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Chapter One
September
The cool Michigan breeze blew through the trees, and though the sun shone warmly on my back, a shiver raced down my spine. Dressed in a seersucker suit that my mother bought me, I should have been sweating, but I didn’t feel anything. I’d been numb for four days. That’s not true. I wasn’t numb. If I were numb, I wouldn’t have this unrelenting pain filling my chest and flowing out into my limbs. I guess I was numb to everything but the pain. It had been that way since I’d found my mother dead. At fifty-three years old, my mother, Michelle Garland, had passed quietly into a new world while I slept. A world without me. I never expected that our Thursday morning breakfast date would be our last, but that was my reality last Friday morning.
I was supposed to be cooking pancakes and eggs for the people of Bells Pass right now, but instead, I was standing in a cemetery wearing a red striped suit with a stupid tie that had Santa faces all over it. Why? My mother loved Christmas. She would have kept the house decorated for Christmas all year round if I’d let her. Now, I sort of wish I’d let her.
I laid a rose on her coffin and closed my eyes. “It’s always going to be you and me, kid,” I whispered, my voice breaking on the words she used to say to me every day. She’d say, ‘it’s always going to be you and me, kid, and we’re going places!’ Then she’d pat my backpack and leave me off at school while she went on to finish the walk to work. “How am I going to be just me now?”
A warm hand settled on my back, but I didn’t need to open my eyes to know who it was. “It’s not just you,” Ivy soothed in a way only Ivy Lund could. The owner of The Nightingale Diner, the establishment where I worked, was just that, a nightingale. Whenever someone needed something in Bells Pass, Ivy was there. “It’s you and everyone in this town. It’s you and me. It’s you and Mason. It’s you and little Lucy who loves her Uncle Lance. That’s little comfort right now, but maybe one day it will help you find a place to belong again.”
I nodded while I wiped away a tear from my cheek. “Thanks, Ivy. I’m sorry this has thrown everyone off at work. I’ll try to be back next week.”
“No,” she said, her head shaking when I opened my eyes. “You don’t for one second apologize for having to miss work. Work doesn’t matter right now. You and your mom matter, and we’re all here for you. That means we do whatever we have to do so you don’t have to worry. That includes making sure you get a paycheck. So not another word about that. Right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, a trembling grin tipping my lips. Ivy Lund was only four years older than I was, but you wouldn’t know it by the way she behaved. She was the mother hen of The Nightingale Diner and when I signed on to work there, I didn’t know just what a powerhouse she would become in my life. The only other woman I held in higher esteem was the woman buried in the silk and velvet casket under my hand.
“Don’t ma’am me!” she teased, shoulder bumping me. “I’m thirty-four, not eighty-four.”
I smiled at her usual response to being called that. “Thanks, Ivy. I know everyone loved my mom, and everyone is grieving. I appreciate the grace right now.”
“Don’t give it a second thought. We’re all going back to the diner for coffee and lunch. You take your time here and come over when you’re ready.”
“I don’t have a ride. I rode over with the funeral director.”
“I’ll wait with him,” another voice said from behind us.
I sighed. Indigo Dickson was the last person I wanted to sit in a car with today. There was too much between us that was left unsaid. I’d worked at The Hideaway until Indigo got a job there too. After a year of working together, I moved on to put distance between us. Then, last Christmas, Indigo hired on to work at The Nightingale Diner, which was a Godsend for Ivy, but a little like hell for me. It wasn’t because I didn’t like her, either. It was because I liked her too much. Always had.
“That’s okay. I can walk. It’s less than a mile to the diner,” I said, keeping my back turned to the woman who had the power to hurt me irrevocably if she found out the truth. I wasn’t going to give her that chance. We’d been friends in elementary school, frenemies in middle school, and by the time we worked together at The Hideaway, her indifference couldn’t have been more obvious. When she started working at the diner, I was worried it would be as tense as it was at The Hideaway. Thankfully, we’d both matured, and we slipped back into an easy friendship at work. I had no doubt she would have my back at the diner, but in a personal relationship, she had the power to destroy me.
Ivy tried to bite back a snort but failed. “You’re not going to walk back to the diner. Anyone on the Bells Pass PD would have me arrested if they found you walking down the side of the road today.”
I had a solution to the problem. “I’m ready to go now. I can ride back to the diner with you.” I patted the casket one last time and said a silent thank you to the woman who had gotten me this far in life. I understood there was only so long you could stand in front of a casket and wish that things were different. They weren’t different and Mom had left it up to me to take it from here. I thought back to the many times we discussed death over the years. As a nurse, she experienced it more than most. She always told me visiting her at a grave would be a waste of time. She wouldn’t be there. She’d be visiting a sick child or watching over a community event. Mom always said if I wanted to feel her love again, giving my time to something she loved in life was the best way to feel her around me.
“My car is full since I have Mel, Holly, Shep, and Lucy,” Ivy said, her lips in a frown.
“Mine is empty,” Indigo said. “He can ride with me. We’ll meet you there.”
Ivy clapped once. “Perfect. See you there.”
She turned and walked away, leaving me with the one woman I didn’t know how to bemearound. I couldn’t face her just yet, so I turned back to the casket one last time.
“I’m really sorry about your mom, Lance,” Indigo whispered. “I wish there was something more I could do.”
“I appreciate that, Gumdrop,” I said, using the childhood nickname she’d earned for her love of all things gummy. Indigo would do anything for you if you had a steady supply of gumdrops for her. “I wish I knew what to do too. Whenever I’m home, I’m always waiting for her to come in and toss her bag down on the table with an off-key version of some Taylor Swift song falling from her lips. It’s just so quiet now. She knew she was dying of cancer. Why didn’t she give me a chance to say goodbye?”
I could feel her presence behind me and I steadied myself for whatever she would say. One thing about Indigo Dickson was that she never minced words.
“Would it have helped to have spent your final Thursday morning breakfast date crying because her time here was at an end? She was a nurse, and she understood that she had little time left with you, but she was also a mother. She was going to protect you to her final breath. That’s exactly what she did. Now, instead of memories of tears and long goodbyes, you have the memory of her laughing while she eyed the biggest cinnamon roll in the case. You have the memory of her spilling her coffee across the table and sopping it up with your discarded sweatshirt before it hit your jeans. While you can’t appreciate that today, I’d wager my job at the bakery that one day you will.”
I groaned and it wasn’t quietly. It was loud and ugly because she was right. It sucked that she was right, but she was. The doctor told me my mom had found out about her cancer the week before, but it had already spread throughout her body, including her brain. There were no treatment options available given the advanced disease, so simply put; her days were limited.
For the last four days, I’d told myself she was just coming to terms with it herself. I told myself she’d planned to tell me but didn’t live long enough to do so. I was lying to myself. She would always be a mother, and while she couldn’t protect me from the pain of her death, she could protect me from the ugliness of life. She let me enjoy her last days on earth. I suspect she thought she had more time than she did, because I know my mother would never want me to find her the way I did on Friday morning. She would have protected me from that had she known just how little time she had left.
“I hate it when you’re right,” I admitted, turning away from the casket to make eye contact with the girl who stole my heart in elementary school and my pencils in middle school. She had grown into a beautiful woman who now stole my breath away every time I laid eyes on her. Speaking of eyes, when you gazed into hers, you knew exactly why her mother named her Indigo. They were mesmerizing and the depths of them held me in place. Her long black hair was pulled up today in a braid and wrapped in a knot on the back of her head. Any other day I’d dream about letting that braid out and running my hands through her kinky locks, but not today. Today, I could only think about one woman and what she’d left behind.
Indie took my arm and walked with me across the grass and onto the warm concrete drive of the cemetery. She beeped open the locks on her Mini-Cooper and got an eye roll from me. It was a ridiculous car for a ridiculous woman, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to fold my six-two frame into it. At a full foot shorter than me, she wouldn’t have that problem.
