Maddie rose and moved to the coffee table. “I don’t know.” She poured herself more champagne. “He won’t talk to me.”
“Did you finally tell him who you really are?”
Maddie nodded and refilled her friends’ glasses. “Yes, I told him, and he didn’t take it very well.”
“At least you didn’t sleep with him.”
Maddie looked away and took a drink from her glass.
“Oh, my God!” Clare gasped. “You fell off the wagon with Mick Hennessy?”
Maddie shrugged and took her seat. “I couldn’t help myself.”
Adele nodded. “He’s hot.”
“A lot of men are hot.” Lucy took a sip as she studied Maddie. Her brows shot up her forehead. “You’re in love with him.”
“It doesn’t matter. He hates me.”
Clare, the most kindhearted of the four, said, “I’m sure that’s not true. No one can hate you.”
That was so blatantly untrue, Maddie couldn’t help a smile, while Lucy coughed on her champagne.
Adele sat back and laughed. “Maddie Jones got a cat and fell in love. Hell has officially frozen over.”
The day after Clare’s wedding, Maddie packed up her cat and headed to Truly. The wedding had been beautiful, of course. And at the reception, Maddie had partied and danced the night away. Several of the men she’d danced with had been good-looking and single, and she wondered if she’d ever get to a point in her life when she would not compare every man she met to Mick Hennessy.
She spent the rest of September writing and reliving the days before her mother’s death. She inserted parts of interviews and diary entries, including the very last:
My baby will turn six next year and will go to first grade. I can’t believe how big she is. I wish I could give her more. Maybe I can. Loch said that he loves me. I’ve heard that before. He says he’s going to leave his wife and be with me. He says he doesn’t love Rose, and he’s going to tell her that he doesn’t want to live with her anymore. I’ve heard that before too. I want to believe him. No, I do believe him!! I just hope he isn’t lying. I know he loves his children. He talks about them a lot. He worries that when he tells his wife he wants a divorce his kids will have to witness a big scene. He’s afraid she’ll throw things or do something really crazy like start his car on fire. I worry that she will hurt Loch and I told him so. He just laughed and said Rose would never hurt anyone.
The hardest part of the book hadn’t been reliving the death of her mother moment by moment, as she’d always thought. That had been hard, to be sure, but the most difficult part had been writing the end and saying good-bye. In writing the book, she realized that she’d never said good-bye to her mother. Never had any sort of closure. Now she did, and it felt as if one part of her life had ended.
When she was through with the book, it was mid-October and she was physically and emotionally drained. She fell into bed and slept for almost twenty hours. When she woke, she felt as if a thorn had been taken from her chest. A thorn that she’d never even known was embedded there. She was free from the past and she hadn’t even known she’d needed freeing.
Maddie fed Snowball, then jumped in the shower. Her cat had yet to sleep in the bed Maddie had bought for her. She liked the video, and the carrier not at all. Maddie had given up on any sort of rules. Snowball liked to spend most of her time lying on the windowsill or in Maddie’s lap.
Maddie washed her hair and scrubbed her body with watermelon-scented sugar scrub and wondered what she was going to do with her life. Which was such an odd question, really, when she thought about it. Until she’d finished the book, she hadn’t realized how much of her life had been wrapped up in the past. It had dictated her future without her even knowing it.
Maybe she’d take a vacation. Someplace warm. Just pack a swimsuit and a pair of flip-flops and hit a nice beach. Maybe Adele needed a break from her cycle of cursed dating.
As Maddie toweled herself dry, she thought of Mick. She was thirty-four, and he was her first real love. She would always love him even though he could never love her back. But perhaps there was something she could do for him. She could give him the same gift that she’d given herself.
Mick’s gaze rose from the bottle in his hand to the woman walking in the front door. He set the Corona on the bar and watched her as she moved between the tables. Mort’s was slow, even for a Monday night.
Her hair curled about her shoulders like the first time he’d seen her, and she wore a black bulky sweater that hid the wonders of her body. She carried a box beneath one arm. He hadn’t seen her since Founders Day when she’d told him that he couldn’t handle the truth about her. She’d been right. He couldn’t, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t missed her every damn day. Didn’t mean that his gaze didn’t drink up everything about her. Trying to forget about her hadn’t worked. Nothing had worked.
Above Trace Adkins on the jukebox, she said, “Hello, Mick.” Her voice poured through him like warmed brandy.
“Maddie.”
“May I talk to you somewhere private?”
He wondered if she’d come to tell him good-bye and how he’d feel about that. He nodded and the two of them moved to his office. Her shoulder touched his, adding need to the warm mix spreading across his flesh. He wanted Maddie Jones. Wanted her like he was starving, wanted to jump on her and eat her up. She shut the door, and the urge got stronger. He moved behind his desk, as far away from her as possible. “Maybe you should leave the—”
“Please let me talk,” she interrupted and held up a hand. “I have something to say and then I’ll leave.” She swallowed hard and stared directly into his eyes. “The first time I recall being afraid, I was five. I’m not talking about Halloween and boogeyman afraid. I am talking sick-to-my-stomach afraid.
“A sheriff ’s deputy woke me up to tell me my great-aunt was coming to get me and that my mother was dead. I didn’t understand what had happened. I didn’t understand why my mother had gone away, but I knew she was never coming back. I cried so hard I threw up all over the backseat of my great- aunt Martha’s Cadillac.”
He remembered that night too. Remembered the backseat of the cop car and Meg sobbing beside him. What was the point of remembering?
“When I met you,” she continued, “I didn’t expect to like you, but I did. I certainly didn’t expect to like you so much that I ended up in bed with you, but I did. I didn’t expect to fall in love with you, but I did that too. From the beginning, I knew I should have told you who I was. I knew I should have told you a hundred different times. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I also knew that I’d lose you if I did. I knew when I told you, you’d leave and never come back. And that’s what happened.”
She set a Xerox copier-paper box on his desk. “I want you to have this. It’s the book I moved here to write, and I want you to read it. Please.” She looked down at the box. “The disk is with it, and I’ve deleted it from my computer. This is the only copy. Do what you want with both. Throw them away, run over them with your truck, or have a bonfire. It’s up to you.”
She looked back at him. Her brown eyes steady, calm. “I hope that someday you can forgive me. Not because I personally need your forgiveness. I don’t. But I’ve learned something in the past few months, and that is just because you refuse to acknowledge something, refuse to look at it or think about it, doesn’t mean it’s not there, that it doesn’t affect you and the choices you make in your life.”
She licked her lips. “I forgive your mother. Not because the Bible tells me I should forgive. I guess I’m not that good a Christian, because I’m just not that magnanimous. I forgive her because, in forgiving her, I am free of all the anger and bitterness of the past, and that is what I want for you too.
