“Mommy,” AJ said excitedly. “I love tomatoes!”
I ran my hand through his hair.
“See?” Kyle asked. “I told you you would.”
“That’s how you learn,” I said. “When you try new things, you discover all sorts of things you love.”
“Exactly,” Caroline said. “Which is why this trip is going to be so much fun!”
From down the table, Vivi said, “Please, Aunt Sloane. Pretty please with a cherry on top?”
I looked at her. She was so adorable. And she wrote that beautiful essay. “Fine,” I said. “I won’t like it, but I’ll go.”
“Wait,” Mom said. “What boat are you taking?”
“Well, Jack’s, of course,” Caroline said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world that we would be taking the boat Mom’s old boyfriend named after her.
Poor Mom. She could never hide her feelings. She turned redder than the fresh tomatoes. I shot her a very satisfied look. She thought she was tricking me, but Caroline was tricking her, too. I wondered if James was ever scared of her, especially now that he had crossed her. She was just a little smarter than absolutely everyone, so even when you thought you had her figured out, she could still ambush you.
“Oh, I . . .” Mom stammered and trailed off. “I didn’t know Jack was even in Peachtree Bluff.”
Caroline looked at her like she was dense. “Of course he’s in Peachtree. Where else would he go?”
I was about to chime in when I heard, “Happy birthday to you,” trailing from the kitchen. It made me think of all of those birthday parties I had been watching on the home movies, all those happy times when Adam was here and life was good. But I had to push the thought out of my mind. I was lost without him, but if I kept dwelling on him every single second I was going to destroy everything we had spent years building.
So I joined in. “Happy birthday, dear Ha-al, happy birthday to you.”
Hal smiled and blew out the candles as we all looked on. His beard almost got into the cake but missed it by a centimeter. “Thank you all so much,” he said. And then, much to my surprise, he got choked up. Caroline put her hand on his arm. “Hal? What’s the matter?”
He wiped his eyes and said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that no one has remembered or celebrated my birthday in more than twenty years.”
I looked across the table at Mom, whose eyes were now filling with tears too. She put her arm around Hal and hugged him.
I wondered how that was possible, how this wonderful man could have gone more than twenty years with no one celebrating his birthday.
I looked around the table at my two boys beside me, Grammy on my other side, Mom across from me, Emerson, Mark, James, Caroline, Vivi, even Hippie Hal, Kimmy, and Kyle. I had all these people who loved me, all these people who supported me no matter what, all these people who would remember my birthday. I took them for granted sometimes and just assumed everyone had what I did. But it was at times like these that I remembered how rare it was to have a family like mine, to have love like this.
I knew Adam would come back to me. I knew he would. But having these people surrounding me, bolstering my spirits, not letting me disappear into myself again while I waited, was an absolute blessing in the meantime.
EIGHT
civilized
ansley
Our Peachtree Bluff neighbors had brought sixty-two casseroles since we got the news that Sloane’s husband Adam was MIA. That meant it had been sixty-two casseroles since I had told Jack it wasn’t the right time for us, that, with all I had on my plate, I couldn’t commit to a relationship too. As I stared at all those uneaten casseroles in my deep freeze in the garage, I could poignantly feel every second that had passed since my first love, the one I had met in this very town, told me that he had waited long enough for me, that he had put his life on hold for thirty years and that was more than generous.
And now, he was gone. Well, gone from my life, anyway. The fact that Caroline, Sloane, Emerson, and Vivi were getting ready to embark on their drop-Vivi-off-at-camp-and-rehabilitate- Sloane mission on Jack’s boat meant that he wasn’t gone from Peachtree Bluff. I had to admit that soothed me. The thought that he was still here but not in my life did not soothe me.
On the bright side, my mother’s episodes of confusion, though more frequent, tended to last a shorter time. We were hoping we could attribute her mental inconsistencies to her pain medication usage after the car wreck and broken ankle that had brought her here to me.
On the other bright side, it seemed like, despite my incredible skepticism, Caroline and James were getting along splendidly and Emerson was well on her way to being totally in love with Mark. Two out of three happy daughters wasn’t bad.
“Caroline!” I called, walking up the stairs into the guesthouse.
“In the kitchen, Mom,” she called back.
I loved this guesthouse. I had made it a sanctuary from the real world. Before all the girls had come home, I would come out here for a couple of days and feel like I was on a mini-vacation. It was less formal than the main house. Both floors had wall-to-wall seagrass carpet, marble mosaic tile in the bathrooms, and pale sky-blue walls.
As I walked into the kitchen/great room area I admired the beaded chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling. I loved the exposed beams in here, the casual, rustic
