Pausing in her cooking, my mom turned to give me a look. “A mother always worries,” she informed me seriously. “About a million different ways that something could go wrong. It was my job to worry - but not to pass those worries on to you.”
I appreciated that. Mom had never questioned my relationship, had never pointed out that most high school relationships don’t last. If she had, she would have been right, but I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.
“But I could see that Helena was a sweet girl,” she added. “And she was important to you, so I wanted to make her comfortable in our home.”
It was impossible not to smile. Mom had definitely succeeded in making Helena feel comfortable. There was a time when Helena was around our house more than she was at her own house. The thought sent a pang through me. It must have been difficult for Helena to lose my family when we broke up, even if I knew she and mom were still in touch.
“Do you see much of Helena?” I asked and almost laughed at the guilty look on mom’s face. “It’s okay,” I promised. “She told me you give her family recipes,” I teased, before shaking my head. “But really, it is okay. I... all I’ve wanted is for Helena to be happy, even if I haven’t let myself think about whether she was.”
My tone quietened a little. “It’s been strange to see her after all this time,” I admitted. It wasn’t something I would tell anyone else, but this was my mom.
She crossed the kitchen, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “I know, sweetheart,” she assured me. “It was strange for me at first, too. Oh, I’m not saying it’s the same kind of strange - but it was hard to know what to say. I knew that seeing me after the two of you broke up must have been difficult for her, but I wanted her to know she could still talk to me. I didn’t stop being her friend just because I stopped being her mother-in-law-to-be.”
I nodded. Maybe, if Helena and I had both been living in the same place, we would have wanted to stay friends. Neither of us harbored any ill will. At least, I didn’t! And from how Helena treated me now, it seemed like she wanted good things for me.
“We were all a little worried,” Mom admitted. “Me, Pat, your dad. That you’d come home for the wedding and have to be around Helena so much. I was glad you’d met Becca in between. Does that make it a little easier?”
The question made me still. It wasn’t something I had thought about in those terms. Did it make it easier? The relationship between Becca and I had been good but also very different from what Helena and I had shared. It probably did make it easier, just because it allowed me to understand that relationships could be different.
“I think that Becca did make things easier, put it in perspective. Kelly, too.” I’d only dated Kelly for six months. Unlike Becca, mom had never met her. But Kelly had been my first girlfriend after Helena, the first experience I had of dating someone who wasn’t from my high school. She’d been lovely, but perhaps just not quite right for me.
“It’s just weird. Seeing Helena again. It makes... I don’t know. Makes me think a lot about the things that were, you know? Things I haven’t thought about in years.”
Mom hummed. “But don’t you think you’d be thinking about things that were anyway?” she asked. “This is the first time you’ve been home for longer than a week or two. Even if Helena weren’t here, you’d still be seeing the places you grew up, training on your high school ice.”
She had a point. Staying home for this long would have made anyone nostalgic. But thinking about how things were with Helena felt different, in a way I wasn’t sure I could explain.
“Maybe it’s good,” Mom suggested. “Maybe you need to think about these things. Shoving them all out of your mind forever isn’t necessarily ideal.”
I had no idea if mom was right. As a general rule in my life, I assumed that she was. So she was probably right about this, too. It didn’t answer any of my questions. Since most of them were ‘why can’t I stop thinking about it?’, it was unlikely that mom would have answers.
“I’m sure you’re right,” I decided. “It’s just a change, right? But anyway, I have to help Pat with his house, that’s the important thing.” It was, after all, why I’d come home. Not to rekindle anything with Helena. Not that that was what we were doing.
Maybe I just needed to have a good think about what it was that I was doing.
“Tell me about your day instead?” I asked. Mom thankfully knew me well enough to let me change the topic.
Chapter Ten
Helena
Over the next two weeks, Ethan asked me about a hundred questions. What had it been like to go to high school with Sam Levesque? Had I really watched Sam Levesque play hockey right here in Lunengrove? Had Sam Levesque liked comic books when he was Ethan’s age? Who did I think would win in a fight between Sam Levesque and Superman?
It was adorable. And weirdly refreshing. Knowing what our history was, most people didn’t ask me what it had been like to be engaged to a professional hockey player. Ethan knew we’d dated, but he was so young that he didn’t care.
But
