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Without thinking about what I’d say, I pulled my cell out of my back pocket. Shit. No service.
Going into the kitchen, I picked up the phone from the wall, dialed. It suddenly seemed urgent that I get some answers. “Hi, Mother,” I said when she answered on the first ring.
“What’s the crisis?”
“There’s no crisis, I just—”
“Then why are you calling me in the middle of a work day? You never call during the week. Did something happen at work?”
“I’m not at work.” I had to spit it out before she started in on her line of questioning. “I’m in Bridgewater.”
The answering silence was brief but telling. It took a shock to shut my mother up for more than a heartbeat. “What are you doing in Bridgewater?”
I walked into the mud room by the back door, stretching the phone cord as far as it would go. “I have to deal with Charlie’s house, remember?”
Another pause. “I figured you would have hired someone to clear it out and put it on the market. You didn’t have to go there.”
“I wanted to.”
She sighed on the other end of the line. “You always did like that godforsaken place.”
And now we were getting somewhere.
“Yeah, I did like it here. That’s one of the reasons I’m calling, actually. I was curious about why we stopped coming.”
The silence was too long this time. She really hadn’t seen that one coming. “I take it you’ve been there long enough to see that Bridgewater is a unique place.”
Unique was one word for it, but my mother managed to make that word sound like an insult. “It’s definitely unique,” I agreed.
She sighed again. “Okay, Catherine.”
She was the first to call me Catherine in a few days. The name sounded weird now.
“What is it you really want to know? Did I grow up in an unorthodox family? Yes. Was Charlie in a polyamorous relationship? I imagine you’ve already learned the answer to that.” Her voice was filled with impatience, which is pretty much how she sounded all the time, come to think of it.
“Why did we stop coming here?” I twirled the cord around my finger. “Stop seeing Uncle Charlie?”
“That is no lifestyle to expose an impressionable young girl to. You were getting old enough that you would have started to figure out what was going on, and your father and I didn’t want that for you.”
“God, Mom, you make it sound like the people of Bridgewater were performing satanic rituals or something.”
Her tone hardened. “I know all about what goes on in that town, Catherine. I grew up there, remember? Had two fathers, even. I knew that what was going on around me, even in my own house, wasn’t normal.”
I toyed with a line of clothespins clipped to a string by the door and tried not to lose my temper. The anger welling up in my chest was tainted with sadness, regret. I’d been happy here, dammit. I’d been surrounded by people who cared about me more than they cared about their careers or their image. Yet, My mother had chosen to end that. “It may not be normal, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s wrong.”
“We didn’t want that life for you. I still don’t.” Suspicion crept into her voice. “What is this about, Catherine?”
When I didn’t answer right away, she
continued. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of staying there.”
I opened my mouth to say No, of course not. I have a job to get back to. But the words wouldn’t come.
“Catherine.” She drew the word out as a warning, but I’d had enough. She’d confirmed what I’d suspected from the moment I’d learned about Bridgewater’s unique ways. She’d kept me from this place for propriety’s sake, even though it had made me happy. She was filling my head with her negative thoughts on the place even through the phone. Being here, meeting the people, seeing it with my own eyes, painted a different picture entirely.
“I’ve got to go, Mom. Good talking with you.” It really wasn’t, but I had no idea what else to say. I wasn’t going to call her later. I wasn’t even sure I really loved her. Not in a healthy, normal way.
I hung up before she could respond. I’d heard enough and walked the phone back to the wall base. Sally turned to me holding two mugs of tea, handed me one. “What did your mother say?”
