Gift of Friends

Chapter Thirty-One

Donna sat at their kitchen table with her morning coffee. The house was quiet.

Too quiet.

Lynette was out walking. Her daughter had said little since their brief discussion in Lynette’s bedroom yesterday.

Did Lynette overhear anything else?

Talking with Lynette about their future—futures—was scary, but part of her also thought it was long overdue. Their impromptu move back to Ruby Shores more than a year ago really had made sense at the time. But now . . .

Why does change have to be so hard?

Donna liked to think she knew her daughter better than anyone else, and that phone call from Frankie yesterday had put a sparkle in Lynette’s eye that had faded in recent months. Maybe spending time in New York again was the right thing for her daughter, even if it could just provide her with the closure she didn’t get because of the circumstances of the pandemic.

Lynette might need to go back, but Donna didn’t. She’d always dreamed of seeing more of the world, and at seventy-two, there wasn’t any more time to waste. Before they’d left New York, she had already made tentative plans with Chester to tour Europe, but then the world shut down and put things on hold. She’d never mentioned her plans with Chester to Lynette.

Chester, her old neighbor back in the city, was the one potential draw for Donna to tag along with her daughter. But, deep down, Donna knew both she and her daughter would benefit from following different paths. It would be a first for them, but a necessary first.

She cradled her coffee mug between both hands. The silver ring on her left middle finger tap-tap-tapped against the stoneware cup. Her nervous habit irritated Lynette, who had often accused her of never being able to sit still.

Was she just naturally twitchy, or had she felt confined for too long?

She unwound her fingers from her mug and slipped the ring off. The skin below was pasty-white and indented after eight years of never taking it off.

Lynette had lost the matching ring in the lake at Whispering Pines. At first, a rush of panic had filled Donna when she heard the other ring was gone. The blessed rings had served as important touchstones during her struggle with breast cancer. She’d expected to never take hers off again, attributing much of her healing and recovery to the special matching rings.

But sometimes when she noticed it on her finger now, it transported her back to that terrible time instead of feeling an appreciation for surviving. Was the ring making her feel fragile? Had Lynette’s ring made her daughter think of Donna as frail, too?

She set the ring next to her coffee and rubbed her finger.

It felt . . . freeing.

The sound of footsteps on the back stairs brought a smile to her face. Lynette wouldn’t be back from her walk yet, so it must be her old friend, Raven.

“You two really have done some amazing things with this place,” Raven said, accepting a cup of coffee. “I know the house was looking tired, but when faced with using a hefty chunk of our hard-earned savings to give her a much-needed facelift, or letting someone else with a fresher vision bring her back to life, it was an easy decision. Our low-maintenance condo in Salt Lake is the better option for us at this stage.”

Donna sat across from her old friend. “Are you still working full-time? I would think you’d want to retire before long.”

They continued to catch up, as old friends do, on each other’s lives.

Raven noticed the silver ring, still on the table, and picked it up. “This is pretty.”

“It is. Lynette had a matching one, but she lost it.”

“I gave up on wearing rings years ago. The skin on my hands is so dry, I’m constantly putting on lotion.” She handed the ring back to Donna.

Donna examined it and laughed when she noticed the gunk stuck in its crevices. “I think I’ll clean this up and tuck it away in my jewelry box. It is pretty, but it represents a different time in my life. Now, when I look at it, it reminds me of when I was sick. I’d rather focus on how good I feel most of the time nowadays. But speaking of rings, I should go grab that box I called you about, so we don’t forget why you actually swung by.”

Raven checked the time. “My husband will probably be back to pick me up in a half hour. I wish I could stay longer, but this was just a quick trip.”

Donna hurried up to the spare room where Lynette had stored the box. It was a shame that her daughter was going to miss Raven today.

Raven was at the kitchen sink when Donna got back downstairs. “The improvements you did to the kitchen look amazing. But I noticed the cracked cupboard door is still here. I was so mad at Sybil and those tarot cards of hers that day when I slammed it too hard and broke it.”

Donna set the box on the table. “Speaking of tarot cards, here you go.”

Her visitor left both of their empty mugs in the sink and returned to the table. She opened the box. The wedding photographs were on the top. Raven removed them and sat down.

“These are very similar to the ruined ones from Sybil’s room at the home,” she said, running a light fingertip across the faces of her long-lost family members. “I hate that my grandfather wasn’t there to watch my mom grow up, or to attend her wedding. I only ever knew my grandmother as a widow.”

Donna knew Raven had suffered a similar loss. Neither of her parents, the bridal couple in the picture Raven held, had been alive for her own wedding. “The names on the back of that made Lynette so curious that she visited the cemetery where you’d told me they’d buried Sybil. She did a little detective work of her own there, and that’s how we figured out those were your parents.”

“She did?” Raven glanced up from the picture. “Boy, I haven’t been to their graves in years. I should probably swing by there on our way out of town today. I only wish we could have buried my brother there, too. Then I could show my respects to all of them.”

Raven’s mention of her brother reminded Donna of the strange twist Lynette had revealed regarding her old high school friend. She motioned toward the box. “There are some newer pictures in there, too. Have a look at those.”

“There are?” Raven set the two bridal pictures on the table and pulled the box closer to look inside again. “I’m glad those tarot cards aren’t in here. Did you take my advice and burn them?”

“Really? They aren’t?” Donna said, surprised. “Lynette had to have taken them out, then. I wonder if she took them with her to Whispering Pines. It would be just her style to want to play around with the cards with her friends.”

“That’s fine. I have no desire to see them again. Oh, here are those other pictures you mentioned.”

Donna watched her old friend’s expression as the other woman studied the image of the young boy, but it was impossible to guess what Raven was thinking. Then she noticed the way Raven’s hands shook when she dropped them on top of the older photographs.

“Do you have any idea who that boy is in the pictures?”

“I have a pretty good idea, but I don’t understand,” Raven said, meeting Donna’s gaze.

“Is it a relative?” A twinge of guilt followed her question, given she might already know the answer.

“He looks just like Gideon, my brother. But it can’t be him. The photograph is too new, so it has to be his son.”

Donna hated the pale, pinched look on Raven’s face. Maybe she should have tossed those pictures to prevent the pain her old friend was so obviously feeling. But that would have felt wrong, too. She waited, giving Raven time to process what she was seeing.

Raven finally shook her head and pointed at the boy in the picture. “This is crazy. Sybil must have kept in touch with him, even after Gideon died.”

“So you do still have family, beyond your husband?” Donna asked, careful to keep her tone low and unemotional. She didn’t want to further upset Raven.

“Technically, yes, but I haven’t thought about him in years. I know that must sound awful. But my foolish brother got involved with this shrew of a woman. She got pregnant, and he ended up marrying her, but it caused a huge rift. Her father was against the very notion of his precious daughter having any kind of relationship with a boy who wasn’t Catholic, let alone marrying him. To compensate, Gideon disassociated from us. It almost broke Sybil’s heart. She’d already suffered so much heartache. It was like we lost Gideon, even before he got sick and died. I only saw their baby one time, at his christening, but Sybil said something inappropriate about the ceremony to Gideon’s in-laws, and that was that,” Raven explained. “Or so I thought. This tells a slightly different story, though. See this car in the background of the one photograph? That was Sybil’s. Which means the boy must have been here, or with Sybil somewhere, when he was much older than an infant.”

Donna reached across the table and picked up a picture. “What was the boy’s name, Raven?”

“Taran,” she said. “Why would Sybil keep something like this from me?”

“You called your brother’s wife a shrew a minute ago. Did the two of you ever get along?”

Raven’s bitter laugh provided the answer even before her words. “Never. I hated the changes I saw in Gideon from the moment he met her. It was like he turned into a different person. Why couldn’t she see that, aside from Sybil, Gideon was the only family I had in the world?”

“Whatever happened to them after he died? Your brother’s wife and child, I mean.”

Raven shrugged. “I heard things over the years, but I never actively tried to keep tabs on them. I think she remarried a few years later, maybe even had another kid. But from the looks of this, Sybil kept closer tabs on them than I did.”

Donna squirmed in her chair, considering whether to share what she knew of Taran and his mother. “All of that happened a very long time ago,” she said, deciding to test the waters a little. “That boy in the pictures would be a grown man now. About Lynette’s age. Would you ever want to look him up?”

Raven grimaced. “I don’t know. Maybe? Of course, none of what happened was his fault. He was a child. But I suspect his mother poisoned our name. I doubt he’d want any kind of relationship with his dead father’s sister after all this time.”

Donna wasn’t so sure about that. She decided Raven deserved to know what little Donna had learned about her adult nephew. “Raven, the boy looks happy in the pictures Sybil kept. I, of all people, know how unfair it is to judge someone by the type of parents they had.”

This earned her a curious look from Raven.

Donna waved a hand. “But this isn’t about me. Raven, a month ago, we had some water in the basement, and Lynette was out of town. I needed help, so I reached out to Owen down the street. He’s helped us out a few times around here. An old friend was visiting him, and he came along to help clean up the basement. When they finished, I invited them up here, to the kitchen, and offered them a beer.”

Raven narrowed her eyes at Donna. “Okay. I’m sorry about all your basement problems. We honestly didn’t know those issues were cropping up, but I don’t see how—”

“Raven, the name of Owen’s old friend was Taran,” Donna said, cutting Raven off. “He said he’d been here, in the house, as a kid. He said Sybil even fed him chocolate chip cookies. But he never said he was a relative.”

Raven drew in a shaky breath. “It has to be him! ‘Taran’ isn’t a common name.”

Donna reached into the box and pulled out a tuft of hair. “There is more. Do you remember, years ago, when we left town so suddenly? I quit at the nursing home and moved away from here with Lynette?”

Raven stood and retrieved both their cups from the sink. “I think I need more coffee for all of this,” she said, splitting the last of the coffee in the pot between the two. “Sure, I remember when you left. It was shortly after Lynette had that terrible car accident. I hated to see you go, and not just because of how much you helped Grandma Sybil at the home. I considered you a friend. But I could tell something serious was going on, so I accepted your decision.”

Donna sipped the coffee Raven handed her. The now bitter brew fit the distressing story she was about to share.

“Lynette was dating a boy named Storm. It was his pickup she was driving when she had the accident. She took it without his permission, the night of her high school graduation. Earlier that day, some things related to a man I was dating had bubbled to a head, and I felt awful. My gut told me to call in sick to work and keep Lynette home with me. Not only was she upset about how the man I’d been dating treated her—of which I knew nothing about until then—but something else was going on. I suspected she might be pregnant, though she never let on that she was. A mother just knows sometimes, you know?”

Raven’s expression reminded Donna that her friend knew little about a mother’s intuition, given her own had died while Raven was young and she wasn’t one herself.

“I’m botching this,” Donna said.

“No, go on. I’m dying to hear how this all ties together. Because I’m assuming it must.”

Donna felt something brush against her leg and looked down to see Ebony there. She hadn’t even noticed the cat wander into the kitchen, but it felt like Ebony was giving her encouragement to continue.

“I’m sorry. This is complicated,” she said. “Anyway, you knew Lynette back then. She had the uncanny ability to get what she wanted, and what she wanted the night of her graduation was to go out with her friends. The entire group of them ganged up on me, convincing me they’d stick together. But Lynette snuck out of the grad party without her friends and wound up wrecking Storm’s truck. When I got to the hospital, the doctors gave me a rundown of her injuries. There was the possibility of a concussion, a terrible cut down one cheek, and other bumps and bruises. No one mentioned a pregnancy test. When I got her home, I saw wrappings from her sanitary products in the garbage, so I figured I’d been wrong about the possibility that she’d been stupid enough to get pregnant. It was the one blessing from that awful time.”

“That had to have been a relief,” Raven said.

Donna nodded. “It was. But I was still worried. I knew she was head over heels for this kid, and he was a couple years older. I had mixed feelings about him. He obviously cared about Lynette, and he stood up for her. But he projected an image of sorts that made me nervous. Also, they never seemed to be able to keep their hands off each other, even around me. I was wrong about Lynette being pregnant, but I worried it could still happen. Plus, her friends were all heading off to college, but there was no money for Lynette to do the same. She could have tried for scholarships, of course, but she was reluctant to make any specific plans after graduation. I knew that had to do with the boy. I started wondering if it might be best to get her away from Ruby Shores. To move. Moving would be expensive, but I found a way.”

Raven reached across the table to grasp Donna’s hand. “What an awful predicament to find yourself in! You should have come to me for help.”

Donna snorted. “I didn’t know you that well and I’ve never been good at asking for help. Lynette was furious with me, but I hoped she’d get over it with time. And she did, eventually. I still think leaving was best for her, but it was hard to drive away from Ruby Shores. We’d both built a life.”

“Did she ever hear from him again? Her boyfriend, I mean. And what kind of name is Storm?”

“As far as I know, she didn’t talk to him again until decades later. In fact, it was only about a month ago when she ran into him. He was with Owen.”

Donna watched to see if Raven was piecing things together yet.

“Owen? Wait . . . Owen seems to be the common denominator in your stories today.”

“Raven, Storm and Taran are one and the same. I didn’t recognize him in this kitchen that day. When he dated Lynette in high school, he had long, black hair. Like this,” she said, holding up the tuft of baby hair from the box. “He’s bald now, and much broader. He goes by Taran as an adult. It shocked Lynette when she ran into him. When they talked, he admitted to an interest in this house because it used to belong to his great-grandmother.”

A silence descended in the kitchen again, much like the one Donna noted earlier, before Raven’s arrival.

Finally, Raven cleared her throat and glanced at the time. “Oh heavens, I have to leave soon. I am so shocked by all of this, I don’t even know what to say.”

Donna got up from the table. “I’m so sorry to dump all of this on you.”

Raven picked up her purse from the kitchen floor and stood. “Don’t apologize. That Sybil might have maintained some kind of secret friendship with her great-grandson shouldn’t even surprise us. That woman did what she pleased, but I always try to remember how good she was to me. If I were to decide I wanted to meet this nephew of mine, do you think he’d be willing?”

The sound of a car pulling into the drive by the garage and the toot of a horn reached them.

“I have no idea,” Donna said. She took a step toward the backdoor to walk Raven out, then remembered the box. “You should take this.”

Raven looked from Donna to the open box on the table.

“There are a few more things inside that we didn’t talk about,” Donna said when she saw Raven’s hesitation.

“Actually, would you mind if I just took the wedding pictures?”

“But what about your mother’s ring?”

Raven reached inside and pulled out the ring. She held it between her fingers and studied it closely, then held it out to Donna. “You should have it.”

Donna took the pretty vintage piece from Raven with a shake of her head. “Why would you give it to me?”

“I never wear rings. I have no one else to pass it on to. It’s a beautiful piece that meant a lot to Sybil. She’d hate for it to be hidden away. Wear it. Or give it to Lynette. Sybil considered you family, too.”

Donna felt torn but knew Raven’s husband was waiting for her. “Why would I want a cursed ring?”

Raven laughed and some of the tension in her expression eased. “Maybe it’s time we quit assigning blessings, or curses, or any kind of meaning at all, to things. It’s just a ring, and it would look good on you. You seem to have an open finger, now that you are going to stop wearing your cancer ring.”

Not wanting to argue, Donna dropped the ring back into the box and motioned for Raven to follow her outside. “Who knows? Maybe it was a young Taran, or Storm, who hid the box in the shed for Sybil. Maybe I should have Lynette give him the ring.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Raven said, pulling the kitchen door shut behind them as they headed for the garage. “If he really is family, Sybil would probably like that idea, too.”

Donna headed for the driveway, but Raven veered toward the old statue of her mother as a young girl. Once she reached the tired rose garden, she reached out a hand to touch the girl’s leg.

“I love how carefree they made her look.”

Donna expected Raven’s husband to give his horn another quick tap, but he didn’t. She moved over to stand beside her old friend in front of the fountain.

“Thank you for telling me about Taran, Donna. All signs point to him telling the truth about who he is. Secrets can be so damaging, can’t they? If Sybil would have been honest with me about staying in touch with my brother’s son, maybe I could have had some kind of relationship with him over the years, too. Not that it’s her fault that I let Gideon’s wife ruin things for us. I want to discuss all of this with my husband. If I decide to reach out to my nephew, could you get me his contact information?”

“I’m sure I could,” Donna said, putting her arm around Raven’s shoulder. “You know where to find me, should you need anything.”

Donna watched as Raven and her husband pulled away. Should she have admitted the whole truth to her old friend about the events surrounding their departure from Ruby Shores more than thirty years ago?

It wasn’t until an hour later, when Lynette called to ask for a ride home from a used bookstore downtown, that Donna realized the importance of one of Raven’s parting comments. Lavonne had said something similar to her around the firepit a month ago.

Secrets really were damaging to a family.

Lynette deserved to hear the truth about theirs.