I walked out the back door, and I could see my brother’s big head on the screened-in porch—and my other brother’s smaller head beside it. A row of beer bottles were lined up in front of them, ready to be consumed. I sat down in a chair across from my brothers, handed a beer to Scott to open for me, and took a swig. Then I looked at John. “I forgive you,” I said. “I still think you’re an awful person, but I forgive you. I think I actually did a long time ago.”
I smiled at him, and he smiled back. “Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot.”
“Oh,” I added. “No one invited you for Christmas.”
We all laughed. I knew even then it couldn’t be this easy. It would get infinitely more complicated as the months went on. But, for now, I was sitting on the porch in Peachtree Bluff, drinking a beer with my brothers for what must have been the millionth time. I pretended my mom was right inside the kitchen and I had to be ready to hide my bottle behind my chair if I saw her coming toward the door.
I pretended Georgia was nothing more than Jack’s Realtor and nothing was or could be going on with them.
Because, sometimes, the truth, like warm beer, is simply too hard to swallow.
TWENTY-NINE
lost
sloane
After Grammy died, I wallowed and harped on the thoughts that I would never eat her particular cheese straws again or hear her tell my kids a bedtime story. I stayed up too late crying and drinking wine and sharing memories with my sisters. But life dealt her a hand. She played it. And that was something to be terribly grateful for.
Caroline and Mom had the funeral preparations under control, and Emerson, ever the cool, fun aunt, had asked if she and Mark could take the kids to the park. I was going to take her up on the offer, even though the boys would come back sugared up and loaded with any toy or trinket they had even looked at. I was going to have to watch her more closely when they got older and started asking her to sign for their tattoos.
I decided to go to the store to get a little bit of peace and quiet and to do the one thing my mother had asked me to: paint a piece for Jack’s living room.
I had immediately said, “No.”
“But you’re painting again,” she protested. And I was. I had graduated from blacks and grays to some dark blues and greens, as though my emotions were getting slightly less dark but even more complicated.
“Yes, Mom. But those paintings are just for me. They aren’t for the public.”
She had crossed her arms. “Jack is not the public.”
I smiled when she said it. I thought back to my conversation with my sisters on the boat. Mom definitely had the hots for Jack, no matter what she said. I raised my eyebrows at her, and her face turned beet red. Her blush was one of my favorite things about her. I found it so charming.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
When I said no again, she handed me a check. From Jack. For half the money that I wanted to have saved before Adam got home. There was pride. There were standards. And then there was the practical reality that food and clothes and shoes and rent cost money. I snatched the check and said, “It’s a pleasure doing business with you. Any color scheme I should be working around?”
She shook her head. “I’ll design the room around your painting.”
Well, now. That was flattering.
I had told Caroline only weeks earlier that I wasn’t going to paint with people looking at me. But the view from Mom’s store was so gorgeous that I was at the front, painting my little heart out, while Mom’s manager, Leah, waited on a handful of customers. I felt someone looking at me. See? This is why I didn’t paint in public. I looked up and smiled. Not a scary stalker stranger. Just Jack.
“Hi,” he said. “I can’t wait to see it all come together.”
I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I had, for probably a full twenty minutes, forgotten that Adam was gone. In that moment, it all came flooding back to me so harshly it took my breath away.
“Sorry,” Jack said, stepping back as if he had offended me in some way. “I can let you get back to it.”
“No, no!” I said. “That wasn’t about you. It isn’t finished, of course, but I’m kind of liking it.”
It was an abstract piece with shades of green and blue and even a little peach thrown in. There was a section of black and one of white, and I hadn’t consciously created it at all, but when I looked back at my work, I laughed out loud.
“What?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing. It’s just sometimes I get so lost in the work that I don’t realize what it is that I’m doing.”
“Oh.” He looked confused, but he didn’t press. I would explain it to him later.
He crouched down on the floor beside me and picked up a sketch Mom had done in black and white of the living room to give me inspiration. “You’re a pretty talented mother/daughter duo, aren’t you?”
I smiled. “Mom always says I get my artistic ability from my dad.” I paused. “But that’s kind of funny because, I don’t know if you know this, but Caroline and I both came from a sperm donor.”
His expression
