The Last of the Moon Girls(61)

She looked up, fixing him with a withering stare. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about this.” He waved an arm, indicating the scorched ground and blackened trees. “Evvie gave me the Reader’s Digest version while we were in the garden. I assumed you’d fill in the blanks at dinner, but you didn’t say a word.”

“Sorry, I was a little busy. Some guy decided to drop my mother on my doorstep without warning.”

Andrew sighed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “What was I supposed to do, Lizzy? Let her keep walking? She would have gotten here eventually. You realize that, right?”

“That isn’t the point.”

“It is, actually. She’s not some drifter I just picked up. She’s your mother.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Okay. Okay. There’s some bad blood between you two. I get it. I also get that this isn’t really any of my business, but at the risk of stepping over the line, maybe it’s time to work through your issues. For Althea’s sake, if nothing else. She’d want the two of you to work things out.”

“How would you know?”

“Because we talked.”

Lizzy’s eyes narrowed. “About me?”

Andrew suppressed a wince. He hadn’t intended to mention his conversations with Althea. Especially the one they’d had about Lizzy’s tortured relationship with her mother. He’d known instinctively that she wouldn’t appreciate being discussed, even by her grandmother, but he’d opened the door now, and maybe it was time.

“Yes,” he said carefully. “Sometimes we talked about you. We talked about Rhanna once too. About what happened before she left, and the effect it had on you. She made a lot of messes, that’s for sure, but she did come back. That’s got to mean something. Maybe she wants another chance. And maybe deep down you want to give her one.”

Lizzy cut her eyes at him. “The only thing I want to give Rhanna is a ticket back to wherever she came from. Don’t look at me like that. You know what she’s like. You saw her that night in the fountain, making a spectacle of herself. That’s who you picked up and brought here.”

Andrew blew out a sigh. Yes, he’d seen her. Half the town had seen her. And the half that hadn’t seen her had certainly heard all about it. And about every other damn thing she’d ever done. But he’d also seen Lizzy’s face when Rhanna stepped out of his truck, that instant of recognition, of relief, before she’d retreated behind her outrage, and he couldn’t help wondering if all that anger was masking something deeper, something she wasn’t willing to acknowledge—pain. The kind people lived with when their hearts had been broken. Yes, there was history, and, no, he didn’t know all of it, but surely thumbing three thousand miles across the country—even for a self-professed gypsy—counted for something.

“Maybe she isn’t that woman anymore,” he said quietly. “Maybe she’s changed. People do, you know?”

Lizzy cocked an eye at him. There was a smear of soot on her right cheek, like an angry bruise. “She just hitchhiked across the country with a knapsack and a guitar. She had to sell her van to pay off some debts. She tells fortunes and crashes on couches. Does it sound like she’s changed to you?”

“I think it’s too early to tell. And she is here. I know you have every right to be angry, but I also know you’re not the kind of person who could just toss her mother into the street. For starters, she’s broke. And this is her home. She came home, Lizzy.”

Lizzy kept her eyes on the ground as she scraped a streak in the soot with her bootheel. “She gave up the right to call this home a long time ago. And she’s never been my mother. She had me when she was sixteen and handed me over to Althea before the midwife was done cleaning her up. We shared a house, toothpaste, shampoo. We were never mother and daughter.”

“Maybe she thought she was doing what was best for you.”

“Now you sound like her.”

Andrew shrugged. He was annoying her now, and that wasn’t why he’d come. He dropped down beside her, picked up a stick, and began to trace a circle in the ash. After all these years she was still an enigma, a puzzle he felt driven to solve.

“That bit before,” he said finally. “About the dream. You asked how she knew Althea was dead and she said she had a dream. What did she mean?”

Lizzy’s eyes slid away. “Nothing. She didn’t mean anything. She just says things.”

“I saw your face when she said it, Lizzy. It wasn’t nothing.”

He could see the wheels turning as she weighed her response, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Finally, she looked at him squarely. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

The question caught him off guard, or maybe it was the way she’d asked it, as if she were testing him. “If you mean do I think some part of us remains after we die, then yes, I guess I do. For a while, after my father died, I used to think I could hear him up in his room, crinkling the pages of his newspaper.”

“You don’t think it’s just wishful thinking?”

He took his time with this one, sensing a new and more critical test. “I don’t,” he said at last. “I think most of us leave this world with unfinished business. Things we never said, chances we never took, wrongs we never righted. Maybe they keep us here. Like Jacob Marley and his chains, we’re tied to this world by our regrets. We can’t move on until we’ve cleaned them up, or at least made our peace with them.”