wrapped my arm around her and squeezed her close.
“What about you, Harry?” I asked my nephew, who was also working the door. My question drew his gaze away from one of our young neighbors who looked to be about twenty and had an impressive booty which she showed off to the best possible advantage in a bottom-clinging micro mini that made men, young or old, lose all brain function.
“What about me?” Harry never took his eyes off the rumpus. Poor bastard.
“You “tapping” anything yet?” I winked at Hannah, who laughed.
“Oh god, gross!” Harry cringed. “You’re supposed to be the cool one, Aunt Jules. You can’t ask a teenage guy stuff like that!”
“I thought being the “cool” one meant I get to ask these questions, no?”
“No, just no,” he said.
Harry shook his head until his shaggy blond hair partially covered his face, which I figured was why he wore it that way.
Hannah, who had the same blond hair and blue eyes as her brother, as well as the same dimples, leaned close to her sibling and tipped her head in the direction of Liam. He was on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall and holding an untouched glass of wine.
“I’m trying to convince Aunt Jules to make a play for him ,” Hannah said.
Harry glanced at Liam and then at me. “Well, the guy has been staring at you for the past forty-five minutes so you should go talk to him or shoot him and put him out of his misery. I say this as a dude who has done his share of holding up walls and staring.”
I hadn’t seen Liam since the morning under the lemon tree. The days in between had been a flurry of activity as we were swept up in planning a service worthy of Babs’s diva expectations. Thankfully, she’d left us an exacting list of instructions, telling us precisely what she wanted, so there was no debate or second guessing.
I’d ordered the flowers and food, notified the papers of her passing with an obituary she’d written herself, and created a PowerPoint slide show of the photographs Babs had picked out to be synced to the music she’d chosen which we’d played during the memorial service.
The few times I’d had a chance to peek during the week, Liam’s workout room remained dark and I didn’t see him moving about his house or his yard, not that I was stalking the guy or anything. Okay, maybe just a little. I assumed after our emotional clinch, he was steering clear of me, letting me know in no uncertain terms that he was not interested. Message received.
But then he arrived at Babs’s service with his parents, the Professor and Mrs. Mahony, who had come from their retirement village to attend, and my heart had tried to punch right through my chest at the sight of him. I’d had to dredge up every bit of self-control I possessed to keep from running across the church and throwing myself into his arms, and I do mean every bit.
Yes, I was aware that I was grieving and not one-hundred-percent in my right mind. I knew I was vulnerable and likely running away from my emotions and probably seeking comfort from the familiar, which was Liam. Still, I had felt his eyes on me throughout the service and only resisted meeting his gaze because I wasn’t brave enough to face the possibility of rejection, not today.
It didn’t stop me, however, from checking him out on the few occasions he was speaking to someone else. And, hoo boy, if I thought Liam working out had been quite the eye popper, Liam in a suit, well, let’s just say the urge to grab him by his tie and drag him upstairs to my room and have my way with him had crossed my mind every minute since he had stepped through the door of our house. I blamed the grief for making me think crazy inappropriate things.
In an effort to be more circumspect, I scouted the room for my sisters. Em was in the corner talking to several of Mom’s closest friends, women who had moved into the neighborhood when Mom did, and like her had raised their children and buried or divorced their husbands here. They were a St. John-wearing, afternoon-card-playing, Friday-morning-hair salon tribe who drank Manhattans and met for mahjong once a week where they commiserated about the unfortunate choices their grown children were making. I was pretty sure I was one of their main topics of conversation and was more than happy to let Em be our emissary.
I shifted my gaze until I found Soph, who was standing by the front window with her husband. Stan and Soph had met in college, and Soph, still reeling from the death of our father, had fallen head over heels, crazy in love.
I don’t know that Stan had ever felt the same way about her. They had only been together a few months when Soph turned up pregnant with the twins and the next thing we knew, she was married and a mom. To me, the loss of Sophie had been almost as big a blow as the loss of our dad. Watching her tight expression as she stood with Stan, I wondered, not for the first time, if my sister was happy in her marriage.
Stan was a big, lantern-jawed, Dudley Do-Right sort of guy with thinning blond hair, narrow blue eyes, and a bit of a paunch. He loved cross-fit, expensive wine, fast cars, season tickets, and exotic trips to exclusive places. Yeah, in short, he was a pretentious douche and I’d never really warmed up to him.
I never thought he was good enough for Soph, because I knew he saw her as nothing more than the mother of his children. She was the field he’d plowed to bear the fruit of his loins. If I could pick one word to describe how he treated her, it was dismissive. Even now, I saw her ask him something with a tight expression, putting her hand on his arm to get his full attention.
Stan shook her off and spun away from her, appearing irritated until he caught sight of the neighbor girl with the generous southern hemisphere strolling by. He perked up, giving the young lady what I’m sure he thought was a charming smile but was in fact a middle-aged creepy guy smirk. I squelched the urge to walk over to them and punch him in his big, stupid face.
“Julia, how pretty you look.” A familiar voice pulled my attention away from my sister and her husband and I turned as Mrs. Giovanni approached the open front door.
“I was just devastated to hear about Barbara,” the older woman said as she reached past me and handed Harry a casserole dish. The teen hurried to the kitchen.
Mrs. G was one of Babs’s mahjong buddies and I knew that losing one of their own was a crushing blow not just because it left an empty space at the table, but it also forced them to acknowledge their own mortality. Never fun. I studied her face and could see that despite the carefully applied make-up, she’d been crying. I opened my arms and hugged her. She started to cry again.
“I just don’t know how I’m going to get by without her,” the woman said.
“I know,” I agreed. “Mom was a force of nature.”
Mrs. G stepped back. She smiled at me through her tears and then fished a tissue out of her purse, dabbing her eyes with it. People were moving around us, coming and going, while Hannah filled in as greeter until Harry returned and I focused on Mrs. G.
“Barbara loved her girls so much.” The woman gently pressed the tissue to her lids. “She was so proud of how you went off to New York and made a new life for yourself. It was always “Julia this” and “Julia that.” You made your mother so proud.”
She patted my cheek as I stood there stunned. Babs had bragged about me? I couldn’t reconcile it. I had to assume she’d done it to save face. The Babs I knew was pissed that I was in New York and therefore out of her control. Mrs. G stepped past me into the house to commiserate with her friends. I wondered what else Babs had said about me?
The thought fled as soon as I turned and saw him standing there. Liam was a mere foot away from me and I knew, I knew absolutely, that he had heard what Mrs. G said and judging by the way his jaw was clenching, he wasn’t happy about it.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Liam said.
There it was, the low reverberating bass that was Liam Mahony’s voice. It may have been nine years since I’d heard it, but like a tune that gets stuck in a loop in your head, I’d never forgotten it or how it made my insides bloom like flowers reaching for the sun.
“Thank you,” I said.
We stared at one another. Up close in daylight, we had the opportunity to take in the changes time had wrought. Liam was harder, more chiseled, as if the softness of youth had fallen away to leave behind the more defined and resilient planes of a man.
I imagined he saw the same changes in me. I had borrowed one of Soph’s dresses for the service rather than buy something new. The blue with the flared hem was slightly flirty yet reserved at the same time. I wore my hair up in deference to how much Babs had disliked my curls—I even wore mascara and lipstick, again, just for Babs. One stray curl had fallen free of my updo and curled around my neck. I saw him study it as if it was the key to unlocking the girl he’d once known.
“Well,” I said for lack of anything better to say. This was not the time or place to try and make apologies or explanations, although they were his due.
“Well,” he repeated.
Obviously, this conversation was going nowhere fast.
“It was a lovely service, Julia.” Mrs. Mahony, Liam’s mother, hugged me close before she moved to stand beside her son.
Mrs. Mahony was a handsome woman with a square jaw and arching eyebrows. She wore her gray hair long and didn’t wear make-up, something that had always driven Babs crazy. Mrs. Mahony was the down-to-earth sort, and her husband the Professor, who had joined us, was very much her complement with his thick gray beard and dark-rimmed glasses. He, too, gave me a quick hug. My fondness for them had never diminished over the years and I was relieved to see their affection for me hadn’t either, despite the circumstances of my abrupt departure.
“Your mother was an extraordinary woman,” Mrs. Mahony said.
Given that my mother had never kept her disapproval of my relationship with Liam quiet, frequently complaining to the Mahonys that their son was a bad influence on me, I found her words very kind.
Professor Mahony removed his glasses and polished the lenses with a cloth he took from his pocket. He appeared thoughtful. “I can honestly say I never met anyone quite like her.”
I smiled because I knew Babs would have approved the sentiment as it was spot on. There was no one like Babs Blumer and I doubted there ever would be again.
More people came in the door and the Mahonys took their leave as they needed to drive back up the coast to the retirement home they’d moved into when Liam bought their house. Liam let his parents walk ahead of him. He looked like he wanted to say something but then he shook his head.
We stared at one another for a few seconds and then with a curt nod, Liam turned and left. I could read in the stiff set of his shoulders beneath the fitted charcoal gray suit exactly what he was thinking. Ex-girlfriend confronted, feelings successfully held in check, neighborly duty done, game over.
Yeah, not even close, buddy. I hadn’t booked my return trip to New York yet. I wanted to make sure my sisters were okay first but also, after the other morning, I was determined to try and explain to Liam why I’d left the way I did. After nine years, I owed him that much or maybe I owed it to myself. Either way, the overdue conversation was absolutely happening whether he wanted to participate or not.