Sweet Forty-Two(65)

“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “It was a little jarring, obviously, since I haven’t had that many people in my place, like, ever, and certainly not for anything so emotional.”

“Do you always keep to yourself because of your mom?” His question was as direct as his eyes were. Unflinching. Bold.

“It’s not really like that.” I shifted in my seat, picking up the crumbs one by one and placing them on an empty cupcake wrapper.

“What’s it like then?”

My eyes shot up. “What’s with the inquisition, Regan?” I stood, but he lurched across the table, capturing my hand.

“Sorry. Please sit?”

I sat, but only because I swear I could hear a flicker of Irish accent in his voice, and I wanted to hear it again.

“Let me try this again.” He cleared his throat. “What I meant to say was thank you for being so cool. Upstairs with Bo and Ember, and earlier today with me.”

A few seconds ago I was uncomfortable with what seemed to be an interrogation, but that swiftly morphed into me viewing his own uneasiness. Then I felt like a giant ass for assuming it was about me at all. Regan picked at something invisible on the table, looking down, and lost again.

I put my hand on his to stop the maddening noise. “Hey, it’s okay. She was clearly really special. Rae, I mean.”

He released half his mouth into a smile. I needed to give him more.

“Tell me about her.”

He looked up, seemingly startled. “Really?”

I nodded. “Really.”

For the next several minutes, Regan told me the story of his star-crossed romance with Rae Cavanaugh. He had a dumbstruck grin on his face, but the wear around his eyes highlighted the unhappy ending that awaited me. I always read the last page of books first, anyway; it gives more guts to the story. It was no different here. Knowing the ending made Regan’s smiles brighter. Tragedy has a way of amplifying the good and smudging the bad. When he finished the story of his spunky, tough as nails girlfriend, he sat back and took a weary breath.

“I like her,” I whispered.

“I loved her. And,” he cleared his throat but that did nothing to stop the tremble in his voice, “I never told her.”

Regret is ugly. A pus-filled boil ready to break open on the face of your soul. As soon as I saw it forming, I stood. “Come to the kitchen with me. I need your help for the stuff I’m sending with you to the studio tomorrow.”

“Really?” His eyes lit up and the boil faded into hiding.

“Really.” I chuckled, mocking our identical conversation from minutes before.

Tomorrow I would tell Regan anything he wanted to know, because I knew he wouldn’t forget to ask. For tonight, though, I’d let us get lost in the sweet escape of this confectioner’s wonderland. A place where nothing was sour.





Georgia

Regan and I had stayed up well past midnight making a mix of cookies, cupcakes, and muffins for him to bring to Blue Seed Studios with him the next day. While he’d seemed excited at the prospect of helping me, we completed the project in near silence. It wasn’t heavy, by any means. It was more meditative. We didn’t ask questions of one another; rather, we just seemed to enjoy the company and the silence.

I’d received a text message from my mother, reminding me to pick her up at ten in the morning to take her to her first ECT treatment. Regan asked what was wrong when he saw me check my phone, but I brushed it off as nothing. Just work, I’d told him, making sure I was okay. It was a small lie, but we’d had so much heavy crammed into one day, I wanted to spare us both from the “mom getting her brain electrocuted” conversation.

Once the goods were done, cooled, and wrapped, I sent Regan back to his apartment with bags filled to the top and I sank myself into a restless sleep.

The truth is I’d spent several days trolling the Internet for information on the effectiveness of Electroconvulsive Therapy. As I sifted through the horror stories and testimonies of support, I learned that the treatment had come a long way since the days of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the reality was—my mother was the perfect candidate.

Years of successful pharmaceutical and talk therapies carried her this far, and there was literally nothing left to try on those two fronts. With the ECT she even had a chance of lessening the medication she was on. She also had a chance of forgetting large chunks of her life. Typically, the risk of memory loss surrounded the days and weeks preceding the treatment, but risks of darker holes in memory remained.

Frankly, I wouldn’t blame my mother if she welcomed some of that memory erasing power. There were some hard years that dotted the score of her life like bullet holes. As I drove my mother to her appointment, I felt myself hanging onto every word she said as if I were the one at risk of forgetting everything. I couldn’t figure out why I wanted to hang on to any of it, though.

“Georgia,” my mom cooed from the passenger seat. She always had a therapist voice. Sing-songy and soft. Like a blanket.

“Sorry, I was just daydreaming.”

“About that boy?”

“What boy?” I asked out of procedure more than necessity.

“The one with the penny-colored hair.”

“Copper.”

She rolled her eyes. “Same thing.”