The time for holding her tongue, hesitating...it was over. She wanted to talk to her daughter.
“I’ve missed so much of it, Lark.”
Lark looked away. “I was going to pull out some of Gram’s boxes in here. I still haven’t found what I want to use. There was a square... It’s in the swatch book. But it doesn’t have a label. It’s this really pretty yellow, and it’s so soft. And I thought... I thought I might want to use that. But I couldn’t find it in the attic.”
“Well, she may have gotten rid of it during one of her purges.”
Lark shook her head. “I just don’t think so. There was something about the quilt that mattered to her. And I think anything that she earmarked for it... It’s been here. Avery even found that diary.”
“I don’t know,” Mary said. “You definitely understand her better than I do.” She stared at her daughter. “Sometimes I think you understand her better than you understand me.”
Lark jerked and looked at her mother. “I don’t, Mom.”
“You had an easy time sitting and talking to my mother. After you quit talking to me.”
There was a ripple in the air between them, and Lark’s brow creased.
“There were things that Gram understood about me,” Lark said. “She was... An artist. And, I know that it’s hard for you that I have that and you don’t. That it’s something I shared with her. But I never needed you to do the same things I did. You always cared about what I made, and that was what mattered.”
Mary could feel the weight of things they hadn’t said to each other before, settling in this room, and she didn’t know where it came from. If it was all that regret from the things she hadn’t said to Addie. All of the air they couldn’t clear, resting here, choking her. There wasn’t room in her throat for it, and more unspoken words.
Her mom wasn’t here.
Lark was.
“Why did you leave? I don’t mean for college. You’ve just been gone for a long time, and you know, I don’t just mean your body.” She looked at her daughter. “It’s something about you.”
“You’ve never asked me before.”
“No, I didn’t. I was afraid, with all of you, that I would ask the wrong questions. I was jealous, Lark, of how my mother understood you all. I felt like I would never be able to connect with you the way she did. I felt like I didn’t learn how. That if she’d taught me I could have been a better mother. I... I shouldn’t have let that stop me. I caused you pain, didn’t I?”
“Mom...” Lark said, pain reflected in her eyes. “There are some things that don’t get better when you talk about them.” She cleared her throat. “Now, I want to dig through those boxes that I found back here.”
She walked away and Mary felt that with it, Lark was taking the chance for them to talk. And it wasn’t on accident.
Lark made her way through the back of the darkened building, into the tiny bedroom that used to belong to Addie Dowell.
Mary had avoided this, and anything like it. She had avoided being around her mother’s things. At least, in this personal sense. She had been to the house, but that house was filled with memories. She had both of her parents there for a time, and then after that, it was where she had grown up with her father. The memories there were layered. The things her mother had stored in the attic were part of other people. Things from the past, and not directly tied to Addie herself. But this room... It was all Addie.
A shoebox full of lipstick, and she knew that every single one was on the red spectrum. She didn’t even have to look.
Bottles of perfume and hairspray, some wigs. All red. It smelled faintly of cigarettes, even though she knew her mother hadn’t smoked in here. It was just... All of her things. There was a tin that had once contained cookies sitting on top of the vanity, and Mary took the lid off of it.
Inside were pieces of broken costume jewelry.
Earrings with no backs, gaudy bracelets that were missing some of their rhinestones. “She probably saved these for projects,” Mary said, sticking her hand into the tin and holding the gems up. “Either that or she just liked them, I guess. She was a magpie.”
She wondered if her mother had worn those to parties.
All the things she’d done during those years that she was away.
Off being a woman instead of a wife.
Instead of a mother.
“I bet she just liked them,” Lark said. “She was... She wasn’t practical. Not at all.”
“I never understood it,” Mary said. “People from her generation, they were supposed to be some kind of sacrificing and self-serving. She never really was. It was like she was lost half the time when she was home, halfway to somewhere else even when she was with us.” Mary shook her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say these things about her to you. You loved her so much.”
“I love you,” Lark said. “That she hurt you hurts me. I think she really did feel bad about it. Later. But, she didn’t know how to tell you about it. How to apologize to you.”
“Did she ever tell you? About the things she did when she was gone?” Mary had never asked. And she’d never be able to now.
Lark shook her head. “Not really. She talked about her red convertible. And sometimes she would talk about having been to this state and that state. And I thought... I thought it was really interesting. And now I’ve kind of done the same thing, I guess. Roaming state to state. Did she tell you?”
Mary shook her head. “I didn’t want to know.”
Part of her regretted it now.
There was a large box at the foot of the bed, that was taped shut. And Mary moved over
