Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(3)

All the prayers in the world can’t bring Mom back, Calla reminds herself, twisting her mother’s emerald bracelet around and around on her wrist.

So in the end, what does it matter? Calla could have gone to church every day of her life, and she’d still be here, standing at her mother’s grave in the wilting humidity of Florida in July. Helpless. Angry. Distraught.

I can’t take much more of this. If this isn’t over soon, I’m going to . . .

I don’t know what. Just lose it.

Oh, Mom . . .

She closes her eyes, hard, and tears roll freely down her cheeks once again, leaving a hot, stinging trail like toxic rain.

What am I going to do without you?

Calla loves her father, of course . . . but how can it be just the two of them from here on in? They’re rarely, if ever, alone together.

Now that’s all they’ll ever be.

What will they do? Or eat? Or say?

It would be easier, Calla thinks irrationally, if her grandmother lived closer.

Never mind that Odelia Lauder, with her rotund figure, dyed-red curls, purple nail polish and matching strands of beads, is a classic whack job—according to pragmatic Mom, anyway.

But at least if Odelia were around, things wouldn’t be so—

Her grandmother abruptly reaches for Calla’s hand and clasps it tightly.

Almost as if she’s just read Calla’s mind.

Which is interesting considering that she’s seen Odelia Lauder exactly twice in the past decade, both brief and awkward encounters at family funerals up north.

Of course, before Mom and Grandma had their final falling out in a highly charged scene Calla dimly recalls from her early childhood, Odelia was a regular fixture in their lives.

She’s always lived back in western New York, in Lily Dale, Mom’s tiny hometown. Calla has never been there. When Calla grew old enough to ask her mother why, she said it was because of the weather.

“It’s always cold and unpredictable and stormy. They get feet and feet of snow.”

“Always?” Calla asked dubiously. “What about summer? Why can’t we go visit then?”

Her mother never had a satisfactory answer for that question.

Odelia used to visit them in Tampa, though. Calla vaguely remembers sitting on her lap reading stories, stringing clay beads, singing funny little songs. But the memories are surreal, almost as if they happened to somebody else.

Kind of like this, today. The funeral.

If only it were happening to somebody else.

Tears spill past the frames of her sunglasses and trickle down her cheeks.

It’s so hot. Everything is ominously still, the sky oppressive. It’s going to storm.

Calla shifts her weight, slips her hand out of her grandmother’s to reach into the pocket of her black skirt for a fresh tissue. Her mother’s black skirt, actually. This is Mom’s suit, one she wears—wore—to her bank job, a well-cut designer crepe in a size 6. Not exactly Calla’s style, but why would she ever own a black suit in the first place? Unlike Lisa, she’s usually in shorts and T-shirts.

Anyway, it fits perfectly. She and her mother have—had— the same long legs, long waist, slim build.

“You look so much like her, Calla. . . .”

How many times has she heard that phrase in these past forty-eight hours?

Not that she hasn’t been hearing it her entire life. Like her mother, she has thick milk-chocolate-colored hair with streaks of lighter brown; wide-set hazel eyes that go green or gray, depending on the day; even a faint patch of freckles on the bridge of her smallish—for her face, anyway—nose.

She looks nothing like her father, who has pitch-black hair and blacker eyes.

Sometimes Dad laughs when people ask if she’s the mailman’s kid. Sometimes he doesn’t. Especially when the person who’s saying it is a guy who’s flirting with Mom.

Flirting.

That makes her think of Kevin. She turns her head, slightly, seeking that familiar sun-streaked mop of hair, those big blue eyes fastened to her from wherever it is that he’s standing.

She does see big blue eyes, filled with tears.

But they belong to his sister, and Lisa isn’t looking at Calla. She’s staring, in sorrowful horror, at the coffin and the grave.

Calla can feel Kevin—or someone else?—watching her intently. The sensation is as palpable as the rolling rumble of thunder in the distance.

She turns again slightly and scans the crowd. There are a bunch of kids here from Shoreside Day School. Like Tiffany Foxwood, who—on the last day of school back in May— snickered when Calla tripped over Nick Rodriguez’s sprawled legs in the cafeteria, almost sending her chef salad flying.

Nick didn’t trip her on purpose. In fact, he said, “Whoa, good save, Delaney.”

But Tiffany, notoriously bitchy, snickered. Right, and here she is now, staring blatantly as if taking notes to report back to her coven. Yeah, you should have seen Calla, she was a mess, no makeup whatsoever, her face was all raw and she never stopped crying, not once. Oh, and she was the one who found her mother, you know. And she didn’t even check for a pulse. She ran screaming into the street like a raving lunatic, and the old guy next door, the one who’s almost deaf, actually heard her and called 911.

The old guy next door is here, too, Mr. Evans, along with a group of elderly neighbors, no strangers to loss themselves at their age. And there are a few teachers from Shoreside: Mr. Hayes and Ms. Valvo and Mrs. Durkin. Dozens of Mom’s coworkers from the bank are here, and a bunch of faculty from the college where Dad is a professor.