Chapter 13
This is it?” I ask, eyes bulging out of my skull.
“Mh-hmm.” My mom nods.
It’s gorgeous. The cottage is a single-story home tucked between cypress trees, lavender bushes, and grass that looks as fluffy as a baby lamb.
You wouldn’t notice the quaint house if you weren’t paying attention.
It seemed like an afterthought in comparison to the whimsical landscaping.
I wouldn’t be shocked if fairies flew out and started tending to the land.
My mom ambles up the gravel path that leads to the house.
“The real estate agent is busy hosting an open house today, so she left us the keys,” she says.
“Why does it need a real estate agent?” I ask, realizing how out of my depth I am being given an entire house at the age of twenty-two.
“Well.” She sticks the key into the rounded door and wiggles it back and forth. “You’re about to have a lot of options, and since I know you don’t want to stay here, I figured we should have a real estate agent help you with all of them.” Her voice sounds brittle, like she doesn’t enjoy saying it.
All of my options.
A few months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to conjure up a single reason why I’d want to stay in Seabrook, California. I hadn’t been expecting to come home at all, and now I was entering my dream home, the property in my name.
My breath hitches as I walk inside. The ceilings are sloped and low. The wooden floors creak, and the floor plan hints at the age of the home, having a random two-step staircase down into the living room, which is merely a hop away from the kitchen.
“Watch your step. This is called a sunken living room. My grandparents had something like this,” my mom says as she walks ahead of me.
The space is so small it feels like you’re standing in the kitchen and the living room at the same time. Just enough space for some books, a desk to write my romance novels, and the husband and kids I hoped to have but could never fully picture.
My mom watches me take it in, face blank.
“I want to ask you what you think, but I don’t at the same time,” she says in a small voice, walking toward the bedroom without meeting my eyes.
“What do you mean? It’s… perfect.” At her silence I continue, “Right?”
She points at something behind me. “Look.”
I follow her finger to see the bedroom. But what she’s referencing must be the sliding glass doors leading into a garden. No, not just a garden. A lavender farm.
“Is that—” I rush over, slide the glass door open, and pad outside. “Oh my gosh,” I say, breathless. “Are you kidding me?”
Fluffy lavender heads float wistfully in the wind, huddled together like they’d die if they were pulled apart.
There’s a rough path through the center of the yard made up of random stones and the occasional red brick.
It’s barely visible through the forest of flowers growing discordantly on both sides.
“Lottie had a green thumb,” my mom says, coming up behind me. I can hear the smile in her voice. “She wasn’t the one maintaining this one, but she is the one who had the vision for the whole thing.”
“Why didn’t she ever show me this?” I ask.
“She bought it long before we ever moved in with her. Had been renting it out to family friends for years. And then in more recent years, she hired someone to manage it and started doing short-term rentals, so.” She shrugs. “She just… never got around to it, I guess.”
And now she never will.
It’s the closest we’ve gotten to acknowledging Lottie’s absence.
“But hey!” She reverts to the fake peppy voice I’ve learned to shrink away from. “She was clearly still thinking about you since she gave it to you.”
I nod. Lips pressing into a thin line.
“Yeah,” I say.
“But no pressure, sweetie. I know how much you wanted to go to New York, and this will still be yours even if you don’t decide to live in it,” she says with a forced lightness.
She’s trying to act like there’s no pressure to go one way or another, but her tone is off.
Her body language is icy. Sometimes I wish there was pressure from her to stay.
At least it would be a pure, unhidden desire.
Expressed because it was true. Not a placation to prevent me from feeling guilty when I already do.
Because this thing she does, skirting around topics, hiding emotions, putting on a fake happy voice when she’s clearly not feeling happy, makes me feel unsettled.
Sometimes I just want to shake her shoulders and scream, “TELL ME HOW YOU REALLY FEEL, MOM!”
“Mom,” I start. “This whole like, ‘I know how excited you are to go to New York’ thing, you do realize why I want to go there, right?”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes, sweetie, I know! I know,” she says the words so fast, already waving her hands and shaking her head like she wants the conversation to stop. She turns around and enters the bedroom.
“No, stop for a second,” I say, voice stern.
All of this is already too overwhelming for me to handle without her skirting around her true feelings. I’m feeling smaller and smaller beneath the reality of Lottie’s death and this huge new responsibility by the second. I need her to be honest with me, to guide me in this.
“I don’t talk about New York all the time because I’m enamored by the city and crawling out of my skin to sit in an office building all day.
I do kind of romanticize that, sure. The independence of moving and proving that I can make something of myself, but—” The words get lodged in my throat.
I don’t actually know how to admit this to her.
“I don’t—I just—I want to do that for you.
” I gesture my open hands toward her. “You gave me everything my entire life. You were always working so that I could have everything, and I am so grateful for that. But, now I want to be able to give you that. To give you rest. To see you finally relax and…” I shrug, trying to emphasize how okay I would be with the idea of “… maybe you could even date someone. I don’t know.
Whatever you want to do with your independence I would be fine with.
I just want you to feel freed up enough to do things because you want to. Not because you have to for me.”
I’m out of air now that it’s out. If I thought I had a vulnerability hangover this morning, I can’t imagine what I’ll feel like tomorrow.
My mom doesn’t say anything for a beat. I’m about to start talking again to fix what I’ve done when she says, “Oh, Blair.” She shakes her head. “You’ve always been the sweetest girl.”
I nod furiously, anticipation and the intensity of my emotions swelling inside me like the tide.
“But you don’t have to do that for me.”
“What?” I ask, stunned. “Why? You don’t have to feel guilty about it if that’s what it is. I want to do that for you, Mom. It would be my joy. And I’m not just saying that.” I gesture wildly with my hands, pleading, urging her to understand. To give me something in return.
“Oh honey,” she scoff-laughs, in a motherly “that’s so cute and naive” way. “I don’t need you to take care of me, baby.”
My eyebrows furrow.
“Do you think Lottie made me work at the cash register all those years?”
“Yes?” I say, honestly. “I mean, not like, forced you, but like gave you a job, yeah.”
“No!” she exclaims, scaring me slightly.
“I begged Lottie to let me do that. She would’ve just let me live in her house with you.
She probably would’ve paid for everything for both of us!
She love, love, loooooved you so much. Oh my goodness.
You have no idea how much she loved you.
You were like the daughter she always wanted, truly. ”
Tears sting my eyes. Not again, I think. I keep my lips pressed tight, urging my tear ducts to dry up. I tense every cell in my body, willing myself to listen to her words without crumbling.
“But I was excited to work.” She sighs and rolls her eyes in an expression of relief.
“Oh my goodness, I was so excited to work. To make something of myself like you said. I relied on your father for everything. I let myself get so—” She shakes her head and moves on.
This is the most I’ve ever heard her open up, but she’ll probably never tell me what she endured under my father’s hands in detail.
“I didn’t want to go from relying on your father to relying on Lottie. ”
“So, did we only live with Lottie because… you wanted to?” I ask.
She smiles softly, seeming to ponder her answer before speaking.
“In Vietnam, living with your grandparents is very common. We probably would have done that, but since they had already passed away, and I couldn’t provide you with a father figure, I thought living with Lottie would be a close second.
Don’t get me wrong, if she hadn’t let us live with her, it would have been much harder.
” She blows out air, eyes wide. “Much, much harder. But you know we always make things work. And above all, I just wanted you to grow up in a house full of love.”
I smile back, a small, broken thing.
“Wow,” I don’t manage to say more as I try to process everything she’s revealed. To learn that it was love fueling her actions instead of stress had my world tilting on its unreliable axis. “You definitely gave me that. And so much more.”
Her eyes soften with affection as she studies me. “You know, con.” She inhales. “Something I learned after leaving your father is that creativity is not just in how a painter paints or how I sew my own clothes, or writing stories like I know you like to do.”
Blood races to my cheeks. How do mothers always know more than they let on?