Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(5)

But he doesn’t. He says anything.

“If you need anything, I’m around.”

She shrugs. She wants to tell him that she doesn’t need anything. Not from him.

But it would be a lie. And if there’s anything her mother taught her, it was never to lie.

Calla watches Kevin walk away, hands in his pockets and head bowed, to join his parents and Lisa. They get into their white Lexus and drive away. Mrs. Wilson is sitting in the back with Lisa, her arms wrapped around her, comforting her.

For a moment, Calla is so insanely jealous that she feels physically sick.

She wants to be Lisa, wrapped in her mother’s arms.

No, she doesn’t.

She wants to be Calla, wrapped in her own mother’s arms.

She blinks away tears, steps closer to her father, and stares at her mother’s grave.

A shadow falls over the ground in front of her, and she looks up to see a man in sunglasses and a dark suit passing by. His head is bowed in sorrow, and she can’t tell who he is. Just another person who’s mourning Mom. Calla never realized just how many people Stephanie Delaney touched in her life, until she saw the crowd here today.

“So let me know if you want her to come stay,” Uncle Scott is telling Dad as Calla listens idly, her insides twisting in agony. She still feels sick.

What if I throw up?

She supposes it really doesn’t matter now. People have dispersed quickly, running through the rain to their cars.

The cool droplets feel good. . . .

But we shouldn’t be hanging around out here with lightning splitting the sky.

Then again, what does it matter? If she’s struck by lightning, she’ll be with Mom again.

The man passing by the grave raises his dark glasses to his forehead and looks up at the sky. Catching a better glimpse of his face, Calla recognizes him . . . sort of.

Who is he, exactly?

Oh. He’s one of Mom’s coworkers or something. Right. She met him when he stopped by the house one day not long ago to give something to Mom, and Calla answered the door.

His name was Todd. Or Tom. Something like that. She watches dully as he walks away toward the thinning line of cars parked at the edge of the cemetery.

Her father, looking as out of place in his dark suit as Calla feels in hers, removes his wire-rimmed glasses to dab away the tears that seem to just keep coming. “I don’t know, Scott . . . ,” he’s saying. “That would be such an imposition and you guys already have a full house.”

“There’s always room for one more. She can bunk with the girls and help Susie out around the house. She could really use a hand. And you know how the kids love Calla.”

What?

Talk about a lightning bolt. . . .

They’re discussing her?

No. No way.

No way is Calla moving in with her aunt and uncle and their four kids, all under seven years old.

Has her father lost his mind?

Or . . .

Hurt washes over her.

Is he so reluctant to be a single dad that he’s shipping her off to another family?

Numb, she opens her mouth to protest, but she can’t seem to find her voice.

“What do you think, kiddo?” Uncle Scott asks, turning to Calla as a hard lump swells in her throat. “How would you like to spend the rest of the summer in Chicago?”

Just the rest of the summer?

Oh.

Just the rest of the summer.

Okay, but still . . .

“We’re going to California in August,” she reminds her father.

He’s about to start a two-semester sabbatical in the physics department at Shellborne College. At least . . . that was the plan.

Mom, a total workaholic, had even reluctantly arranged to take a few weeks of saved vacation so that she and Calla could spend the remainder of the summer out west with Dad before Calla began her senior year at Shoreside Day in Tampa. Of course, Mom was torn about going away for so long. She kept asking how her office was going to get along without her. Dad’s retort was the same every time: “Well, how am I supposed to get along without you?”

How bittersweet those words are now.

“Calla—” Her father breaks off, looking overwhelmed.

“You rented that place for us near the beach for the month of August,” Calla tells him. Then, seeing the look on his face, she adds in a small voice, “Didn’t you?”

“I did, yes . . . when you and your mom were going to come out with me. But without her . . . it’s expensive, Calla. Really expensive. More than we can afford . . . now.”

“Where are we going to stay, then?” She doesn’t dare allow herself to consider the larger question: What’s going to happen when it’s time for me to go back to Tampa and start school?

“You and your dad need to talk,” Uncle Scott tells her.

“We just . . . we have a lot to figure out,” Dad says, more to Uncle Scott than to her. “It doesn’t have to be today, or even tomorrow.”

“There isn’t much time, Jeff. You have to make a decision.”

“No, I know. I just can’t think straight.”

Calla walks away, her heart pounding. So Dad doesn’t want her to go to California with him now? He’d rather send her off to be Aunt Susie’s summer slave? The cousins are brats, the house is a crumb-and-cat-fur-filled wreck, and where the heck would Calla “bunk,” as her uncle so charmingly put it, in his daughters’ tiny, toy-clogged room?