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“Now, hold on,” Cobb says, trying to sit up in his bed and grunting in pain as he does. Marigold gently pushes him back down. “Hold on,” he says again, laying back on the pillows with a sheen of sweat on his pale forehead. “Elijah came to you with the absolute truth: he does want to spend Christmas with you, and that was always his plan, whether I’d scheduled my surgery for now or later.”
“You just chose now so that you could crash our holiday?” She pops one hip out and puts a fist on it as she glares down at him.
“No,” he says, shaking his head. He really does look a bit tepid and unhealthy to Marigold’s eyes. “But when the boy says he thinks he can arrange for his old Pops to tag along for an old-fashioned family Christmas, then who am I to say no?”
“You’re both incorrigible,” Marigold says, hand still on hip. She looks around the room, which is filled with cards lining the windowsill, plants in pots, flowers in vases, and all kinds of gift bags. “How in the hell are we supposed to get all this back to Shipwreck Key?” she wonders.
Cobb follows her gaze. “Plants and flowers get donated to the pediatric and the maternity wings, and the cards will fit in my bag. I think there are gifts in those other bags…” He lifts a shaky hand and points around the room. “But you can go through them and see if they’re more appropriate to keep or donate.”
Marigold sighs for what feels like the eight thousandth time since she set foot in Miami and arrived on the second floor of the hospital.
“Nigel Cobb Hartley,” she says, switching her tone to a more serious one and using his full name. “You must think that I’m a lady of leisure with nothing better to do than be your assistant and nursemaid.”
Cobb smirks at her. “I love you, Goldie.”
“You know, yousaythat,” she says, softening just a few degrees as she looks at the father of her child. This is the man who she’s loved through more ups and downs and rollercoaster twists and turns than any woman should have to tolerate. This is also the man who she eventually had to leave in order to save them both—a fact that she cannot afford to forget.
“I do say that,” Cobb says, reaching for her hand again. “Because it’s true. Thank you for coming to get me.”
Marigold lets him touch her hand before she heads for the door, stopping to look back at him one more time as she palms the handle. “I’ll talk to the doctors and find out what the plan is to release you. Then I’m throwing you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and taking you back to Shipwreck Key. There’s no way we’re spending Christmas in a hospital, do you hear me, Cobb?”
“Aye aye, Captain,” he says, closing his eyes and keeping them shut.
Marigold watches him for another second as worry creeps through her veins. She needs to get him well. That’s her only job—her only mission.
That, and making sure that Christmas is just as magical as her son remembers it being back when they were all under one roof.
Marigold
It’s seventy-two and breezy three days before Christmas Eve, and Marigold is sitting by her open bedroom window at her white wooden desk with its chipped paint and circular teacup stains all over it. Her laptop is open on the desk, and she’s got the document pulled up that she’s been working on for months now—the one where she gets to craft her very own manifesto about what it means to be a woman trying to age gracefully in a digital world. Will anyone read it? Maybe. Maybe not. But is it cathartic to write what amounts to a series of essays about the encroaching feelings of invisibility that close in on a woman starting at around age forty? Is there something to gain by putting her thoughts down about the way strangers (men, mostly) feel entitled to comment on her changing looks? Does it feel therapeutic to talk to herself on paper about the small indignities of aging, like knee wrinkles, loose arm skin, whatever it is that happens to a woman’s neck, and the sad feeling that she’ll never again wake up and be “morning skinny”? Yes, yes, andhellyes.
Marigold has been awake since four o’clock, drinking too much coffee and puttering around the house. One thing she’s never struggled with—even through these menopausal years—is getting a good, hard night of sleep, but this morning she was dozing soundly in her cool, dark room when she heard the soft strumming of a guitar coming from the front room. Wrapping a robe around her and tying it tightly, she wandered out to find Cobb sitting on a kitchen chair next to the tree that she and Elijah had decorated and strung with lights. His fingers brushed lightly over the strings of his guitar as he played “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” next to the twinkling lights of the tree.
“What are you doing?” Marigold asked quietly, slipping into the room and perching on the edge of the couch as she tried to blink herself awake.
“Jet lag,” Cobb explained, his fingers still moving over the strings while his eyes lingered admiringly on Marigold’s makeup-free face. “You are a true beauty at four a.m., Goldie.”
“Thank you,” she said, swiping a hand across her eyes. “But I meant what are you doing out of bed? Shouldn’t you be recovering?”
“It’s been eight days since surgery,” Cobb explained, changing the placement of his fingers on the guitar and switching to “White Christmas” seamlessly. “And I’m still young and healthy.”
Marigold shot him a look. “Then why aren’t you back in the U.K., recovering in your own house with a cute nurse at your side to attend to all your needs?”
“Ah,” Cobb said, still playing the song quietly, so as not to wake Elijah. “True recovery is a process that’s aided entirely by the love that surrounds a person.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her, looking as youthful as he had when they were first living together in New York more than thirty years earlier. “But also I have these spurts of energy in the morning, and getting up and moving around is good for me. Trust me, I’ll burn through this feeling in about twenty minutes and be back in bed.”
Marigold stood up. “I’m going to make coffee.”
True to his word, Cobb had tired easily. By the time Marigold had returned to the living room with two mugs of coffee in hand, he was gone, his guitar propped up against the couch and the house silent again.
Now, at lunchtime, she’s stuck on a chapter she’s writing about what it feels like to be judged by the general public the same way she’d been judged by clients looking to possibly book her for a modeling job. For inspiration, she opens up her latest Instagram post, skimming the comments and trying to read them as if they aren’t actually about her, which is next to impossible.
“Her nose is too flat at the end,” someone says. They regularly dissect her amongst themselves as if she’s unable to read their words.
“Don’t you think her thighs look a bit more jiggly than they did when she was in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue?”Good god,Marigold thinks,I was half the age that I am now when I worked for Victoria’s Secret.
“I still think she’s pretty, but—“Here we go: the inevitable “but”—“I just think she needs to get some minor work done. I mean, if you have that kind of money, why wouldn’t you get a little Botox or something?”
The wind picks up, blowing through the window and lifting her white linen curtain so that it floats on the breeze next to her. Her hair brushes away from her face and she looks out into the garden, which is the view she chose for her bedroom.
