2. Rae
2
RAE
TWELVE WEEKS BEFORE THE PROPOSAL
Now
T he box in my hand is going to fall.
I see it happen in my mind’s eye. The ancient glassware Aaron’s mother, Marcy, has had since her wedding to his father forty years ago will go first, tumbling out of the poorly taped box and shattering all over the hand-scraped hardwoods under my bare feet. I’ll have to feign regret as I sweep the shards of gold-rimmed glass up, frown, and sigh, and apologize every time it’s mentioned, which, knowing Marcy, will be at least once a day for the rest of my life.
It still won’t be enough to convince her I didn’t do it on purpose, and that’s fine because I won’t be one hundred percent sure it wasn’t.
“Whoa, babe, you’re going to drop it.” Aaron rushes toward me, swooping in just as the box slips free from my fingertips. He catches it midair and laughs at my clumsiness as he sets it on the counter in the middle of our brand-new kitchen. “Mom would have flipped if any of this stuff got broken. Her wedding china is in here.”
I watch him start unpacking his mother’s precious keepsakes and try not to roll my eyes. “Where’s Marcy, anyway?”
Aaron glances over his shoulder toward the hallway that leads to the stairs then back at me with his brows pulled together in a tight line of disapproval. As far as looks go, this one is my least favorite of his. It’s too close to the look he gives Riley when she eats her snacks on the couch.
“Rae, you know she doesn’t like when you call her Marcy.”
I move over to the fridge and pull out a bottle of water, cracking the top and taking a couple swigs before I respond to him. “Her name is Marcy, Aaron, what else am I supposed to call her?”
“I don’t know, maybe Mom?”
The glare I turn on him makes him whither. “Why would I do that? She’s not my mother.”
Aaron knows this is a touchy subject for me, so I’m not sure why he’s decided that today, of all days, is the best time to broach the topic again. After months of stressing about this move from Manhattan to New Haven and the addition of his mother to our household, I’m not in the mood to argue about something we’ve already discussed ad nauseam. Losing my mother when I was barely out of high school left a hole in my heart I have no intention of ever filling with Marcy Scott. Not because she’s not a good mom, because she is—if helicopter moms are your thing—but because she’s not my mom.
Her hugs bring me no comfort.
Her smiles offer me no reassurance, and all of her advice is biased towards her son.
“Sweetheart,” Aaron coos, sidling over to me to wrap his arms around my waist and kiss my neck. “I know that, but one day, she will be your mother-in-law, and what are you going to call her then?”
“Marcy,” I deadpan, ignoring the way my stomach knots at the mere allusion to marriage.
He stares at me, and despite being tired and sweaty and a bit annoyed, I can’t help but appreciate how damn easy he is on the eyes. Between the honey-brown eyes, golden skin, and the jet black hair that he always keeps cropped close to his scalp, I’m usually prone to giving him whatever he wants, but I won’t give him this.
Aaron must see the resolve in my eyes because he pushes out a breath of concession and leans in to kiss me on the lips. I reciprocate, allowing myself to relax into his arms, to let the anxiety of being back in New Haven and the stress of living with his mother fade into the background. I’m seconds away from slipping him some tongue when footfalls in the hallway announce that we’re about to have company. We break apart at the same time, turning our attention to the doorway just in time to see my daughter, Riley, come barreling into the room with a phone in her hand.
“Auntie Dee is on the phone!”
Her voice bounces off of the bare quartz countertops and pings around the room, highlighting just how empty it is in here. Aaron plants a quick kiss on my cheek before he lets me go, knowing that a phone call from my best friend means unpacking the kitchen has just become his sole responsibility.
I pluck the phone from Riley’s hands and run a hand over wild curls spilling out of the bun I wrangled them into this morning while an adoring smile pulls the corners of my mouth up. Chocolate brown eyes that are close to being squeezed shut by the chubby cheeks I hope she never grows out of reflect that same adoration back at me and my heart goes all warm.
“Thank you, Nugget. Did you finish unpacking all of your plushies before you decided to start playing games on my phone?” Silent shock is the only answer I get from my daughter. Luckily, it’s the only one I need.
“Get back to work, missy,” I demand, shooing her back in the direction she came from. She heads off without argument, or at least none that I can hear, and I put the phone to my ear. “Hey, Dee.”
“You know she’s talking shit about you as we speak, right?”
My best friend’s unorthodox greeting makes me laugh. Deanna Tyson always makes me laugh. That’s how we became friends in the first place. Her off-the-cuff, dry-as-a-bone sense of humor caught my attention on the third day of first grade. I was the only person in the class to laugh when she asked our teacher, Mrs. Mac, if her first name was Mary and followed it up with a question about why she wasn’t wearing black. That shared giggle from across the classroom lost us both our recess that day and earned us both a friend for life.
“Yep, I’m probably being called everything but a child of God,” I say, moving out of the kitchen and down the hall to the room Aaron will use as his home office. Right now, there’s nothing in here besides his desk chair and stacks of boxes that contain his degrees from Stanford, as well as an array of accolades denoting the list of achievements leading to the promotion that brought us here to New Haven.
I plop down in the desk chair and turn my back to the closed door, gazing out into the massive, manicured backyard. When we viewed the house in early January, our realtor told us we would be stunned by how gorgeous the yard would be in Spring. It’s the middle of March, so the season technically hasn’t started yet, but Aaron and Marcy are already talking about all the elegant outdoor outings we can host for their family, friends and his co-workers. I advocated for a smaller place, something that wouldn’t stretch us so thin financially, but in the end, the yard and all it’s possibilities won out.
“Let’s just hope she uses the curse words right this time. I can’t have my niece going around calling people mother-shitters,” Dee quips, reminding me of the first and last time I gave Riley permission to curse. We laughed for days at her odd combinations.
“As her mom, I think it’s probably my job to hope she never gets them right.”
“She’s a smart kid, Rae. You know she’s going to figure it out eventually. Those kids at her fancy little school will probably have her cursing like a pro by the end of her first day.”
“Oh, God,” I groan, knowing she’s right because private school kids are the untamed monsters everyone wants us to believe public school kids are. “How long until she starts calling me ‘mother’ and rolling her eyes at everything I say?”
Dee snorts. “I’d say you probably have a good month or so left.”
“Damn. I guess it was fun while it lasted.”
“We had a good run,” she agrees, a laugh slipping through the cracks of the severity she’s forced into her tone. “How are you feeling about being back in New Haven?” she asks, switching gears now that we’ve gotten our signature banter out of the way.
Pulling my legs up into the chair to sit crisscross applesauce, I mentally prepare myself to answer such a loaded question. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had friends and even complete strangers ask me how I feel about moving back to my hometown. Each time, I’ve answered with the expected enthusiasm about sharing the place where I had all of my firsts with my daughter and putting down roots with Aaron. While none of those answers have been dishonest, Dee is the only person with whom I can be completely truthful because she knows everything.
The set of stairs I fell down and broke my arm.
The park bench where I had my first kiss.
The hospital room where I said goodbye to my mother.
The burial plot I picked for my brother.
The graves I’ve visited and the one I dug for a love I had to bury before it killed me.
“Rae?” Dee’s voice is soft now, all traces of humor gone. “You okay?”
“It’s weird,” I answer, jumping straight in because there’s no point in tiptoeing around it. “Everything is different but the same. It hasn’t been home for a long time, but I don’t feel like a stranger.”
“You can leave New Haven, but New Haven will never leave you,” she murmurs, repeating an old adage her mom, Emma, would recite whenever she’d hear us talking about how ready we were to put this small town behind us. She’s been gone for two years now, but we still find ourselves quoting her at the most random times.
“The older you get, the more you sound like her,” I muse, a soft smile playing on my lips even as my heart breaks for her again. Losing a mom is the kind of pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially my best friend and her little sister.
“Jayla says the same thing.”
Even though I can’t see it, I know she’s rolling her eyes. Dee hates it when me and Jayla agree on anything. She swears we do it just to gang up on her, even if we express our similar thoughts at different times.
“Did she tell you we ran into each other at the mall yesterday?”
“Yeah, she said Riley and Sonia hit it off instantly.”
“They did. Riley’s already asking when we can have them over.”
“Of course she is; that girl loves a gathering.”
I laugh. “She really does. I don’t know where she gets that from ‘cause it’s certainly not me.”
“Well, there is a whole other set of DNA you have to account for,” she reminds me, making my heart sink into my stomach.
Ever since Aaron drove us into New Haven city limits, I’ve been trying my hardest not to think about that other set of DNA, the man who contributed it, and what’s going to happen when we run into each other here, in the very place I left him when his demons came to destroy us both.