The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(85)

“She didn’t even respond. Don’t worry.”

Kay reluctantly suggested they cancel the girls’ getaway plans, but neither of them wanted to.

“We’re doing it, and you’re coming, too, Kay,” Elena said firmly, pulling out her phone. “Here, let’s get online and find you a plane ticket.”

“I don’t know. I’m not crazy about flying. I haven’t even been on a plane in years,” she confessed.

“I used to be a nervous flier,” Landry said. “Before cancer. But now I always think that if the plane crashes, well . . .” She shrugged. “It’s out of my hands.”

“And there are worse ways to go,” Elena added. “In a plane crash, you’re there one minute, gone the next. It’s not death that scares me. It’s dying.”

Kay told her that she feels exactly the same way.

Then she found herself remembering her mother’s final tortured weeks on this earth—not to mention the agonizing final blog posts from Whoa Nellie and others who had gone down that terminal road. And Meredith’s trepidation as she faced the final stages of her disease.

Meredith was terrified over the prospect of what might lie ahead. She didn’t want to go through that; didn’t want to put her family through it.

I’ve always been the kind of person, she wrote to Kay, who likes to get the first flight out the morning a vacation ends. Once I know it’s over and I have to go, I just want to go. Get it over with. It was like that when we left our kids off at college, too. No long, drawn-out good-byes for me. I couldn’t stand it. Years later the kids told me they were surprised I didn’t leave skid marks getting out of there, while all the other parents were lingering. Of course, they didn’t understand that it was because I loved them too much—not that I didn’t love them enough.

Thinking of her own mother, Kay wanted to tell Meredith that she knew all about not loving someone enough, both on the receiving end and on the giving end. But she didn’t say it.

She didn’t like to talk about her mother ever, not even with Meredith.

Despite her earlier exhaustion—when she didn’t know how she was going to keep her eyes open until sundown—Beck has yet to fall asleep. Now the sun is coming up again, casting rosy shadows through the crack in the sunshine-and-sky-colored curtains her mother hung at her bedroom windows the spring before she left for college. Cheerful curtains, Mom called them.

“I feel so bad we couldn’t afford to buy them until now,” she said. “You can take them with you, and the new bedspread, too, for your dorm room when you leave.”

“No,” Beck said. “They belong here, for when I come home.”

Home . . .

She’d never considered the concept before—never realized that home was less about the place than it was about people in it. Without Mom here, home has become just a house.

Now just she and her father are left to rattle around in it. Her brothers and their families left even before some of the postfuneral crowd did, but she, of course, is stuck here. She can’t leave Dad alone, and even if someone else were willing to stay with him—

Where would I go?

The house she shares with Keith is no longer home either.

I have no home.

What now?

Dad will sell the house. He’ll need a place to live. So will she. But not here, in Cincinnati. It would be too far a commute to her job in Lexington.

Anyway, there’s nothing really keeping Dad here now that Mom is gone. He doesn’t even have a job.

Maybe he’ll want to make a fresh start someplace new . . .

But . . .

All alone?

Will he be alone?

Thoughts of what might possibly happen next for him—for all of them—continue to spiral in Beck’s head until at last she gets out of bed, too depleted to lie here for another moment listening to the morning birds and the patio wind chimes tinkling gently below, stirred by a warm morning breeze that tickles the cheerful drapes.

Opening her bedroom door, she half expects to smell coffee brewing and hear pots and pans clattering in the kitchen. Mom always liked to make pancakes for breakfast on Sunday mornings. Even later, especially when the grandkids slept over. She liked to play restaurant with them the way she did with Beck and her brothers when they were little.

They got such a kick out of the way she’d pretend to be a waitress taking their orders, and would dream up all kinds of crazy things—beef-’n’-booger surprise was one of Beck’s brothers’ favorites, and now it’s her nephews’, too.

No matter what the kids would try to order, though, Mom would say, “One stinkerdoodle special, coming right up!”

Then she’d bring them a plate filled with pancakes that had smiley faces made out of chocolate chips or raisins.

On this Sunday morning, there are no pancakes on the griddle and there’s no coffee wafting in the air.

The house creeps with silent shadows as Beck descends to the first floor, on tiptoe in the hope that her father is still asleep on his recliner in the den.

He isn’t, though.

The door is ajar and the lamp is on; when she peeks in to check on him, she sees him sitting at his desk in front of the computer.

“Dad?”

He jumps, cries out.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing?”