Chapter 67 Mo
Mo
“Mom!” Mo swatted her mother’s hand. “For the last time, stop touching things.”
Rosemary scowled, rubbing the spot, and Mo watched her mother’s paper skin glide over the blue-green veins.
Rosemary went back to tucking sprigs of lavender into simple folded napkins. “Where is the ceremony taking place today?”
Mo spoke around the needle she held in her teeth as she pinched another fold into the chiffon draped over the floor. “Here.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They’re doing the ceremony here. At the cliffside.”
A response didn’t come. Her needle nipped in and out of the sheer fabric, bunching and loosening in Mo’s hands.
Mo had always loved family harmonies—the way family voices blend and anticipate and layer.
She remembered her mother’s cadence, her sister’s lilt.
The way Laurie turned up the edges of her words and thoughts, like a paper aging in the sun.
The way her mother spoke in staccato—heels clicking across marble floors.
Mo always sang the harmonies.
She was surprised to find, twenty years later, she still could.
And even though what Laurie and her mother did could never be unsaid or undone in Mo’s heart, the house she’d grown up in was almost full for the first time in so long.
She’d pay for it, she knew that. But for the moment, she cherished the quiet bustle of her kitchen that morning as she forced breakfast on Deli and was scolded by her mother about the temperature of the tea.
She’d stood in the window, soapy dish in hand, and watched her sister wander out the back door all the way to Mrs. Peevis and tuck a daisy into her fur.
She just wanted a life with a front porch light glowing softly and steadily when the moon rose, and everyone came home.
“How selfish of you, Maureen.”
Mo jerked her head back. “What?”
“Letting those children get married here, for your vanity?”
Mo looked around the room, like a clue might be peeking from her cupboards. “Okay, Mom—I’m lost.”
Rosemary rolled her eyes and shook her head, flattening her palms against the smooth wood of the kitchen table she used to set as a much younger woman. “Do they know this is a place only fit for endings?”
Despite her many unflattering traits, Mo had always admired the way her mother could translate the things most people hide from the light into language. Mo’s father was always a poet in love. Her mother was a poet in pain.
She wondered whether Rosemary ever got credit for that.
“It’s not like the land is haunted, Mom.”
Rosemary watched Mo seriously. “A brilliant thing died a violent and early death right here”—she gently patted the table—“and it is here it was buried. The ghost in this house has touched every bit of our lives since we put it in the ground. Am I wrong?”
Mo’s life in the cottage flashed through her mind. Her parents’ fighting, her father in the rearview mirror. Then his funeral. Deli crying as Lorraine took her home. Mo’s first night alone without Beth.
Hot, prickling tears gathered along Mo’s lash line. To her shock, her mother leaned forward in her chair until she could place a hand on Mo’s shin and gently squeeze her leg. Her grip was still strong.
“What do we call this place, then, my girl, if not haunted?”
Outside the sun broke through the clouds and slanted through the kitchen windows, and Beans hurried to bask in the sunny spot on the floor.
The California sun used to make squares on her black-and-white-checkered tile, and sometimes Mo would find Beth napping with Roni on the kitchen floor—her citrus-kissed hair spilling into the grayscale, her freckled hand in fur.
Tires came up quickly outside.
Mo cleared her throat as she rose. “That’s probably Lachlan.”
“Who’s Lachlan?”
“Hellooooo? My darling!” Douglas’s voice cracked as he cooed and fearlessly reached for the high note.
“Not Lachlan,” Mo managed a moment before the door burst open to reveal a potbelly and spindly legs peeking from under a long, pleated kilt. Douglas’s face was hidden behind the two massive bottles of bubbly he held up in front of him.
“Peekaboo!” He parted the bottles like curtains on a stage, twinkling eyes scrunched in mirth.
“’Tis a beautiful day, indeed, my Mo! Oh!
” he cried, rushing to set the bottles on the counter.
He spun to strike a pose with shoulders and head back, a pointed toe in front of him, and his hands on his hips.
One eyebrow lifted with the side of his mouth as he looked Mo’s mother up and down. “You must be Rosemary.”
Rosemary looked briefly shell-shocked before she rearranged her face into cool superiority. She stood and smoothed her skirt just as Cairn’s shadow from the doorway fell across her feet.
“Rose.”
Mo couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother taken aback.
“Cairn?”
Cairn rolled a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, his bluebell eyes shining. “You’re lookin’ well, Rose.”
Rosemary’s cherry nails fluttered over her midriff before clasping in front of her body. “You do, too.”
“As glamorous as I’ve heard, I see.” Douglas floated over and lifted one of Rosemary’s hands in his, bringing it to his lips. “Such a shame I was away those years you were here. But a pleasure to meet you at last.”
Mo braced for the acid comment her mother would produce for soft, sweet Douglas, but Rosemary’s smile was real.
“Douglas, I presume?”
Douglas took a quick step back, crossed one ankle over the other, and bowed. “At your service.”
“Yes, a shame,” Rosemary mused. “Perhaps if I’d made more of an impression, you all wouldn’t have stolen away my daughter.” Her tone didn’t match her words—still wistful and soft. Mo opened her mouth to protest, but Douglas beat her to it.
“Perhaps if you hadn’t stolen away young Callum’s heart, all of our lives would be different now.” He watched Rosemary meaningfully. Mo got the feeling she was missing something. “Alas, however the story was written, I am glad we are here for this chapter.”
“Perhaps.”
Cairn cleared his throat in the doorway. “Where do you want this, Mo?”
Mo jolted to life at the sound of her name. “Oh, you can put it—wait. What is it?”
Cairn jerked his chin over his shoulder as Douglas clapped his hands together in glee. “Come darlin’,” Douglas said, offering his arm to her mother. “Have a look.”
Mo followed Cairn out the door and squinted into the filtered sunlight.
A towering archway stood behind the truck.
She gasped at the glory and shape of it—two separate pieces made of entangled branches, reaching up and toward each other but not quite meeting.
It reminded Mo of the arms of two lovers, one’s fingers about to brush the soft, pulsing skin of the other’s wrist.
“Holy hell.” Mo knotted her hands in her hair. “It’s incredible!”
Cairn gave a noncommittal shrug. “Was mostly the boy. His wood, his design. I was the assistant.”
“Lachlan?”
Cairn nodded. “Ash cut from Hannah’s grove.”
Mo smiled, full of fondness. “Let’s get it to the cliffside.”
“First things first.” Cairn disappeared behind the truck and reemerged carrying a large box with a light tinkling.
“Champagne flutes? Kitchen counter, please, Cairn.”
He nodded. “Excuse me, Rose.”
Her mother pivoted sideways as Cairn walked past, and she swore she saw a blush peeking through her pressed powder. “I’ll help,” Rosemary muttered, and followed Cairn into the house.
Mo had the feeling she was seeing back into time. “What am I missing, Douggie?”
Douglas put an arm around her shoulder and kissed her forehead. “I suspect we are witnessing a remembering. Alas, I wasn’t there.”
Mo pursed her lips. “If only you hadn’t been traveling the world, we’d have the gossip. Why’d you have to be so hip when you were younger?”
Douglas recoiled. “Younger?”
“You’re right, please forgive my past tense.”
“Forgiveness is very hip.”
Mo grinned. “Bitchin’, even.”
“So totally bitchin’.” He walked to the archway. “Come on then, you and I can handle this. Let’s leave the kids to catch up.”