AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Thank you, but I hope we won’t need to. What we need is an honest talk with Mom.”
“Good luck with that.” She’d long since given up trying to discuss anything important with her mother. “There’s something else puzzling me.”
“What?”
“How can Scott afford to buy this house?”
“I don’t know. I had a conversation with him but I couldn’t work it out.”
“Wait—” Jenna thumped her feet onto the floor and sat up straight “—you saw him? You went to see your first love and didn’t tell me?”
“I went to thank him for helping Mack. He made me breakfast.”
Jenna noticed she didn’t deny the “first love” comment.
The sound of the front door interrupted them.
“Damn,” Jenna muttered. “This was about to get interesting. Don’t think the conversation has ended.”
Nancy walked into the room. In those few seconds before she noticed both of them sitting there, she looked tired and beaten.
Jenna felt an ache in her chest.
How long had that look been there? Lauren was right. She should have paid more attention. Maybe they weren’t exactly close, but Nancy was still her mother. She’d pulled away as a defense mechanism, not because she didn’t care.
The look was gone the second she saw them. “Jenna! I didn’t know you were visiting today.”
“I asked her over,” Lauren said. “We want to talk to you, Mom.”
Nancy dropped her bags and sat down without bothering to remove her coat. “About what?”
“The house.” Jenna noticed that her mother’s hands were curled into fists.
Lauren pulled out an empty chair and sat down. “Why didn’t you tell us before now that you were thinking of selling?”
“It only came together recently. I don’t need a house this size.”
Jenna thought that with all the junk around the place her mother probably needed every one of the ten bedrooms. Looking closely at her mother, she realized that her mother’s smile was fixed and strained. She wondered if Lauren had noticed, too.
“You love this place,” Lauren blurted out. “You love it more than—anything.”
Jenna knew her sister had just managed to stop herself saying you love it more than us.
“It’s a house,” Nancy said. “One can’t have feelings for a building.”
“But you do have feelings for it. All those times people wanted you to sell and you never would. ‘Over my dead body,’ you said once.”
“How dramatic. I realize the timing is inconvenient for Lauren, but—”
“This isn’t about me, Mom,” Lauren said. “It’s about you.”
Jenna felt a rush of frustration but underneath was compassion. “Why can’t you talk to us, Mom? You talk to your friends, to the people you visit in hospital, the mailman, the gardener, but not to your own daughters?”
Nancy sat very still. “I don’t know what you mean. We see each other every week. We talk all the time. And Ben is more than the gardener. He’s a dear friend.”
“We don’t talk about the things that matter. We talk about your book group, my class and the weather.”
“That’s because there isn’t much going on in our lives.”
