It’s been over a month now since I’ve heard from Gavin. It’s better that way, I tell myself. Annie and I are just finding our footing again. She’s just beginning to trust me. I can’t bring a man into that mix, not now. I want her to know that she will always come first.
Alain tries to talk to me about this on the last day of Hanukkah, the day before he returns to Paris, but he doesn’t understand.
“Gavin cares for you,” Alain tells me. “He helped you find me, and Jacob. He has been kind to your daughter. He did not have to do those things.”
“I know,” I reply. “He’s a wonderful guy. But we’re fine without him.”
“I know. But do you want to be without him?” Alain asks, looking at me carefully in a manner that assures me he already knows the answer.
I shrug. “I don’t need anyone. I never have.”
“We all need people who love us,” Alain says.
“I have Annie,” I reply.
“And me,” he says with a smile.
I smile back. “I know.”
“Do you not believe in love?” he asks after a long pause. “Did you not see it, plain as day, between your grandmother and Jacob?”
I merely shrug in reply.
The truth, which I cannot explain to Alain, is that I do believe in love now, the kind of love that can exist between a man and a woman. I have Mamie to thank for that, and I will forever be grateful, because it is a lesson I never expected to learn. I suppose I am my mother’s daughter in that way.
But my heart is as surrounded by ice as the bird feeder that has frozen solid on our back porch. Just because love exists does not mean that I am capable of it. Sometimes, in the darkness of night, I wonder whether I’m even capable of loving Annie in the right way or whether I’ve forever inherited my mother’s coldness. Annie is my child, and I know I would lay down my life for her in a heartbeat, or give up anything in my own life to make her life better, but is that love? I have no way of knowing. And if I can’t be sure of my ability to love my daughter the right way, how could I possibly believe I could love someone else?
Besides, it seems to me that Mamie hung on to her love for Jacob like a rope that could save her from drowning. But over the years, the rope that saved her became a noose that tightened more and more with each passing year. I’m afraid that’s what love can turn into, if you let it.
Gavin was right; there are layers upon layers of defenses surrounding my heart, and I don’t know how someone could get past them. I don’t believe anymore that there’s anyone out there willing to try. It only took one conversation to push Gavin away, and he disappeared entirely, proving to me that he’d never really cared that much in the first place. How foolish I was to think any differently. How foolish that this breaks my heart.
On December 30, the day after Alain has left to return to Paris, Annie appears at the door to the bakery at two in the afternoon, when she should be home, hanging out with her friend Donna, whose mother had agreed the girls were old enough to be trusted alone in my house for a few hours.
“Is everything okay?” I ask instantly. “Where’s Donna?”
“She went home.” Annie smiles. “You got a call.”
“From who?”
“From Mr. Evans,” she says, naming the town’s only estate attorney. “Mamie left a will.”
I shake my head. “No, that’s not right. We would have known about it already. Mamie died last month.”
Annie tilts her head to the side. “So I’m lying now?” I open my mouth to reply, but she keeps going. “He said that, like, Mamie didn’t want him to call you ’til December 30, ’cause there’s some letter she didn’t want you to have ’til New Year’s Eve.”
I stare at my daughter. “You’re kidding.”
Annie shrugs. “That’s what Mr. Evans says. Call him if you don’t believe me.”
So I call Thom Evans, one of the many men in town who’d dated my mother on and off when I was a kid, and he tells me in his stiff, careful tone that yes, there is a will, and yes, there is a letter, and I can come over any time the next day to pick them up, even though it’s a Saturday, and a holiday to boot. “The law never sleeps,” he tells me, which makes me have to stifle a laugh, because the whole town knows that if you stop by Thom Evans’s office, you’re as likely to find him passed out at his desk with a bottle of scotch in his hand as you are to find him actually working.