Chapter 55 Laurie
Laurie
Five thousand miles away, Laurie MacDonald was typing like a woman possessed. She’d sent message after message to Delilah, and only got a response when she’d thought her grandmother was dying. Laurie hadn’t heard from her since. Delilah was drifting.
Maureen had already left Laurie once, and she’d be damned if she sat back and let her only daughter leave, too.
She fought the urge to scream at the sound of her mother’s pointed nails clicking against her table.
“Tell them I’m not eating red meat.”
Laurie sighed more deeply and loudly than most people would say was necessary, but Rosemary McDonnell wasn’t most people’s mother. “Yes, Mom, I already wrote that.”
“And tell them I have to have herbal tea, no caffeine at all, at all.”
“No caffeine.”
“And tell them I’ll need extra blankets for my—”
“MOM! I got it. Okay? I’m well aware of all your limitations.”
Rosemary looked a lot like she was being forced to suck on a whole lemon, and Laurie winced under a sudden wave of guilt.
“Fine,” Rosemary snapped, “but don’t get all huffy with me when we’re sharing a threadbare quilt because you forgot to warn them about my sensitivity to cold.”
“It will be fine, Mom.”
“You’re only as ‘fine’ as you are prepared, Lorraine.”
She hated the name Lorraine. It hung over her like an axe, demanding perfection somehow, like the word itself wore Chanel suits and expected her to be valedictorian.
Only her sister and her dad had embraced it when she decided to go by Laurie in high school.
Every letter she’d kept from her father, postmarked by Royal Mail from Scotland, was addressed to Laurie, not Lorraine. Except the last one.
She still remembered the smell of it in the fireplace, sealed in its envelope, while Rosemary watched over her shoulder. Lolo, scrawled in his handwriting on the front, was the last thing to curl up and burn.
Laurie did wonder, sometimes, with twenty years of hindsight, if she’d been wrong to listen to her mother instead of reading her father’s last words. Even if he had left her.
They sat in a tense silence punctuated by the clacking of Laurie typing the email into existence while a horrible aching tide tugged at her insides. She reread what she’d typed, and a flash of anger burned through her, evaporating the tide all together. A swooshing sound sent the email on its way.
“There,” Laurie said. “It’s done.”
Rosemary looked her daughter up and down and made a tutting sound. “Well, what are you waiting for, Lorraine? We have a lot of work to do.”
Yes, Laurie thought, and it’s about time everyone did their fair share.