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“Of course it’s not. Zach’s said the same thing, and I take it as a compliment.” Now it was her turn for a sheepish chuckle. “Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.” Willa handed her a tart, and Lyra handed back the bottle.
“When you asked me if I was okay, I was mentally comparing you to my mom, and my mom was coming up on the short side.”
“I’ve noticed the tension between you. From what Zach’s told me, you’ve been running the show for your dad and brother, but it looks like your mom’s in the mix again?”
“Did Zach tell you that?”
“That you’ve been running the show, yes. That your mom’s back in the mix, no. It’s just what I’ve seen.”
“That’s pretty accurate for just observing.”
“I’ve been a nurse a very long time. Being able to read what’s not being said is a crucial skill in that work. It helps us take care of people who can’t or won’t communicate with words, and it’s not something I can turn off. I see more than people usually want.”
“I don’t know what’s going on between my parents, honestly. But yeah, they’ve been divorced going on nine years, and Mom’s been around the past week or two more than all the previous years combined, even though they’ve always lived like fifteen minutes apart at the most.”
“Do you and your mom have a tricky relationship? If I’m prying, tell me to shut the fuck up and mind my business.”
Like she’d say something like that to Zach’s mom. Besides, she didn’t mind the question. “Not really? I mean, right now, yeah. But usually we get along fine. I love her, and I know she loves me. It’s just ...” Lyra paused, thought twice, went for it. “When they split, I was fifteen, and they both wanted custody. The judge let me choose if I wanted to live with one or the other primarily or do a fifty-fifty thing. I said I wanted to live with Pop. I know Mom was hurt by that, but Pop was kind of a mess when she left. I couldn’t leave him, too.”
“Shit. That’s rough.” Willa handed the bottle over.
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not like she held it over my head. We just ... decided not to talk about it, without, like, literally deciding anything, and we went on. Things were fine until this. I don’t even know why I’m so pissed. Pop is thrilled she’s back. If she is back.”
“You don’t think she is?”
“I don’t know.”
They were quiet for a minute or two, eating their cheesecakes and sharing the wine, watching the sunset grow vivid.
Then Willa said, “I’m thinking I want to say something, but it would be a confidence, something I wouldn’t want you to tell Zach. That’s an imposition, I know.”
His mother wanted her to keep a secret from him? “Why not tell Zach?”
“Because it’s about my family, his grandma and aunts and uncles, and I don’t like the thought of him feeling different about people he loves because I have a problem with them that isn’t his problem.”
That made sense. It also resonated with Lyra’s own conflicted feelings, though she couldn’t quite see how. “Why do you want to tell me?”
“I guess because it’s about mothers and daughters. I don’t have a daughter, but I am one.”
“Okay. How about I promise not to tell him unless I think keeping the secret would hurt him somehow.”
Willa turned to her and smiled. “I like you, Lyra.”
The sentence nearly brought Lyra to tears, which was a bizarrely strong reaction. The recent past had been very fucking intense; she felt like an open wound. “I like you, too, Willa,” she managed to say without a quaver.
“I always thought I had a pretty okay relationship with my family. They didn’t understand a lot of my choices, and they weren’t always there when I needed them, but I knew they loved me, and I knew they tried. I tried, too. I knew my life was incomprehensible to them in some ways, but they loved me. I wanted to keep things as easy between us as I could, so I didn’t say a lot that probably needed to be said. But all those things I didn’t say, all those things they didn’t understand, it just kept building up and building up. I met Rad and we started a family, and they didn’t understand why we didn’t get married, why we didn’t have the boys baptized or even take them to church, why we were raising kids in an MC—those were big things about my life they didn’t understand, more than that, theyhated, and they kept trying these little manipulations to get us in line. Then my dad died, and it was like he was the last rusty bolt holding everything together. It all got too fucking much after that, and after areallynasty fight with my mom, where she said something I can’t ever forgive, I cut ties. Zach and Jake love their grandma and everybody else, so we sent them to Texas on their own until they stopped wanting to go. I’ve never told the boys about that fight or what was said, because it was my shit, and some really old shit I never want them to know. And I don’t want them to carry it with them when they think of their Grandma Randall. I’m telling you, I guess, because you said you and your mom set the divorce aside and moved on, and it sounds like maybe that old sore’s broken open again. If you’d be inclined to hear some advice from a woman you just met ...”
Lyra nodded; she didn’t feel like she’d only just met Willa.
“The pain of talking over hard stuff while it’s fresh is nothing like the pain of old stuff coming back after years to kick you in the teeth. You’ve got to clean a wound while it’s fresh or it wreaks all kinds of chaos. Talk to your mom.”
“It’s not me. I would talk. I’ve tried. Mom doesn’t like negativity. She says it’s poison and why would anyone willingly take poison.”
A sad laugh burst from Willa’s mouth. She put her hand up like she’d burped. Lyra half expected her to excuse herself as if she had.
She didn’t excuse herself. She said, “In my opinion, there’s nothing more poisonous than a resentment left to fester like a dirty wound.”
