Chapter 15 #2
“Anne.” Sadie’s voice brimmed with emotion. “You deserve to be that person. And I can’t wait for the day you realize it.”
Anne furiously brushed her cheeks with the back of her right hand. She sniffed. Couldn’t answer. It was too much just to withstand the bright, beautiful enormity of Sadie’s faith in her.
“So what do we do now?” she managed. The flame of her earlier distress still flickered hot in her chest, but she’d managed to turn down the burner to low heat. Sadie wasn’t saying yes, but she wasn’t saying no, either. She just needed time. “What’s the next step?”
A pause. Then, “Let me suggest something. What about—”
“Mom?”
Startled, Anne whipped her head around so quickly, she nearly lost her balance.
Brooke stood at the back door of the main house, holding the baby. Colton, her middle child, clung to her waist. Hal was next to them both.
All three stared down at Anne.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Now was not the time. Now was so incredibly not the time. “Sadie, you—”
“Mom!” Brooke beckoned frantically at her, shouting in a yell-whisper clearly pitched to avoid alerting the neighbors to their business. “Come here!”
“Just a minute!” Anne called out up toward the house.
She couldn’t rush this with Sadie, not when they were just beginning to make a way forward. How could she make sure Sadie understood that Anne believed in her just as much as Sadie believed in Anne?
In the space of an instant, she made a decision. “Sadie, I’ve got to go, the kids are—look, I’m going to leave your phone on the welcome mat, okay? And something else, too. ”
“Something else?” Sadie sounded surprised.
Anne fumbled inside her front pocket for the note she’d kept, the one she’d given Sadie on her book’s release day. For the bravest woman I know. A. “You said earlier that you were a coward. You’re not. I’m giving you a reminder of that.”
Before she could start to rethink it, she placed the folded note on top of Sadie’s phone, then put them both down on the mat.
It wasn’t more than a hundred feet between the tiny house and the back porch where Brooke, Hal, and Colton were waiting, but the crossing felt like a lifetime. Halfway there, she heard the tiny-house door opening, and as Anne kept walking, her back burned from what she knew was Sadie’s stare.
“Well, hi, everyone,” she said once she’d reached the porch, offering them all a practiced smile. Colton was the only one who bothered to return it. “How are—”
“Okay, Mom?” Brooke shoved the sleeping baby into Hal’s arms, then reached down to muffle Colton’s ears.
“What the f-u-c-k is going on with Sadie? What the f-u-c-k is going on with you? Why is Sadie refusing to talk about—whatever it is? Hal and Claire and I have been totally in the dark for hours, and because you wouldn’t call me back, I had to drive all the way over here, with all three kids—”
“I can hear you,” Colton interrupted, looking up at his mother. “You spelled f-u-c-k. That means it’s a curse word.” He sounded it out with kindergarten confidence. “Fuuuu—”
“I didn’t—you know what, you got me. Mommy’s a terrible influence who really needs to remember you know how to read now.”
Letting go of Brooke’s waist, Colton attached himself immediately to Anne’s and squeezed.
Anne, not exactly sure how to react to this unusual display of affection from a child who wasn’t much of a hugger, briskly rubbed the top of Colton’s head.
“Colton,” she said, prying one of his fingers loose to establish exactly how sticky it was, “what do we always make sure we do before we put our hands on Grandma Anne’s very expensive clothes?”
“We wash them with the soap,” Colton recited. “I did! Did you know, um, did you know that Aiden’s dad doesn’t live at his house now? Because of divorce. Aiden knows everything about divorce.”
“Me, too,” Anne told him, having no clue who Aiden was. “Maybe we’ll start a club. Colton, why don’t you go inside and make sure your hands are clean while Hal and your mom and I talk about some grown-up things?”
“I wanna stay,” Colton said instantly.
“Go find your big brother inside,” Brooke said, mercifully stepping in. “But don’t run. Make good choices. I trust you.”
I trust you. Anne would never have said that to her own children, much less meant it.
“Can I have candy?”
“When we’re in the car,” Brooke told him just as Anne said, “No sugar before dinner.”
Annoyance flashed over Brooke’s face.
“You really shouldn’t let them ruin their appetites. It’s not good to—”
“Mom, my kids, my decisions, okay? When I want you to parent them, I’ll ask you to do it. Promise.”
Anne shut her mouth, chastened. Was that how Brooke saw her advice? Interfering? She’d just wanted to help—
But she’d wanted to help Brooke do it right.
Exactly the same way Anne had always done everything right.
Oh.
Colton ran back into the house, all gangling limbs and loud feet. When had he gotten that tall? It hadn’t been that long since Anne had been over to Brooke’s, had it?
Hal adjusted Kaisley in his arms and cleared his throat. “Something happened between you and Mom. What was it?”
This was not a conversation she wanted to have. Not one bit. “It’s—well. It’s complicated.”
“Which means you fought,” Brooke translated.
“So why can’t you make up? What could possibly be so awful that Sadie would run over here?
” She sighed, hands on her hips. “More importantly, why the hell am I here? You’re grown women, this is your own business to figure out, and I still have to pick up a few things before I go home and make dinner. ”
“Agreed entirely,” Anne said with immense relief. “So why don’t you take the kids and—”
“Why does my mother have a dark spot on her neck?” Hal blurted out, then paled, looking for all the world like he regretted asking.
Anne’s stomach plummeted to a depth somewhere below the earth’s crust.
“She what?” Brooke looked at Hal, clearly astonished by this new information, and then at Anne. “What kind of dark spot? Did she get hurt or something? What the hell’s going on?”
Somehow, Anne managed to refrain from putting her face in her hands. Why should anything be easy, ever? Why should she be able to keep anything private? “Let’s just go inside the house and have a civilized conversation without any yelling, please.”
As they walked into Hal and Talisha’s pristine living room, noisy footsteps thundered above. Then, inevitably, a loud bang and crash, followed by a wail.
Anne didn’t miss those days. Not one bit.
Brooke sighed heavily. “Can you hold Kaisley while I go make sure no one’s dying?” she asked Hal. “Obviously, I’ll pay for whatever my children just destroyed. I’m so sorry.”
Hal patted Kaisley’s back soothingly. It was clear he relished the idea of getting in a little baby practice before his own kid arrived. “Kais and I are doing just fine,” he said softly and then sat down in one of the oversized chairs. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Be good for Uncle Hal,” Brooke told the sleeping baby, then bolted toward the stairs.
Uncle Hal? That was new.
Anne took the chair opposite Hal and crossed one leg over the other. With each passing second, they were rapidly tunneling toward a conversation she really, really didn’t want to have.
Hal wasted no time. “So that dark spot wasn’t there the last time I saw Mom, which was a few days ago.
At first I thought it was an ink stain, but it’s way too purple for that.
And Mom’s ink stains usually end up on her hands and arms. I went through all the options I could come up with, and I just kept ending up at the same place.
The same completely impossible place.” His expression begged Anne for a simple explanation.
“Not impossible,” Anne said quietly. Self-consciousness made her itch. “Hal, I don’t know how to say this—look, I’m going to tell you. It’s just so hard to—”
“Son of mine, that spot is a hickey,” a voice said from behind them. “Which Anne gave me. Sexually.”
They both turned around to see Sadie in the archway to the living room.
Her brown hair was wild and loose, spitting in most directions. She looked exhausted, her shoulders slumping. The dark circles under her eyes were sharp against her pallid skin.
She was so, so beautiful.
“Sexually?” The pitch scaled to heights Hal probably hadn’t reached since puberty. He looked at Anne again and then at his mother. “I was right? It was—that?”
Anne nodded.
Hal made a shocked, inelegant noise that fell somewhere between a snort and a honk. “Whoa. That’s, uh… Holy shit.”
“?Holy shit? is right.” Sadie strode into the living room, hands in her skirt pockets, and stood next to Anne’s chair. “The holiest of shits. We’ve reached fully beatified dung-heap levels. So. Would you like to tell me what’s flashing through that precious keppie of yours?”
“What do I even say? Tell me what I’m supposed to say. Please. I mean it.”
“There’s no script.” Light apprehension laced Sadie’s voice. “Say what you feel.”
“It’s—fuck, Mom. Exactly how long has this been going on? Why didn’t you tell me? You always tell me everything that’s happening.”
“This is a very recent development.” Sadie took the chair next to Anne. “Technically measured in hours. Anne? Should I tell him? Or would you prefer to do it?”
“I’ll do it.” But tell him what, exactly?
Hal, two days ago your mother told me she couldn’t live without me, and then I had a full-fledged panic attack because I realized I couldn’t live without her, so I accidentally proposed to Sadie and took her on an impromptu road trip, the highlights of which included an erotic experience at Burger Bliss and the best orgasm of my entire life in a shitty desert motel.
Obviously not that. “We have feelings for one another. Romantic feelings. And we’re still in the process of figuring out what’s next. Which is why we fought earlier. That’s what made your mom so upset.”
“Feelings.” A muscle twitched in Hal’s cheek. “Okay. So are you two not straight? Is that what you’re telling me?”