“I’m sorry you feel so gross,” I told her. The tennis tournament in Millwood seemed to have taken everything out of her, but she got to witness Rowan win the whole thing, so she was adamant that she didn’t regret going.
She gave a weak smile. “Thanks, Jessi-girl. The company’s not so bad, though.”
I leaned back against the headboard and watched her. Everything about her was tired, from her breathing to the skin under her eyes to the sound of her voice, but she seemed to feel that acknowledging it meant yielding to it.
“So,” she said. “How are things going with my firstborn?’
I struggled to fight my grin, and Mel laughed.
“That good, huh?”
“Is it weird?” I asked, turning so I was facing her.
“You want me to be completely honest?” she asked, and I nodded. “I’m not the least bit surprised. I saw it coming a mile away from both sides.”
“Both sides?” I repeated. Okay, I had been more than obvious about my crush, but I wondered what hints Luke could possibly have given his mom that he had feelings for me.
“You know I’m a hopeless romantic, so it was hard not to try to play Cupid,” she said. “But I tried as hard as I could to stay neutral, not to push or pull in any direction, and let you figure it out on your own ... The thing I cared most about—the thing Icaremost about—is that you are safe and that nobody gets hurt.”
We were silent for a moment, and then she said, “I’m glad you’re happy.”
“I am,” I said. “I just feel like I don’t see him enough.”
Mel snorted. “When Gary and I started dating, I was off in Hungary on an exchange program and he was starting medical school in Michigan. There was no FaceTime, no WiFi. It was snail mail and calling collect in some kitschy European phone booth. That’s what I call not seeing each other.”
And look how that turned out,I thought but didn’t say.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” she said now.
“Okay.”
“I worry so much about what will happen to Luke and Rowan when I’m gone.” Her voice was soft and sad in the dark room. “I worry about you, too.”
“They’ll be okay,” I said over the lump in my throat. “We’ll be okay.”
It was a flat-out lie. How would we survive without Mel’s advice, without her warmth and her baking and her unconditional love? The answer, I was afraid, was that we wouldn’t. That somehow without her holding us together, we would crumble and fall apart.
“I worry about Luke,” Mel said.
“Luke?” I repeated. “Ro has been kind of a mess.”
“Isn’t he always, though?” she whispered conspiratorially, and we laughed. “No, I absolutely worry about Ro, but Luke scares me. He bottles everything up and carries the world on his shoulders, and my fear is that one day it’ll all suddenly get too much for him. Ro—he acts out and makes bad choices, but you always know how he feels. There are no secrets.”
It was a complete one-eighty on the way I had been seeing things. As far as I was concerned, Ro was the one who seemed ready to explode at a moment’s notice. Ro was liable to make bad decisions and date the wrong girls and lose the tennis scholarship he’d worked so hard for all his life. Luke was ... Luke. Calm, collected, dependable. Sad for his mother, for sure. Afraid of losing her. But strong.
The realization that we couldn’t both be right scared me. Either Mel—whose eyes always saw more than I imagined they could—was wrong, or I didn’t know Luke as well as I thought I did.
“I wish they were closer to their father,” Mel said now. “I think I made the mistake of letting my feelings about him trickle down to them. When it’s just you, you forget sometimes that your kids are not your friends, they’re not your therapist, not your doctor. They are just kids who will one day have their own view on the world, with or without your input.”
Mel’s words reminded me of what Luke had said a couple of weeks earlier about the way his mother had handled the divorce. I cringed now at the way I’d defended her. My blind devotion to her hadn’t allowed me to even consider that he might have been right. But now here she was saying the very same thing.
“Gary went to see Luke last week,” I said, hoping that would make her feel better. I wondered belatedly whether Luke had mentioned it to his mom. Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut sometimes?
“I know,” she said, to my relief. “He’s so secretive, though. You ask him how it went, and all he’ll say is ‘Fine.’” Mel sighed. “I swear, I got a big mouth as compensation for the fact that I’d have two boys and they would never say a word to me.”
I smiled at her. “They love you.”
“I know that too,” she said, looking at me with a serious expression. “I would never ask you to look after them—that would be so incredibly unfair to you.”
