Chapter 36
36
G randma Pearl was not a woman who asked for help often. Even with trying to sell the house, she hadn’t officially asked Sam to come back home. Sam had come because she knew Pearl needed her there.
So when Pearl told Sam to come home in a hurry, Sam did exactly that. And even though Damon had implied he was worried Sam might run again, he didn’t stop her. She knew they still needed to talk, but it would have to wait.
When Sam got out of her rental car, Bonnie was on the front porch waiting for her. “What’s all this about?” Sam sidestepped a palm frond that had yet to be moved to the street for pickup.
“Pearl wants to tell you herself.” Bonnie nodded for Sam to follow. They walked around the side of the house until their feet sank into the flour-like sand and gulls hovered in the sky above them. When they got to the back, Pearl sat in the middle Adirondack chair and patted Sam’s chair as a signal for her to sit.
“Are you okay?” Sam quickly asked as she took a seat. “You’ve got me worried now.”
Bonnie sat in the chair on the other side of Pearl. It was the first time the three generations had been in this spot together in years.
Bonnie reached for Pearl’s hand and held it. “Your grandma and I had a heart-to-heart this morning.”
Pearl tipped the brim of her sunhat lower to shield her eyes from the revealing light. “It’s time for the truth.”
Sam straightened. She was still emotionally raw from her morning with Damon, and while she didn’t know where this conversation was leading, the truth didn’t sound light.
Pearl continued, “I made a mistake. Well, I made a few mistakes. And one of them was discouraging your mama from coming back to see you. She wanted to, a few times, but I was worried she’d do more harm than good. So I asked her not to.”
Sam’s mouth went completely dry. While she’d heard Bonnie tell her this, she didn’t actually believe her grandma would do something so cruel. And she was more than a little shocked that Bonnie was the one who’d been telling the truth, in the end. “You kept my mom from me,” Sam said. “How could you do that?”
“She was an alcoholic who abandoned you, and I was worried she’d do it all over again. That’s how,” Pearl said and sat back in her chair.
It was a fair point. But it didn’t make what she’d done right. “Grandma, you understand how wrong that was, don’t you? You saw how upset I was. How angry I got at my mom. Any of those times you could’ve told me that she’d tried to reach out. You made me believe she didn’t want anything to do with me. Do you know how much that traumatized me?”
Pearl didn’t look at Sam, though; she stared out at the ocean. “I was trying to protect you. And as time passed, you got better. You stopped crying. I thought you’d moved on.”
“Moved on?” Sam blurted out. “Moved on from losing my mother? No, I didn’t move on.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know? You keep everything so bottled up.” Pearl shifted in her chair, clearly uncomfortable with Sam’s tone, but probably knowing she deserved it. “What do you want me to say?”
“How about that you’re sorry for lying to me? Or you’re sorry for keeping me away from my own mother? Or you’re sorry for making me think she’d completely abandoned me?”
Sam waited. And waited. And finally, Pearl said, “I am sorry for all of those things. I’m sorry. What happened in the past is not great. What I did was wrong. But that’s the truth about most things in the past that we don’t like to remember.”
“We can’t change what happened,” Bonnie offered. “But we can change how we approach the future. Your grandma and I want to move on, but you have to decide what’s best for you, too.”
Grandma Pearl and Bonnie were ready to move on. They had, apparently, worked through their issues. Bonnie was now truthful, and her grandma had lies to apologize for. What had happened to the women she’d known? Suddenly, these two who could barely be in a room together without yelling were holding hands and looking at Sam and asking her if she could move on.
“I don’t want to die with regrets.” A sigh escaped Pearl. “If I didn’t tell you the truth, that’s something I’d regret. If I didn’t make things right with Bonnie, that’s something I’d regret. You have to decide if you can live with regrets, or if you want to try to move on from them. That’s your choice. I can’t make it for you.”
Sam snuck a glance at Bonnie, who shifted in her seat. “It’s not up to you whether or not I move on,” Sam said.
“The hell it isn’t. You’re my granddaughter, and she’s my daughter. We’re family. We do dumb shit, we apologize and then we have family holidays where we rehash things after a few drinks.” As if to prove her point, Pearl downed the rest of her coffee.
“Mama,” Bonnie said. “If Sam doesn’t want to clear the air, then we have to respect that and give her the emotional space she needs.”
“I understand you’ve been to therapy, Bonnie. You don’t have to use fancy words to remind us all,” Pearl said.
Sam sucked her cheeks in and tried to pretend she was admiring the ocean waves.
But Pearl, of course, wasn’t about to let her get off scot-free. “And besides, if we give Sam the time she needs, she’ll disappear for another decade and I’ll be the one who’s dead. So, respectfully to both of you, you need to talk this out.”
“Look at you Letos!” Jessie’s singsong voice sailed over the sand as she walked toward them from her back patio. “Oh, how I wish I could paint this moment.” Jessie took a step back and bit her bottom lip as she admired the three of them. She then took out her phone and snapped a photo. “Well, now I can!”
“We’re kind of in the middle of something,” Pearl told her. “Can you come back later?”
“No, I can’t. Because now that I have all three of you here, I have a proposal.” Jessie rocked back on her heels. “I want Pearl to live with me. Permanently.”
Pearl waved her comment away. “I told you to stop asking me that. I don’t want a roommate.”
Jessie slid her sunglasses off. “I don’t want to visit you at some old-folks home. I want to wake up and see your Hawaiian print shirts all over the house. I need a roommate to help me cover the monthly costs, and you need a place to go. Come to my place. It’ll be like Golden Girls , Tybee Island edition.”
Sam smiled. Now this was an idea she could get behind. “We could still sell this place, Grandma, and you could use the money to cover the rent with Jessie.”
“We can’t even agree on which store has the best rotisserie chicken. Why do you insist on sharing a refrigerator with me?” Pearl sat forward.
“People can change! Sam’s near-death experience with the palm tree really hit it home for me,” Jessie explained. “Life is short. Yeah, sometimes we annoy the hell out of each other, and I truly hate that white noise machine, but I don’t want to lose my best friend. I want to watch her sleep, and then paint her while sleeping.”
“You know I love your quirky sensibilities, but if you hover over my bed you’ll give me a heart attack. And you know who died from that? Carol Gaines.”
“Oh, no, she was my art teacher,” Bonnie said.
“Yup.” Pearl looked triumphant. “And you know who else is dead?”
“Spoiler alert, it’s everyone,” Sam said. “Literally every day I’ve been here there’s a new dead person.”
“That’s because people die, Sam. That’s why you have to take your vitamins.” Pearl shook sand off her tropical shirt. “And forgive people before it’s too late.”
“See?” Jessie asked. “How could I possibly go every day without this in my life?”
“What do you think, Grandma?” Sam really hoped Pearl would at least consider the move. She’d feel a lot better about packing up the house if she knew the boxes were headed next door.
Pearl seemed to weigh her options as she sipped her coffee. “Let’s discuss,” she said to Jessie. “But I’d need to bring my beach signs.”
“Of course!” Jessie extended a hand to Pearl.
Grandma Pearl stood from the chair then. “I’m going to get another cup of coffee with my potential new roommate.”
Sam watched her grandma and Jessie walk toward the house. Before she talked things out with Bonnie, she had to talk things out with Pearl. “Wait,” she said before standing from her chair and following the women toward the house. “Grandma?”
Pearl turned around and motioned for Jessie to continue inside. “Sam, you can’t run from your mama anymore.”
“No, I want to talk to you. Just us.” Sam caught her breath and continued, “You somehow forgave Bonnie, but I still need to process a lot of things, too.”
Pearl gently stroked her thumb along Sam’s jawline. “If packing up this house has taught me one thing, it’s that it’s healthy to let things go. It’s time, Sam.”
Sam swatted Pearl’s hand away and let out a frustrated breath. “You know something? Maybe I shouldn’t be mad at Bonnie anymore. Maybe I should be mad at you .”
Pearl’s shoulders slumped. “I realize now that I should have told you sooner. But when would have been a good time for that? You never came home. And it wasn’t news I wanted to drop over a quick holiday where all you wanted to do was talk about anything but Tybee.”
“You could have told me,” Sam insisted. “You had years to find the right time.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Pearl adjusted her hat and looked off. “Anyway, I’m going to be paying my dues truly alone now, aren’t I?”
Sam stopped short. Sure, she had flown Grandma Pearl out to Paris a few times over the years, but Sam never really thought that maybe Pearl was hurt by her fleeing Tybee, too. Pearl had a whole community here—Jessie, the Rochas, Alligator Alice, Byron...she understood Sam had her own life to live, too, right?
“Grandma...” Sam started to say. “I was never running from you. You are the most important person to me. And you getting injured scared me so much. I don’t want to leave here again knowing you might be isolated in some retirement home. What happens if Jessie can’t visit every day, or you can’t access the beach so easily anymore, or get your rotisserie chickens, or—”
“Sammy girl, I’m going to figure it out.” Pearl straightened and her expression turned serious. “I always do.”
“With Jessie.” Sam scratched her eyebrow while she searched for the words to make Pearl see her side of things. “Please say you’ll seriously consider her offer.”
Pearl turned toward the house and let out a little muffled sound that might have been her getting choked up.
But just through the window, Jessie had a bottle of sriracha and seemed to be squirting some into a coffee cup. Then she poured hot coffee into the mug.
“Hot sauce in coffee,” Sam said. “You don’t want to miss out on that every morning.”
And then Pearl laughed and turned back to Sam and wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes.
“Change doesn’t have to be huge for it to be significant, Grandma,” Sam offered. “I know that now.”
Pearl let out an exhausted sigh as she glanced at Jessie in the kitchen. “I meant what I said about keeping my beach signs, though.”
Sam wrapped Pearl in a hug. “Thank you. I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Pearl hugged her back. Then she grabbed Sam’s chin, maybe too forcefully, and said, “You are not perfect, Sam, no matter how much you want everyone to think that. So have a little compassion. Talk things out with your mama.”
Sam rubbed the spot her grandma had pinched and turned to see Bonnie watching her. One more to go , Sam thought to herself as she made her way back to Bonnie and the beach chairs.
Bonnie clasped her hands in her lap and leaned forward. “I’m not the world’s best actress, but if you want me to pretend we worked things out when Pearl gets back, I can do that.” Bonnie brought a hand to her chest as if swearing a solemn oath. “I really don’t want to force you to have any conversations you don’t want to have.”
Sam was not perfect, that much had become abundantly clear through her trip here. She’d gotten a lot of closure from getting answers out of Bonnie on the beach—answers that were probably hard for Bonnie to give. So maybe Sam could at least try to do the same thing for her mom, even if she maybe didn’t deserve it.
“Who knows when we’ll be in the same room again after you leave,” Sam said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound rude, but who knows. We might as well say what we need to say. But you go first.”
Bonnie pressed her palms into her capri pants and looked at Sam. “I want to say that I am sorry for how I left, even if you don’t believe that. I regret my choice every single day, and I wish I could go back and change things. But I can’t. None of us can. All we can do is learn from our mistakes. And I promise I will do that. I will be here for you, if you ever need me for anything. And I won’t leave you to figure out things with Pearl by yourself. She’s my mom, and I plan to help sort out what she needs, okay?”
“Okay,” Sam said. She wasn’t totally sure how her mom planned to help, or if she actually would, but what else could she say? She could grill her mom about the details of how and why, but what would that do, other than remind Bonnie that Sam didn’t trust her? “It probably goes without saying, but you leaving me behind was not okay. What you did will never be okay. I am going to try to move forward with you, but if I can’t, then you have to respect my decision not to talk to you.”
Bonnie licked her lips and considered that. “You’re not wrong. I’m asking you to forgive me for something unforgivable.”
Sam glared out toward the water. She didn’t owe her mom anything, but she had promised to try to move forward. “Grandma has missed having you here. As much as you’re trying to mend things with me, you need to mend them with her as well. So if you expect me to give you a chance, you have to try with her, too.”
Bonnie cracked maybe all of her knuckles, but said, “I will try to be better with Pearl, too.”
Sam slipped her shoes off and dug her toes into the sand for comfort. “So what happens now?”
“Maybe we can start small, you know?” Bonnie shrugged. “Texting. Calling.”
Sam nodded. “Let’s start small. I can do small. Texting first.”
“I would really like that.” Bonnie’s eyes welled with tears and she dabbed the corners with her fingertips. “I think Grandma would be really proud of us.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “She will be.”
Bonnie reached her hand across the chairs and toward Sam’s. Sam initially stiffened, but then remembered that she was going to try to give Bonnie a chance. So she reached her hand out and held on to her mom’s fingertips and they both squeezed each other.
“Are you going to come back to Tybee?” Sam asked.
“Are you?” Bonnie asked back.
“I think I will, yes.” Sam pulled her hand away and looked out at the beach and the water and the endless sky. She remembered feeling so much dread on her first day back, but now she had a bit of what Pearl felt when she came out to the water: clarity. “You probably think that’s a bad thing. ‘Don’t end up stuck in this place.’”
“What?” Bonnie looked like she’d been slapped.
“Don’t end up stuck in this place,” Sam repeated her mom’s fateful words.
Bonnie frowned, like she was genuinely confused.
“That’s what you told me about Tybee,” Sam said, a little annoyed.
“But I didn’t say that. That’s not—”
“You did,” Sam cut her off.
“I did often say ‘Don’t end up stuck in this place,’ but I didn’t mean that about Tybee. It was about a state of being...” She stopped midsentence. “Being in the mental state that I was. I didn’t want to end up in that place. And I didn’t want you to end up like I was. Depression can breed depression, and I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want you to end up stuck in the place I was.”
“So, just to be clear,” Sam started to say, “you were not talking about Tybee?”
“I was talking about a state of being, not the state of Georgia.” Bonnie sat back in her chair.
What was happening here? Sam had built so many of her choices around that warning, and how her mom had behaved, and now Bonnie was suggesting she was...wrong about everything? Sam leaned forward in her chair, trying to sort through the unfamiliar feeling of trusting what her mom was saying.
“I’ve been so scared that you’d repeat my mistakes.” Bonnie dusted something from the arm of her chair into the sand. Then she readjusted herself to look right at Sam. “But the truth is, you never have. You’ve charted your own path, despite what I put you through. And for what it’s worth, Damon is a good man. He’s successful, and he loves you—I could see that as clear as the blue sky above us.”
Sam was surprised to hear Bonnie say something nice about Damon, let alone acknowledge that he loved her. The kindness was so unexpected that she said, “Thanks, Mom.” It was the first time she’d called Bonnie “mom” as an adult, and she found it felt more natural than expected.
Talking to her mom had freed something up inside her.
Damon was her home. Wherever he was, Sam wanted to be. And maybe he felt the same way. She would never be stuck in Tybee, because Damon wouldn’t force her to be somewhere that made her unhappy. Sam had been on autopilot for so long—believing coming home would destroy her—when the truth was she’d been running from the one person who accepted her for exactly who she was. And now it was time to go fight for him.
Bonnie had changed. The mother she’d been was not the person she was now. Even Grandma Pearl was willing to change—she’d apologized to Sam. She was agreeing to move in with Jessie.
And what if Sam could change, too? Not everything about her life, but the parts that were willing to bend to make space for something magical. What if opening herself up to someone she trusted unearthed a new adventure?
“I need to go do something,” Sam told Bonnie.
“Do you need any help?” Bonnie was practically already out of her chair, and she gave Sam a look as if she genuinely would help.
So Sam, despite everything, decided to give her mom a chance. “Yeah, actually, I might need all of the Letos on board for this one.”