“Do you think I should wake Taylor to give him more Tylenol before I go to bed?” I asked my mom. The thought made me cringe. There would be bribing, bargaining, and selling my soul. Taylor would whine and wriggle until I thought I would lose my mind and promise candy, a trip to the toy store, a pony—anything to make this stop. Then he would finally let me shoot the Tylenol in his mouth, take a sip of water, and reach out for the Popsicle I would have ready to take the edge off the taste. I didn’t want to do it. But I loved those grandbabies more than life.
I looked beside me at Mom, awaiting her sage answer, and almost laughed. She could have been on a greeting card, dressed as she was in a floral, zip-front housecoat, her hair tightly wrapped in the curlers she would sleep in, her pink satin bedroom slippers hugging her slender feet. Although the frequent Botox and touch-up sessions from her dermatologist in Florida would have indicated otherwise, Mom had been a fixture on this wide front porch, which originally belonged to her parents, for more than eighty years.
I had replaced my grandmother’s matching rockers with cozy teak chairs and a couch, small white Saarinen end tables, and a teak dining table and chairs on the opposite end. It was the best porch in the world, and I never wanted to leave. Maybe this was why my grandmother had left the house to me in her will. She knew how much I adored this home, that I was the only one capable of loving it as much as she did.
“Darling,” Mom said, pulling one of the sea-blue Serena and Lily herringbone throws off the back of the sofa and wrapping it around her shoulders, “if the child’s fever spikes in the night, he will wake up. Good heavens, what do you think the pioneers did?”
I laughed, sinking back into one of the new Dalmatian-print throw pillows I had just gotten. They accentuated this sweeping white clapboard home, situated on the water a block from downtown, with the black shutters I had added after much ado—and digging up a photo from the late 1800s that proved to the historical association that there had once been shutters on the house and, as such, if I could copy them exactly, I could replace them.
I could hear Emerson’s and Caroline’s voices wafting down from the uncovered, upstairs porch with its six outdoor loungers perfect for sunbathing. My friend and handyman Hippie Hal had added a platform for yoga at the end of the porch, outside the bay window of my bedroom, the largest of the five in the main house.
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mom. I would have made a very poor pioneer.”
She looked at me seriously. “That you would, darling.”
In contrast to my mother, I was still wearing the tailored tan-and-white-striped shirtdress I’d had on since I showered from my day at the beach with my rambunctious grandsons. Caroline had picked out this dress for me, and I absolutely loved it. It hit right at the knee and was cinched at the waist. It reminded me of an updated 1950s housewife frock, which, with the cooking, cleaning, and child rearing, I basically was—minus the husband, of course.
I wished I could be a little more like my mother, comfortable enough to be on my front porch in my bathrobe. But the tourists walking by from downtown deterred me. Had I said that to my mother, she would have replied, “It’s your damn front porch. If you want to sit out here stark naked, you should.”
I pulled the cork out of the open bottle of rosé and poured “just a splash,” as Mom would say, into each of our oversized Riedel wineglasses. Her splash was more like a third of the bottle, but who was I to judge? The woman was old enough to make her own decisions. And she would.
I took a sip, trying to dull the pain that, while Emerson and Caroline were up there sharing the secrets of sisters, Sloane, my little wounded bird, was entrenched in the darkness of her room, in the pitch black of her new reality. I took a deep breath and felt a sob welling up within me, but I suppressed it.
I looked into my mother’s blue eyes, the same eyes I saw each time I looked at my own face in the mirror, and I could feel her strength, the strength I had always borrowed during the toughest moments of my life.
These past few months with my girls back in Peachtree Bluff had been one of those hard times, one of those periods in their lives when, though I wanted to save them, protect them, shelter them, I couldn’t. Yet again, the universe had delivered challenges for my grown daughters whom I had loved and wanted so much, those children whom I had sacrificed for, crossed that line between right and wrong quite a few times for.
I could not erase the fact that Caroline’s husband, James, had cheated on her with a supermodel or that her son had been born in the midst of that, and I could not bring Sloane’s husband, who was missing in action in Iraq, home.
Quite a few times I had thought that at least Emerson, my youngest, was OK. But I sensed something was slightly askew with her, too. Maybe it was that, though she was filming her biggest movie to date, she hadn’t quite found the acting success she had dreamed of. Maybe it was that she hadn’t found the
