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“Hello?” She held the phone to her ear and turned toward the lake, the deep blue of the sky meeting a more gray-blue of the chilly Lake Michigan in late March. Even though it was a warm day, the lake would still be in the forties, cold and unwelcoming, except it was beautiful and compelling and inspiring, too.
Kim took a long breath through her nose as her daughter began to speak.
“Mom! You didn’t answer my text.”
No. She hadn’t.
“Can you send it right now? I need it right away.”
She wanted to tell her daughter to come home. Come home and she would finance whatever transportation cost it took to get her from LA to the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan. But she knew better. Her daughter and she had already had that conversation, and she’d lost. But sending money seemed to be enabling her.
“I didn’t answer your text because we’ve already talked about this,” she said softly, trying to fight back the hurt in her heart. She wanted to send her daughter as much money as she needed. Money for whatever she needed. But if her daughter wasn’t able to make ends meet in LA, if she was spending above her means or unable to earn what she needed to survive, then maybe that was the Lord saying LA wasn’t for her.
She’d already sent $4000 over the last month.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford it, although she really couldn’t. Her divorce settlement had not been generous, and her husband had fought over every penny.
Of course, he had the new family he’d already started, the woman who was pregnant when their divorce became final was now his wife, and he wanted to keep as much as he could to finance his new start.
“We talked about it, and you were being unreasonable. I thought maybe you would have seen my side by now.” Her daughter was most definitely irritated with her.
“Did you ask your dad?”
At Iva May’s funeral, Alyssa had walked in holding onto her dad’s arm, with the new wife, who was just three years older than Alyssa and eight months pregnant, holding onto his other arm. He looked like the quintessential family man. Which of course had made Kim feel like the biggest loser in the world, since not only had he not been a family man, he hadn’t been any kind of husband and father to speak of while he was married to her. She couldn’t ever remember attending a funeral hanging on his arm. If anything, she arrived with Alyssa long before he showed up, sat in the back, and left as soon as everything was over. Most of the time, he didn’t even see her or talk to her.
That was the story of their marriage.
“Dad said he paid you enough in the settlement that you should be able to take care of me for the rest of my life and I could live in the lap of luxury. I know he’s loaded. And he gave it all to you. In fact, he told me that he gave so much to you that he can barely support his new wife and their baby. Mom, how could you take so much from him? Don’t you know they have a child to support? What are you, jealous of his new wife because she’s young and beautiful when you’re old and wrinkled and fat?”
Kim swallowed.
“I’m sorry. I need to go. I... I just arrived at my destination.” She swallowed again. “I love you.”
She didn’t give Alyssa a chance to answer before she swiped her phone off.
Turning around, she sat down on the top step, put her hands around her knees, and put her head in her arms, the tears silently dripping down her face.
She never even told Alyssa about her new sister.
She was just into her third trimester. Three months to go in the pregnancy. She was showing more now, but a month ago when she saw Alyssa at her mother’s funeral—Iva May’s funeral—she hadn’t been showing enough for anyone to be sure, and the loose blouse she had worn had hid any hints of a protruding stomach.
The entire town of Blueberry Beach had been in mourning over the loss of one of their matriarchs, and no one had paid any attention to Kim’s figure. If she had gained a little weight while her mother was dying of cancer, no one would blame her.
That wasn’t really the problem. Of course.
It wasn’t even the insults that Alyssa had just uttered. She was a child. Nineteen years old and thought she knew everything, but she knew nothing.
Kim had been the same at one point and had had the same mentality. Thought she knew everything.
It wasn’t really that, either.
It wasn’t that the insults had been designed to hurt and wound, to be so nasty and mean that they would strike pain into the recipient, repeated from what Alyssa had heard her father saying about Kim.
Of course they were mean, but the main reason that they were so successful in hurting Kim was because they were accurate.
She was jealous. Jealous of her ex’s new wife. The wife that her daughter and ex seemed to adore, to slather attention on, and to hold in high esteem.
She didn’t hold a torch for Todd, not at all. But it made her feel like there was something terribly wrong with her that he was capable of affection, of attention, of love and could lavish it so freely on someone. He just was incapable of giving it to Kim.
