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She shrugged. “I don’t. They’re my calling. Being a nurse—taking care of people, that’s my calling.”
“See that’s the thing. We weren’t enough to keep her here.”
“And she wasn’t enough for your dad to leave what was important to him and go with her. And when she left, she didn’t have a plan, almost no money. She knew your dad was stable and strong and that you’d be better off here with him.”
I’m not really sure I understand how Miranda and my mom can be friends. They are so different. Miranda living her life for others. Mom living only for herself. Or so it seems.
“You’re young,” says Miranda. “So, you don’t get it. You have nothing but choices right now.”
It’s the second time today that my relative youth has been cited as a reason I can’t understand the ways of the world.
“Nothing but choices,” I echo, thinking about my dad sitting in the living room watching television, how I’ll have to get him into bed later.
“I’m just saying—don’t be too hard on her.”
Sometimes I think being hard on my mother is the rock against which I formed myself. I don’t know who I would be if she hadn’t left me behind. I keep this to myself.
“Another thing,” she goes on into the silence. “I got a call today from a friend. There’s a room coming available at Shady Grove. They have some of the best stroke care in the area. Rehab on site. He might get better faster there.”
I shake my head.
“Just think about it,” she says, opening the door to her Jeep. “He wouldn’t want this, Maddie. You, caring for him like this. If he could say so, he’d tell you himself.” She sweeps her arm around. “Your dad. This house. This town. Even the shop. It’s not an anchor. You don’t have to stay here either. There’s a whole world out there. Far away from all the bad things that have happened.”
“Did she ask you to tell me that?”
Miranda shrugs. “She doesn’t think you’d hear it coming from her.”
I smile at my mother’s friend,myfriend. When my mom left, Miranda was there. She was the person I often came home to after school when my dad was working. She was the one he called when he had to go in to work late at night. Even when she married Ernie and they had Giselle, I was still welcomed as part of their family. And when my dad had his stroke, she made sure the at-home nursing agency assigned her to his care.Ourcare.
“This is my home,” I say. “For better or worse.”
Mostly for worse, I guess.
She nods sadly, slides into the Jeep, and starts the engine. “You’re a lot like your dad.”
“So they say.”
She doesn’t mean it as an insult, and I know that. Iamlike him in that I don’t leave behind the people I love. I am stubborn like he is. He never gave up on Ainsley and Sam, even when his own body started to give up on him. I haven’t either. And just like my father, I guess I am not ready to let that night go. Maybe that’s why I went to see Harley Granger.
Miranda pulls away with a wave and I watch her taillights disappear.
As I walk up the steps, something shiny on the porch swing catches my eye. I move over toward it, shift back the pillow that’s obscuring it.
A red foil wrapped box with a white bow. My heart stutters.
Every year since Evan Handy went to jail, I receive an anonymous Christmas gift.
Delicate things. Pretty things.
A crystal hedgehog. A metal dragonfly. A working compass. A shell. A glass ladybug. A clay lotus flower. A silver heart locket with a seed inside. A purple geode. A leather-bound volume of Rilke poems with an orchid pressed into its pages.
I sit with my new present and open it quietly alone on the porch. The air is icy but the wind still, the moon high. Inside I can hear the television. A commercial featuring manic jingle bells blares about Christmas deals for your final days of shopping.
I lift out of the package a small wooden box and open the lid to see the mechanism of a music box. I turn the handle and it plays an odd discordant tune that is somehow eerie and calming all at once.
I don’t know how he’s doing it.
But I know this gift and all the others are from Evan.
