Chapter Twenty-One #2
“Morag called me days ago.” She heard her mom’s truck door open and the familiar sound of her zipping open the compartment in her purse where she kept her cigarettes, then the flick of her lighter and a short inhale.
“She reminds me of your great aunt, my mom’s sister.
I wish you could have met her. I mean, obviously Morag is the British version.
Auntie Sheila was born in Manitowoc. Remember when we went to the maritime museum there?
I think you were fourteen or so. The boys were a handful. ”
Edie remembered. “Morag called you? On the phone? And the two of you talked about me?”
“We FaceTimed, actually. Why wouldn’t we talk about you? What else do we have in common?”
“Why?” Edie closed her eyes.
“I assume because she’s worried. I did have her send over the papers with the terms for the inn, and I gave them to your cousin Amber to look over the legal stuff.”
“Amber’s a paralegal. If I got that far, I was going to talk to Meadow. She went to law school.”
“Paralegals are the same thing as lawyers. Amber went to school for two years to get qualified. Law school takes three. What could be in that last year, how to talk to the Supreme Court? I don’t need that.
I just wanted to know you weren’t being scammed by an old English woman.
Anyway, Amber said she didn’t know a lot about property transfer in the UK, but nothing looked fishy to her. So there you go.”
“I’m relieved that my cousin Amber, paralegal, didn’t find anything fishy in paperwork she admits she knows nothing about.”
“You’re welcome.” Her mom took another inhale of her cigarette. “But I’m picking up that it’s not the nuts and bolts that have got you hung up.”
“No.” Edie could see, in her mind’s eye, exactly where her mom’s truck would be parked, and her mom next to it on the bench in the patch of white cedars by the picnic shelter.
Pamperin Park was as familiar to her as the freckles on the back of her hand.
Her mom liked to park her truck in the last space in any lot if she could, so at least one side wouldn’t have a car next to it.
It was the beginning of March, still cold in Green Bay, with snow on the ground covering the pine needles, and her mom was on the way to second shift.
It was probably getting dark. There wouldn’t be anybody at the park but maybe a few dog walkers.
She knew that place.
“You ever think there was a reason I told you to go to England?” her mom asked.
“Because that’s where Greg’s from.” Edie meant her dad, Greg Whitelock.
“Sure. Good enough. But that’s not all of it. The truth is, Frog, you don’t belong here.”
Edie sucked in a breath, hurt.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to go to work with me every day.
I’ve had to hold myself back from buying us matching lunch sets at Target and fantasizing about doing meal prep with you—I mean, add meat to mine, but you can really cook!
It’s the dream, working alongside your kids, knowing they’re going to be all right, watching them get what you had to work so hard for.
Especially if it was you. You’re my daughter.
You and I both know your brothers are knuckleheads.
I can hold a conversation with you.” Her mother sighed.
“But the truth is, I’ve hated the light that’s gone out in your face since you lost Fauxmage.
That place was cool as shit, Frog. I couldn’t believe you’d done that, all by yourself.
But it wasn’t a Green Bay kind of thing. ”
Edie’s heart skipped hearing her mom praise her. That place was cool as shit. For Tanya, it was the equivalent of throwing a party at a thirty-dollar-a-plate supper club. “How can someone from Green Bay not be able to make a Green Bay kind of thing?” she asked.
“Why didn’t I stay with your dad when I met him in London while following the greatest jam band in the whole world, Phish?”
“I don’t know.” Edie was a little surprised to realize she didn’t.
There was a way that she’d always thought of the story of her mom and dad as fated not to work out.
Her mom had been so far from home, and the fling with Greg Whitelock must have been a passing thing, Edie’s resulting birth the kind of music festival event that happened to Tanya Hoberg back then.
Not a plan. Not a future she’d truly considered.
“Because,” her mom said, “even though there were things that I loved about your dad and England, it wasn’t me. It was important for me to grow, and I got you out of it, but it wasn’t me. I knew that the moment your dad proposed. So tell me, when Morag offered you the inn, what did you know?”
Edie gripped her knee. That moment was crystalline. She remembered it in high definition. “That I could make the inn so special.”
“And then what?”
“I told myself I was on vacation and this wasn’t real, it wasn’t mine, I’m not even English, I would mess it up, it was too big, too much, too hard, that Harlaxton was a lot farther away from Los Angeles than Green Bay, and it was already impossible.”
Her mom exhaled. Edie could picture her, blowing smoke.
“But did you think, ‘I can’t leave home, I’m gonna miss it so much,’ or ‘I was really looking forward to my job at the factory,’ or ‘I can’t wait to be my brother’s last-minute-no-pay babysitter again’?
Did a montage of the Fox River and the Walnut Street Bridge and the coal piles flash through your mind with a pang of longing? ”
“No.”
“No! That’s not you. That’s what I thought, twenty-nine years ago, right down to the coal piles, but your first thought was that you were the right person for this. All the other thoughts that came after were either bullshit or giving up on a girl before you’ve even begun with her.”
I haven’t given up on her.
“I’ll tell you what I think you should do.” Her mom lit another cigarette.
“What do you think I should do, Mom?”
“Let Morag be your fairy godmother. Go rescue the princess.”
Edie laughed, and maybe there were a few tears. “If I do, will you come visit?”
And then, only then, after she’d given in to fate and asked for help, could Edie see it—her mom here in the lounge, talking about when she was in England following Phish, her niece and nephew eating biscuits and milky tea at the dining room table, and her knucklehead brothers being scolded by—
Cosima.
“Of course I’ll visit,” her mom said. “No one’s going to throw away a free lodging overseas vacation.
There’s airfare specials all the time. I’ll get one of those miles credit cards and use it for my groceries at Woodman’s.
And once I’m vested in my pension, watch out.
I’ll be speaking the Queen’s English, I’ll be there so much. ”
Edie ignored her mother’s atrocious English accent.
She had to, because her heart felt like it was going to burst. She thought of the letter Phoebe Frank had left for Cosima in the wallpaper, the letters Agatha had mailed to Barcelona from her cottage in Wales every year like a sacrament, the library full of romance novels Morag had read and kept.
She thought of the castle-shaped play equipment at Pamperin Park that her mom had always taken her to play on, even though it wasn’t the closest to their house, because Edie liked it best, and of a birthday cake she’d begged for with roses made of frosting, fit for a princess.
Edie had spent most of her life believing that castles and frosting roses and magic were for other people. But she didn’t believe that anymore.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, Frog?”
“I love you. I’ve gotta go.”
“You bet. I better get a fire under myself. Call me later.” Her mom made two kissing noises. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
It took her a few minutes in the empty lounge to pull herself together.
The sun was coming in a beam from the reception area, cutting a golden line across the polished floor, making motes of dust dance in the light.
She slid her phone back into her pocket and wrapped up her paintbrush and looked over the whole room, bit by bit, before she was ready to get to her feet.
Then, she found Morag—to her horror, kissing Agatha in the corner by the pantry—and asked her for help.
“I hate heels.” Cosima shoved off her stilettos and sank into her favorite Eames chair in her mother’s study.
Duncan had already taken his customary wingback by the fireplace.
“I hate Reggie Rierson and his dirty, smug, white-man schemes. I hate ten-hour meetings. I’m becoming fond of the SEC and the FBI, if I’m being honest, but I hate their patience for asking the same question thirty times. ”
“Forty.” Duncan sighed. “At least.”
“Do you think he’ll take the bait?”
Cosima had come home to a castle under siege. When she’d walked into the executive conference room in Burbank, there were people around the table in two layers, and more people standing in the corners holding laptops with one hand and typing with the other. They went silent at the sight of her.
As she’d listened to the executives and board members one by one, Cosima had waited for her stomach to twist with the familiar knives.
It never did.
She’d experienced a lot of feelings over the last two weeks. Boredom. Rage. Guilt. Fear. Confusion. And, under all of them, over all of them, through all of them, her unending craving to be with Edie.
Her unending determination to get back to her.
She’d been frustrated that after she talked to Morag, she was needed and couldn’t explain to Edie.
Then Edie texted—the relief in Cosima’s body utter—but before she could answer more than a few lines, a young man in a bad suit with an FBI badge held his hand out for her phone and then slid it into a paper bag and sealed it shut.
From that moment, her calls were monitored and—after Cosima attempted to get a call through to England when they didn’t yet know if she was a conspirator attempting to flee the country or an ally to the investigation—restricted to a landline.