A December to Remember (3)

Joe was looking at her like he’d just read a transcript of her thoughts. But he was wise enough to steer the conversation away.

“And your mum?” he asked. “How did she feel about handing you over to your dad for a month every summer?”

“I think she was pleased that I got that quality time with him, even if it was only for a few weeks a year. She used to say she saved up all her boring jobs, like sorting out the accounts and deep cleaning the house, for when I wasn’t there. But she went away too, to visit her sister and see old friends. It was a nice break for her. She was a single working mum; how many get a month off a year?”

“You mean to tell me Verity’s dad doesn’t take her on holidays?” he asked with mock innocence.

Maggie snorted out a laugh and reached across the flowers to swipe at him. She had two children: Patrick, who had turned twenty in the summer, and ten-year-old Verity. Verity’s dad—an attractive, unreliable man with a host of emotional hang-ups—had left the scene before Maggie’s baby bump was even showing. Theirs had been a short-lived relationship of pure convenience. She might have been desperate enough to have sex with him, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think he was partner or parent material. She’d told Joe all this months ago in a “full disclosure” heart-to-heart, which she’d assumed would have him running for the hills. It hadn’t.

“And your mum and Augustus never tried to make it work between them?” Joe asked. “They surely must have thought about it, living in the same village.”

“Mum never really talked about it. I think she came here originally with the intention of them making a go of it. Only when she finally tracked the elusive Augustus North down to Rowan Thorp, by this time eight months pregnant with me, it was clear he was not a man to be tied down.”

“Jesus,” said Joe, and then looked over to the altar and added, “Sorry, your godliness,” before turning back to Maggie. “She must have been gutted.”

She pulled a face. “I honestly don’t think she was that sad about it. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but she got me out of their brief affair, and that was enough. Mum was forty-five when she met Augustus at the Somerset County Fair. She’d given up hope of ever having kids; she’d tried in both her long-term relationships and it simply hadn’t happened. Then suddenly she meets this randy older guy and gets pregnant. She told me once that coming here was like a formality, like she had to at least see if he wanted to do the traditional thing. But he didn’t, and she was okay with that.”

“She stayed here anyway, made a life for you both.”

“She fell in love with Rowan Thorp. It was a great place to bring up a kid. And I think she wanted me to at least have a chance at a relationship with my dad.”

The guilt crept over her like it always did and she breathed deeply in the hope that it would pass. She had been a nightmare teenager, a caged snarling animal, stifled by the tiny village and angry at her mum simply for being her mum. At seventeen she ran away to follow her then childhood sweetheart—it didn’t last long—to Liverpool. As an adult and a parent, Maggie could imagine vividly how frantic her mum must have been. How heartbroken. That was when the first cancer came. She rubbed her hand across her forehead and tried to swallow down the sticky regret that was climbing up her throat.

Joe was there in a second, arms wrapped around her, holding her close. He couldn’t know what she was thinking, but that didn’t matter; he knew enough of her to know that she needed to be held. She let herself melt into him. His steady heartbeat was a map guiding her back to the present, and at the moment she didn’t care if anybody came in and saw them. Joe was her employee and friend; it was perfectly natural that he should comfort her.

“What is it about funerals that thrusts all your previous failings into sharp relief?” she asked, forcing levity into her voice.

“It could be the sudden facing of our own mortality. But it’s more likely the worry about what people will say about us in their eulogies.”

She snuffled a laugh into his jumper.

“I like to think whoever gives mine will let the congregation know that I was really good in the sack,” Joe went on.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to say that kind of thing in church.”

“You did read those condolence cards, right? Pure smut.”

“Yes. They very much embraced the sexual revolution.”

Now it was Joe’s turn to laugh.

She let herself linger just a little longer in his embrace and then pulled away. “Come on,” she said, bending to wiggle a giant bouquet of crimson gladiolus into place. “It’s going to start filling up in here soon. I need to be at the door for the meet and greet.”

“Will Simone and Star help you?”

She puffed out a sarcastic breath. “Like they’ve helped so far?”

“I see your point. I’ll stand with you, then. I know I never met your dad, but you shouldn’t have to shoulder it all on your own.”

As the only one of Augustus’s daughters who lived in Rowan Thorp, it made sense that the bulk of responsibility for dealing with their father’s death and all arrangements thereof had landed with her. Though she suspected that even if she’d lived in the Outer Hebrides, she would still be bearing the largest weight.