Babs smiled tightly. “I’d like a picture of you and Julia in the courtyard, please.”
Everyone followed Babs outside, including Mom. “Meredith, sugar, your hair needs a little touch-up in the back,” Babs said.
Mom rolled her eyes. “Goodness gracious. I knew it!”
Sarah and I locked eyes, and without a word, I knew she understood what was about to happen. Mom turned back into the church, and Babs turned to me. “Run!”
With no further instruction, the three of us took off through the parking lot, running toward Babs’s Cadillac. Sarah helped me stuff my giant dress in the back seat of the getaway car while Babs leaped in front. And though I’d been conflicted, the moment we pulled out I felt like I’d dodged a bullet.
It was only then that something hit me. I said: “Who in the world could have sent that video?”
Maybe they did it out of malice. Maybe they did it out of kindness. Either way, whoever sent that video might have just saved me from making the biggest mistake of my life.
BABS Cattle Prod
Present Day
I can’t explain exactly when or how it happens, only that it does. At some point over the years, our children suddenly decide that they have free rein to parent us. It starts slowly. A comment here, a suggestion there. And then they take over, fully and completely, as though you didn’t do a perfectly fine job raising them in the first place.
So here I was, in my own living room with its stunning view of the ocean, among my inherited furniture and knickknacks and whatnots, sipping tea that my daughter had made me not as a peace offering but as a trap. I would never walk away and leave a perfectly good cup of tea, which she well knew. She stopped pacing by the fireplace and glared at me. “What were you thinking?”
It had only been two days since my granddaughter had become a runaway bride, so maybe I should have been easier on my daughter. Even still, I didn’t want to play into the ruse that I was the child and she was the mother here, but I couldn’t quite help myself from saying, with the attitude and intention of a teenager, “I don’t know, Meredith, perhaps I didn’t want my granddaughter to be unhappy for the rest of her natural life?”
It couldn’t help but make me think of my late husband, Reid. And thinking of him, as I did no less than a thousand times a day, sent a shot right through my heart. It had been nearly fourteen months since he’d passed. And, yes, I could get out of bed now—not our bed, obviously, where I was certain I would never sleep again—but the guest bedroom bed, anyway. I could go to bridge club or book club, sit in the living room with the latest Reader’s Digest, even though Reid wasn’t sitting in his hideous recliner, reading a book a few feet from me. But I would not stop loving him until my dying breath. He was my one and only, my true love, so I meant it when I said, “Meredith, I think my granddaughter deserves eternal happiness. Forgive me for being so selfish.”
She sighed. “Mother, I know that you and Daddy had a fairy tale, okay? I get it. I understand. But not everyone is whisked away by the love of her life and spends sixty years swooning. Not everyone gets that.”
“Well, they should,” I said.
My daughter was pacing again now, her shoulder-length hair tied back with a ribbon, elegant and graceful in a pair of cigarette-legged black pants that made her seem slightly taller than her five feet five inches. She was a pretty little girl who had grown into a lovely woman. Both my girls had. They had the same long, slender neck and womanly figure. Meredith and Alice, my green-eyed beauties. They had brought Reid and me so much joy.
“Sweetheart, don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, knowing she was guaranteed to take what I said next the wrong way. “But it has broken my heart to see you so unhappy. It has nearly undone me.”
“I’m not unhappy,” she spat, stopping her pacing.
I put my hands up in defense. “Far be it from me to tell you what you are, but Meredith, you have been separated twice in the last decade. You certainly aren’t blissful.”
She sighed and looked at me wearily. “But we’re together now. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Yes, Allen and I have had our share of problems. But we love each other, and we have worked them out.”
I nodded. “I respect you for that more than words can say. But I will be very clear in that I do not wish that same fate for your daughter.”
Surely she didn’t, did she?
Meredith finally sat down beside me on the long sofa, upholstered in a seashell print that she hated. She wouldn’t have to hate it much longer. “Mother, you drove the getaway car? What message does that send?”
I set my teacup down on the end table and crossed my arms. I tried to look indignant even though I knew some of the culpability for this was mine. Just not in exactly the way Meredith believed. “It sends the message that I love my granddaughter more than I love my reputation. It sends the message that I prioritize her happiness over everything else. What message does it send that you told her she would never find anyone as good as Hayes?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know how she is, Mother. That girl is flakier than a biscuit. Hayes is strong and steady. She can’t take care of herself. She needs him.”
It wasn’t wholly untrue that my granddaughter relied on her fiancé quite a bit. Especially once she, with no explanation, had left architecture school. That little girl who had been carrying around graph paper notebooks and sketching since she was six years old had suddenly quit. Just like that. When she was only months away from finishing her fifth-year professional degree, from sitting for her licensure exam, from achieving her dreams.
“Meredith, you have to know what happened. You have to,” I said. I picked my teacup back up, the china still smooth and delicate after all these years, and took a sip, inhaling the scent of spicy cinnamon as I did.
She rolled her eyes again. Ah, now we were back to mother and child. “If I knew, don’t you think I would have fixed it? Do you know what it took for Allen and me to scrimp and save and get her through college? And I cringe to think that she’s paying student loans for two semesters of graduate school that she didn’t even finish. And now that she isn’t going to be living with Hayes, that he isn’t going to be there to support her—what in the world will she do?”
I guessed that was the silver lining. “Well, she’ll have to learn how to take care of herself. It’s a lesson we all must learn, and believe you me, the older you get, the harder it is.”
I’d like to say that I could have taken care of myself long before now, long before I was this woman of eighty who felt afraid living alone in her own home. I wrapped my hands around the cup, the warmth feeling good on my tired fingers.
“But she always goes back to him, Mom. Always. And, yes, it’s no secret that I have been happy about that in the past. I love Hayes. So sue me. But at this point, she’s dug a hole so deep that it isn’t only that she loves him. She needs him, in the most practical way.”
I was from a different time. I was a woman who had raised her children and relied on her husband for the rest, so I wouldn’t necessarily disparage Julia’s choice if I had believed it was what she wanted—which I did not. But the problem was much larger. “He cheated on her, Meredith. They aren’t even married.”