Page 74 of Hard to Score

He stops in front of a driveway and takes our hands and lifts them to point at the house in front of us. It’s a gray clapboard with white trim. There are beach cruisers out front and an American flag waving from atop the apex of the garage’s front.

It looks like idyllic, middle America somewhere with its green grass and overflowing flowerbeds.

“Do you remember this place?” he asks.

I shake my head and then stop as I realize this was the house we used to stay in. The Kincades stayed in this one and the Bowmans in the matching blue one right beside it.

“Why do I remember it feeling so much bigger? Being so much farther out of town?” I murmur as I take it all in. Memories flood all at once. Drew chasing Dekker through the front yard with the hose. Maggs and I drawing a chalk hopscotch on the driveway. The joint dock that stretched out toward the lake that served anything from being a performance space to a fishing hole to a raceway.

“Because we were little and everything seemed big back then. Add to that, the town’s grown so what felt like the outskirts is now the middle of the town.” He pulls me against his side and presses a kiss to the crown of my head, as the two of us stare like idiots at a welcome piece of our childhood in front of us. “But the houses still look the same.”

“They do.”

“C’mon,” he says. “Let’s see if it’s still there.”

“If what’s still there?”

He tugs on my hand for me to follow. “We’re trespassing. Drew. We’re going to get into trouble.” He just laughs and slows his stride when we hit the side of the house. “What are we doing?” I ask in a harsh whisper.

“It’s still there,” he murmurs, as he squats down and brushes something off the concrete that I can’t see.

“What is?” I ask.

“I thought you might like to see this.”

And when he moves his hand, I can’t help the sound that comes from my mouth or my immediate reaction to drop to my knees and touch it.

There in the concrete are five sets of handprints—one big, four little—all with initials carved into the center of them.

But there’s only one set I reach out to touch. There’s only one set with the initials CK in the center. Claire Kincade. My mother. Tears well and spill over as I put my hands on my mother’s. As I find a connection with her that I didn’t realize I so desperately needed.

And I welcome the onslaught of fond memories—joy meshed with sorrow, longing, and heartache—on the side of someone’s house where there is laughter somewhere inside. I also notice how my hands are the same size as hers.

I stare through the blur of tears, unable to tear my eyes away from the sight of her holding my hands. The mom I miss so desperately and yet in this moment, feel a little closer to.

Drew’s hand rubs up and down my back in support as he sits beside me in silence, allowing me to have a moment I never even knew existed.

He gives me as much time as I need, letting my muted sobs turn into hitched breaths, then into appreciative silence.

“Thank you,” I whisper as I rest my head on his shoulder.

“No need to thank me. I thought it might be something you’d want to see.”

“How did you even remember this? I didn’t.”

But I do now. How the owners poured concrete and we all waited until the workers left for lunch before running out and sinking our hands into the slowly-drying slab.

“I remember because I was jealous that your mom would do it and mine wouldn’t be caught dead getting cement under her nails.”

I smile softly, but I’m filled with bittersweet memories. The next closest person I had to a mom was Brenda Bowman. She’s the one I needed when my mom died. She’s the one I wanted to hold me tight when my tears coated my cheeks and words wouldn’t come.

Because with her I would have been able to express my grief, my sadness. I couldn’t do it around my dad. He was already devastated enough that I held it in, that I pretended, but there were so many nights I cried myself to sleep, muffling my sobs in my pillow and wishing I had someone to console me. Someone who understood what my mom meant to our family. To me.

We’d already lost so much and then we lost them too.

I wonder what things would have been like if Gary’s scandal didn’t happen when it did. Or at all. Would Brenda have stepped in to be a pseudo mother to us? Would having had her in our lives saved Dekker the heartache and headaches that came with growing up way too fast and trying to be the mom for us?

Such a significant ripple effect—whatever happened. Why the secrecy after all these years?