“What? You think I was?”
“I don’t want to upset you.”
“I’m a grown woman. I can handle it.”
“Well, you spent a lot of time together even if you were divorced. The farm, the restaurant. Didn’t you see him almost every day?”
“So? We had a lot of business interests in common.”
“I’m pretty sure he was up at Meadow Sweet a lot more than he was down here in recent months.”
A memory rises, of his mouth kissing a line down the side of my neck to my shoulder. I shake it off. “How do you know that?”
“He told me.” She pours olive oil in a heavy skillet and drops the onions into it. “He said you were pretty wrecked over Maya, and he wanted to help you through it.”
I open the plastic container of basil, take it out, and rinse it. “That part is true to a degree. But he was also having a hard time about it.”
She gives a sharp, humorless laugh. “Of course.”
“What’s on your mind, Rory? Get it out.”
“Nothing. It’s the same story as always—Maya, Maya, Maya. Maya needs rescue. Maya needs nurturing to recover from another injury—her mom or getting left or bombing out of college or whatever.”
“She didn’t bomb out of college.”
“Only because you both ran to her rescue! Bailed her out of jail, right? Pulled strings to keep her from getting expelled?”
I look away. It’s true. She wrecked a car while drunk, and walked away without a scratch, but she was arrested and charged. We bailed her out with cash and lawyers. Another time, she and Josh had such a knock-down, drag-out fight in their on-campus room that they were both nearly expelled. Only the intervention of Augustus, who was on TV a lot through that period, and a generous donation to the scholarship fund kept them in school.
At the time, I really thought it was the influence of Josh that was causing her to drink too much. He was a hard-core partier, and the two of them drank a lot together. He was not a good influence.
After the fight, they settled in and got through the rest of college, then headed off to travel the world and work vineyards and learn more about techniques for making wine, and she entered what seemed to be from a distance one of the better stretches of her life.
I look over my shoulder for little ears. Polly and Emma are absorbed in their game. “I did do all of that, but I was honestly just trying to help her. She’s wounded, Rory, in ways you are not. Children are not equal. You know that.”
“Whatever.” She slams a pot into the sink and begins to run water into it. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I wanted to talk about you, not Maya.”
“We did talk about me.”
“Not enough.” She turns the water off. “I need you to promise me that you’re going to let her do whatever she wants with that baby and you’re just going to support her.”
“Okay!” I lift my hands, palm out. “I promise.”
“And really, you need to back off with her sobriety. Go to Al-Anon, get some tools.”
“How do you know about Al-Anon?”
She takes a breath, lets it go. “I started going to meetings when she went to rehab. She asked me to. But I don’t want you to go to the same meetings as me.”
A flush burns up my neck. “What’s with you two? When did you start to dislike me so much?”
“No one dislikes you. Well, neither of us, anyway. You’re just meddling a lot.”
I stare at her, embarrassed and wounded. Neither of them knows one thing about what I survived to get to this moment, to be the kind of woman I wished I’d had in my own life.
“Well, I guess I’ll stop right now.” I pick up my bag and toss my hair back over my shoulders. “Girls, come give me a kiss. I’m going home.”
“Mom!” Rory says. “You don’t have to leave!”
I hug the little bodies, smelling sweet sweat in their hair. “Be good.”
“We will! Love you, Lala.”
“See you soon,” I say, and kiss Rory’s cheek.
“Mom!”
I raise a hand, shaking my head. “Not now.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Maya
The smell of rain blows in through the open patio doors, but nothing is actually hitting the ground. Virga. The word comes to me from a long-lost science class. An undertone of smoke blows in with the non-rain. I go upstairs and look north and south and east, but the clouds are too low to see the fire.
Cosmo chases behind me, up the stairs, trying to attack my ankles. I grab him and kiss him, burying my face in his soft, thick fur. “You’re a little wild man, aren’t you?” He licks my nose, then takes an experimental nip. Tears spring to my eyes and I hold him away from me. “Ouch. No nose-biting!”