Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(6)

And what about September? What then?

Miserable, she crouches beside her mother’s grave as fat raindrops plop into the sandy soil heaped beside it. She reaches blindly for a handful and sprinkles it over the wet white coffin.

“Good-bye, Mommy,” she whispers.

At that moment, the loose clasp on the emerald bracelet releases.

Calla gasps, helplessly watching as it falls into the gaping hole, like it’s determined to go with its rightful owner.

She and her mother had a fight not long ago about Calla’s borrowing the coveted bracelet without asking. Mom said the clasp was loose and she was bound to lose it. Then Kevin broke up with her, and Mom, feeling sorry for her, gave her the bracelet.

“It’s yours to keep,” she said, hugging Calla. “I know it’s just jewelry. It won’t heal a broken heart, but it might make you feel better for a couple of minutes.”

It did.

Now, Calla searches for the bracelet in the shadowed depths of the grave.

“Come on, honey.” Her father is behind her, tugging her arm. “Get up. Let’s go.”

“But . . .”

“Calla, she isn’t in there. Not really. Don’t you remember what we talked about when we saw her at the funeral home?”

Yes. Of course she remembers.

She’ll never forget the macabre sight of her mother’s corpse in the open casket . . . or the startlingly cold, unyielding feel of her flesh beneath Calla’s lips when she kissed her good-bye one last time before they closed the lid.

“You have to let go now, honey,” her father says. “Come on.”

“I know, but . . . my bracelet.”

“What?” her father asks, and his voice is choked with grief, his face ravaged by it.

“Never mind,” Calla says softly, taking his hand as they walk through the falling rain toward the waiting limo.





TWO

“This is absolutely crazy,” Jeff Delaney mutters, pacing a short distance through the crowded gate area to check the Departures screen for the third time in as many minutes.

“Dad, planes are delayed all the time,” Calla reminds him, scrolling through the playlist on her iPod again as he plops restlessly beside her. “And it’s only by a half hour, which is actually not all that crazy. I’ve heard of people being stuck in airports for—”

“No, not the delay. I mean . . . this.” He waves his hand in her general direction.

“I’m crazy?”

“No, I’m crazy for sending you a thousand miles away for so long.”

“It’s only for a couple of weeks, really.” Three, to be exact. By Labor Day, Calla will join him out west as the new kid in some school she’s never even heard of.

A short time ago, that would have been a fate worse than . . .

No. No fate is worse than what she’s just been through. She knows that now.

“What was I thinking?” Dad shakes his head.

“You were thinking logically,” she assures him, tucking the iPod into her pocket. “You were thinking that I can’t come with you now because you’ll be too busy getting settled, and there’s nowhere for me to even stay with you.”

The beach house is history. He’ll sleep on a friend’s pullout couch in a cramped condo until he finds an affordable place to rent in a good school district starting in September. Public school—not private, like Shoreside. He seems much more worried about money now than he did before Mom died. Calla figures their finances are pretty dire without Mom’s salary or even a life insurance policy. She overheard Dad say that Mom didn’t have one. When Calla asked about money, he said they’ll be fine, that they’ll have more than enough. Somehow, she doubts that.

He needs a haircut, Calla notices as she watches him rake a hand through his shaggy black hair. That was Mom’s department—along with his wardrobe. She had planned to go shopping to buy him some decent clothes for the sabbatical. She wanted him to get contact lenses, too. She thought the glasses made him look too “professorish,” as she said.

“I am a professor,” Dad protested, more than once . . . because she said it pretty frequently.

Mom is—was—big on appearances. That was why she talked Dad into moving, a few years back, from their bungalow in the historic district to a nice new home off Westshore. Dad said they couldn’t afford it. Mom said they could. She won that argument. She usually did.

Not that she had to have the most expensive designer clothes or extravagant jewelry, but she liked to be well put together, and she expected Calla and her father to follow suit.

Which was fine—at least, for Calla. Why argue with a mother who enjoyed taking you shopping for hours on end?

But Dad . . . well, he was the kind of man who would— and once did—absentmindedly walk out the front door wearing only boxer shorts.

He still is that kind of man, Calla reminds herself now.

Dad = present tense; Mom = past. You’d think that after a few weeks, she’d have her tenses straight.

Yeah, well, this isn’t an English test. It’s Calla’s life, sad as it is. A life that’s about to take yet another dramatic turn. At least this is one she instigated herself. With a little help from her grandmother. Which is where the “crazy” part comes in.