Don't Let Go(22)

Nana Mae snorted, and Becca just looked at me like I’d gone off the deep end. “Thanks.”
“Bec, it’s four o’clock,” I said on a chuckle. “You’ve got eight hours. What on earth are you complaining about?”
She shrugged as she appeared to contemplate that, and then snatched up her bag at the sound of a car horn outside. “Bye, y’all,” she said, giving us both quick head hugs.
“Check in, Becca,” I reminded. “Is your phone charged?”
“Yes,” she called over her shoulder as Harley bounded after her, thinking it was time to go play. “I know, I know, text you so you know I’m not dead—got it. Bye, Mom. Bye, Nana Mae.”
And she was gone.
“It was better in my day,” Nana Mae said, settling back into the couch pillows a little. Her brand-new sneakers glowed as white as her hair against her dark green sweats. “When we’d leave the house, we left the grid. No cell phones to track you down.”
“Same here,” I said. “Although I had neighbors that were more efficient than any electronic device. Still do,” I added, pointing. “Mrs. Mercer next door nearly called the cops the first time Patrick came over on his bike.”
“That’s because Kathleen Mercer sits in her living room bay window with binoculars every day,” Nana Mae said. “I’m always tempted to turn around and moon her when I leave here, just to hear the scream.”
I snickered. “Well, she used to wear out the phone, too. Mom knew every place I stepped a foot in before I ever got home.”
“And you still managed to get yourself in a pickle,” she said. Meeting her look, I felt the pull at my gut. “Knowing my daughter, I’m surprised she ever allowed you to have that boy in your room.”
“Oh, he wasn’t,” I said as Harley came back to stare at the Mud, her big head resting on my knee. I chuckled—maybe a little too bitterly than intended. “Nothing ever happened in this house, I promise you.”
Nana Mae patted my hand. “As I suspect you’ll make sure is the case for Becca as well.”
I paused, caught somewhere between then and now. “Well, yeah. Obviously I hope she isn’t doing anything.”
“And your mother hoped the same thing,” she said. “Just as I did for her.”
I scoffed. “I sincerely doubt my mother ever did anything that scandalous.”
Nana Mae wiped her fingers clean of the sticky chocolate. “Well, no, she didn’t get herself pregnant, if that’s what you mean, but she certainly pushed her boundaries at times.”
Curious. My mother pushing boundaries. “Like?”
“Like sneaking out at night, stealing her daddy’s cigarettes, reading books she wasn’t supposed to read and stashing them under her mattress.” Nana Mae chuckled. “Or carving out old books to hide things like letters from boys—and her daddy’s cigarettes.”
I stared at her in amazement. Those things did not mesh with the woman I knew as my mother. “How have I never heard this before?”
She shrugged. “Never came up before, I guess.”
“And she wasn’t about to tell me,” I said, brushing crumbs into my napkin. I got up to find a ziplock to store the rest of the Mud.
Nana Mae laughed softly as she worked to her feet as well. She scooped up the plate and followed me to the kitchen. “Of course not,” she said. “Would you? Have you?”
I turned from my open cabinet and gave her a look. “No.”
“Okay then, Julianna. Then don’t be so hard on your mother.” She laid her hands flat on the cold granite of the island and clicked her ring against it. “We don’t tell our kids about our questionables, past or present.”
“But you want me to,” I said, setting the ziplock bag down.
Nana Mae picked it up and began moving the pieces of Mud cake inside it. “Only because your past has joined the present, my girl. And Becca deserves not to hear it on the gossip mill.”
I watched her with her old, wrinkled, heavily veined hands placing each piece in carefully. Her nails were still painted perfectly every time I saw her, hair always smooth and tidy. Even in the days surrounding my mother’s passing, she always looked her best, sitting at her daughter’s bedside day and night in full dress and makeup until the advanced cancer took her from us. So much like my mother in those little ways, and a complete opposite in others.
“What do you think Mom would say if she were still here?” I asked.
She didn’t look up, just finished her task. “She’d probably disagree with me,” she said softly. “But she always did have her own mind. Would swear the sky was green just to argue with me.”
“You miss those arguments, don’t you?”
Nana Mae met my eyes with a little wink before she looked away, but I saw the glimmer of emotion first. “Every day.”

? ? ?

“Stop looking at me like that.”
Harley lay curled in a half circle next to my chair as I got ready, her head resting on the bath towel I’d discarded. Her little eyebrows kept alternating up and down as she looked imploringly at me, devastated that I was leaving her alone on a Friday night. After all, I was always the steady one, the home body. It was usually she and I watching Lifetime movies on the couch on Friday nights, while Becca either went out with friends or had them over.
Now, as I sat putting on my makeup with a sulky dog at my feet, I recalled my nights out at her age and took a fearful breath. Not the time to think of those things. I knew what I was doing at seventeen, and it frequently involved steaming up the windows of Noah’s car. But I couldn’t put my indiscretions on Becca. My questionables.