This Place of Wonder (82)

“I’m just worried. I mean, God forbid, but what if you start drinking again, like—”

She has the grace to halt, but I fill in the rest with a sharp twist of bitterness. “Like my mom?” I give her a tight smile. “Maybe you can swoop in and rescue this baby like you did with me, and all will be well.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She ducks her head, and I see that she’s struggling, but enough is enough. “I just want you to be okay. You didn’t even want to take care of a puppy—a baby is a lot more than that. And you don’t have a job—”

“I do, actually.”

“You won’t be able to support a baby on that.”

All the shame that was trying to crowd in back at the doctor’s office now rises up from the swamp where it lives and fills my cells with sneering doom. I look at my hands, at the pink cast, and my fingernails. I think of the empty future and have no idea how I will live in it. I think of my mother, lying on a bed with purple lips, and squeeze my eyes tight.

Rory says, “Mom, can you give us a minute?”

She gets up, shaking her head. “Everything I say is wrong. I’m just going to head home today, get some rest.”

“Just have lunch. Let’s toast the new little one.”

“I’m not in the mood for toasting.” She kisses my head, then Rory’s cheek, and heads out.

When the front door slams, I look at Rory. “What the actual hell?”

“I’m worried about her.” She sits down. “Please don’t take any of it personally. You’re doing great, and I have every faith that you’ll continue to do well.” She covers my hands. “The universe is giving you a brilliant fresh start.”

The voice of my lingering shame points out all the “truths.” “People do relapse.”

“I know. And if you do, we’ll deal with it.” She bends to get me to look her in the eye. “You’re not alone, Maya, okay? I’m here for you, and Nathan, and even Meadow, although she’s losing her mind at the moment.”

“I need to figure out how to set boundaries with her. She’s making me feel like a loser.”

“Maybe you should. I think it’ll get better once everything is settled with Dad and the restaurant and she can get on with her healing.” She blinks and swipes two fingers over her cheek. “All of us can.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s eat. Oh, and I bought you something.” She passes me a present. “Open it!”

It’s so very Rory that she wrapped an impromptu gift. I rip the paper off and find a package of Micron pens, a ribbon-tied stack of square thick paper, and a Zentangle book. “Hey, this is great! Thank you.”

“It’s very peaceful,” she says. “Meditation without having to concentrate so hard.”

The front door opens again, and Meadow slams into the kitchen. She holds her phone aloft. “They released his body.”

“What?” Rory says.

“The coroner,” Meadow clarifies. “They released Augustus’s body to the crematorium. They found no evidence of foul play and think he must have just had heart failure, maybe due to the cancer.” She stands there a minute, staring at us, her finger below her nose.

Rory falls into Meadow’s arms. “Finally.”

I stand, and Meadow holds out her other arm toward me. For a minute, I think I will hug them both, and then I realize it’s not at all what I want. I’m mad at Meadow, and mad at my dad, and there are so many emotions slamming around my body that I just shake my head. “I’ve got to go.”

Rory snags me as I go by, yanking me into the huddle by the back of my shirt. I fall into their bodies, so familiar, and am surrounded by their scents, which mean home and comfort and all the things I really need right now, but I feel strangled by everything else, shame and anger and loss.

“I’m sorry,” I gasp, pulling away. “I have to go.” I head to my car and pull up all the meetings listed online. There’s one that started ten minutes ago just a few blocks away, and I drive there directly, hardly breathing until I sit down in the featureless room. A speaker with a french twist and a cashmere sweater is telling her story.

I lean back and listen, my hand over my abdomen.





Chapter Thirty-Seven


Norah


In the library, I go back to work on tracking down details of Meadow’s teen years. I feel like I’m missing something, right out of the corner of my eye.

It hits me as I look at the yearbook photos again: all this is entirely ordinary history. Why hide it? It makes a nice little Horatio Alger story—the girl from the sticks coming to town and making good. She has made good. I think of the way she looked this morning, a little wild. A little lost.

Wiggling my foot under the table, I go back through my notes. Mom. Dad. Stepdad. High school. Mom dead. Boyfriend. Baby Rory.

What about the boyfriend? I can’t find an obituary for him, or anything more in the yearbooks. But it’s a small town with a small newspaper. Maybe something will be there in the grad pages. I look through the notices but don’t see anything with his name. I keep scrolling through the headlines of the spring, then the summer, looking for . . . I have no idea what. A fire on a farm out in the boonies started a grass fire that hit the ridge and burned for two weeks. A flurry of burglaries. In the fall, the dullest of days—harvest festival, local mayoral election.