Chapter 13
JASON
Jason was in the passenger seat of Roan’s truck, his stomach doing flip-flops that had nothing to do with his brother’s driving.
They were headed out of Burlington where Jason had picked out a diamond ring.
His mother had always said, once he made up his mind to do something, he went all in. She was right.
After the ring, they met with an architect.
It was too quick of a turnaround to have a full floor plan for the house he wanted to build, but he wanted something he could wrap up to put under her tree.
He and Roan had walked the property that morning, and they’d picked out a perfect spot for a house.
But all of that had to be put aside for now.
Mauve had texted last night to ask him to join her and her mother and her mother’s fiancé for dinner.
She’d asked if he’d come over beforehand so she could fill him in on everything, but had left it at that.
He hadn’t pushed, feeling instinctively that she needed some time to give it some thought.
Her mother showing up without warning had clearly thrown her.
He couldn’t help but speculate, though. Why now?
Where was Mauve’s father? Who was this fiancé?
So many questions. He hoped she would be willing to tell him about it, but he felt uneasy.
After blurting out that she should run away with him to Prague, she’d been a little distant, not responding to texts right away like she usually did.
He hoped it wasn’t too late to change her mind.
He arrived a little after six that evening.
Snow had fallen earlier, but the roads had been plowed.
When he got to her house, he could see her standing in the front window.
He bolted from the car and practically ran to the front door.
Seeing her was like a balm to the relentless ache he’d felt since she’d come to California.
She opened the door before he could knock, pulling him inside by the lapels of his jacket and surprising him with a kiss.
“It’s good to see you,” she said, resting her head against his chest for a moment. “I feel like it’s been weeks instead of a day.”
“You good?” He drew back to look directly into her eyes.
“I have a story for you. Come sit with me. I made some hot cocoa. I’ve been chilled all day.”
He shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on the back of a chair. She had the fireplace going, and the Christmas tree was alight with sparkling bulbs.
She handed him a mug of cocoa before joining him on the couch.
“I don’t know where to start,” Mauve said.
“At the beginning?”
She laughed. “But where does the story start? That’s the real question.
But anyway, in a nutshell, my mother left my father eighteen months ago.
They’re divorced. And she’s in love with her high school sweetheart.
They’re getting married, and she’s moving to upstate New York, where he works as a heart surgeon. ”
“Whoa.”
“I know. I’m reeling.”
“So she left all those months ago and never told you?”
“She said she wasn’t sure how to. I mean, I kind of get it. How do you tell your daughter you’ve left your husband of thirty-five years and became reacquainted with your high school sweetheart? Which, by the way, and this is important to me, she left my dad months before the high school reunion.”
“That’s where she met … what’s his name again?” Jason asked.
“Doctor David Davidson. Mom says his parents were eccentric.”
“That’s hilarious.”
“Apparently, her Doctor David Davidson suggested they stop here on their way to his house so she could finally tell me what was going on. I got the sense that he wants her to be a bigger part of my life.”
Things were starting to fall into place. “This explains the ornaments.”
“Exactly. She found them cleaning out the attic before she left my dad. I should have known something was up when that box arrived. I hadn’t seen any of those ornaments except for the Christmases I unwrapped them. My mother never put them on the tree.”
“Do you know why?”
“I’ve been thinking about this nonstop. She’s lived her life like a woman who puts plastic covers on her furniture, a drawer full of the ‘good’ candles she’s saving for a special occasion, the nice towels reserved for guests that never come.
She didn’t wear her favorite dress because she didn’t want to ruin it.
In that same way, she was saving the ornaments for when I married.
But they just sat in those boxes all these years, when we could have been enjoying them.
It’s such a waste.” She sighed, her shoulders rising up to meet her ears for a second.
“She just decided one day to start living, I guess. And that meant she had to leave her husband. He loved keeping her down and small, pinching pennies and saving all the good stuff for later.”
“I wonder why?” Jason asked.
“I’ve no idea. All I know is that she was right to leave. She’s still young. She has decades to look forward to. With Doctor David Davidson.”
“Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it?” Jason asked.
She nodded, looking into the fire. “All those wasted years. She should have done it earlier.”
“But how could she leave, really? No job. Two little girls.”
“That’s right. She was stuck. She tried sometimes, you know, to choose something she wanted even though it might set him off.
Earlier, I was thinking about the Christmas she bought new lights for our tree.
My sister and I had asked for white lights instead of the colored ones because that’s what all our friends had.
Mom bought them without telling him and, when she pulled them out of the new box and asked my father to string them on the tree, it was like she’d just told him she was having an affair.
He tore open the box, ripped the lights out, and threw them at her.
Then he kicked over the tree my mother had just gotten into the stand. ”
“He kicked over the tree?”
“I know. It was an absurd reaction. He walked out, slamming the door, and drove off somewhere, leaving us all in tears. That’s how he was—angry all the time. A quiet, simmering rage.”
“About what?” Jason asked.
“I’m not entirely sure. Everything, maybe.
His lack of power in a world which had no use for him.
He often said, ‘no one cares about the working man.’ I think about him sometimes, laying tiles in rich people’s houses and then coming home to his modest house full of bitterness.
A ‘cracker box,’ he called it. The only thing he could afford.
And always, under those statements, was the implication that, without a wife and two kids, he could have had the life he wanted.
Regardless, Mom tried to make our home as nice as she could with limited funds.
Garage sales. Bargains after the holidays.
So clever, really. Millie and I never felt like we were poor.
We shared a bedroom. She liked pink and I liked yellow, so my mom painted the room in half.
She sewed curtains for my window in yellow.
The other in pink. She somehow managed to find a braided rug that combined the two colors.
Little things she could afford from her occasional work during the holidays.
And that Christmas, she put the tree back up after he kicked it down.
She told my sister and me to dry our eyes.
She strung the lights, without any of the cursing we could have expected from him.
Then we put our decorations on it—not the nice ones in the boxes from my grandmother—the ones my mother had made herself. ”
He placed his hand on her knee. “I’m sorry.”
“I hadn’t thought about that in a long time.” She looked up at him, tears caught in her lashes. “All the important men in my life have let me down. Do you understand what that means?”
“I do, yeah.” But I’m not one of them. He wanted desperately to say that, to pull the ring out of his pocket and ask her right then and there.
However, there was a part of him that knew this was not the time.
This was his chance to open up to her. To show her a side of himself that he hadn’t yet.
“My mom was similar to yours in that she did everything to make sure Roan and I had whatever we needed. It wasn’t easy to raise us by herself when the perfect Hayes family lived just on the other side of the family farm. ”
“A family with a mother and father,” Mauve said. “With two parents.”
“That’s right. As much as I love my aunt and uncle, there was always a part of me that felt jealous.
When my grandfather died, he’d set up the trust so that my mother and Walter shared equally in the maple syrup business.
But my mother didn’t care about syrup. She’d always wanted to be a teacher.
So she and Uncle Walter worked out a deal between them.
He would take on the farm duties so she could teach school, promising to make sure she got a little of the profit, if there ever was any, which some years was a stretch.
In exchange, she promised to help on the farm during the summer months.
She was really good at marketing and community outreach.
They built the house where Roan and I were raised on the other side of the property.
It was a good life. And then we lost her.
” Jason stared into the fire for a moment, noticing the blue of the gas flames, the way the fake logs were perfectly laid to make it look real.
I have to be real, he thought. That’s the way to show her who I am.
Not a man who leaves. Not like my biological father, but a man like my Uncle Walter, who put his family first. Always.
“Have I told you she died a few days before our high school graduation?” Jason asked.
“Yes, you have. You boys must have been in total shock.”