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For a moment he couldn’t speak. He was too stunned to speak as the information registered. And when it did, his first instinct was to deny it. To accuse Bobby of lying, but of course he knew better. “My God,” he finally managed. “Is he—”
“We don’t know anything yet. He’s in the hospital. It’s…it’s serious, Caleb. Please, get home.”
“I’m on my way,” he said. He tossed the phone down and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
CHAPTERFOUR
Maya walked into the familiar comfort of the farmhouse with a crooked smile on her face. She sailed past her mother and her sisters, ignored all their questions and demands, and floated up the stairs to her bedroom. She was asleep almost before her hair dampened the pillows.
Twelve hours later, she gradually came to. It was a dull, foggy sort of awakening, and it came with a pounding head and a queasiness in her stomach that grew worse by several degrees when she tried to move. “Damn,” she moaned. “Why am I so…?” And then memory came. And she sat up fast, despite the rush of dizziness. “Oh my God, what have I done?”
“That’s the best question I’ve heard in a while.” Maya turned toward the sound of her mother’s voice. Vidalia had been sitting in a chair by the window, but she rose now. Her waist-long ebony curls were pulled around to one side in a ponytail that trailed down over her shoulder. She wore jeans that showed off a figure no mother of five grown daughters ought to still have, and a denim blouse with flowers embroidered at the shoulders.
“Oh, Mom.” Maya put her hand to her head and fell back on the pillows limply.
“You wanna tell me about it?”
Tears burned at the backs of her eyes, so she kept them squeezed tight. “I don’t know what got into me.”
She heard soft steps as her mother crossed the room, felt the shift of the mattress as Vidalia sat down on its edge. A comforting whiff of her mother’s violets-and-vanilla body wash reached her senses. As fresh as all outdoors. “Come on, sit up. Sip this.” Her voice was soothing, and her cool hand stroked the hair away from Maya’s face. “I had a feelin’ you’d be sick this morning. As little as you touch the stuff, even a few beers can make you sick.”
Maya forced her eyes open and saw that her mother’s other hand held a glass of what looked like tomato juice and smelled like the spice aisle at Gayle’s Grocery. She grimaced, but she sipped. And when the tiniest relief seemed to coat her stomach, she sipped some more.
“Now I want you to stop beatin’ yourself up over whatever happened last night,” Vidalia said.
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what happened last night.”
Her mother smiled. “Well, now, let me take a stab at it, hmm? You got the birthday blues. Lord knows, child, I’ve had ‘em, too. They hit you any time you turn an age that ends in nine. Except for nineteen, of course, which doesn’t count.”
Maya frowned and lifted her head.
“Drink,” her mother said. So she drank. And Vidalia went on. “People tend to think these crisis points hit us at the round numbers. Thirty, forty, fifty. But they don’t. It’s the dang nines. By the time you turn thirty, you’ll have had a year to get used to the idea of turning thirty. But twenty-nine—well now, that’s a shocker. All of a sudden you’re looking at thirty seriously for the first time.”
Draining the glass, Maya set it aside.
“Better?” Vidalia asked.
“Stomach is. Head still aches though.”
“Give it time to work. Old family remedies never fail. Now, where was I?”
“Trying to make me feel like I haven’t done something horrible.”
“Oh, right.” Again, Vidalia smiled. “So you had a couple of drinks last night And a handsome cowboy came along, and you had a good time with him. It’s not the end of the world, you know.”
Swallowing hard, lowering her gaze, Maya said, “I took him up to the falls, Mom. I…we….” She bit her lip. “God, what was I thinking?”
Stroking her hair, which was her specialty, Vidalia said, “You had sex with him?”
Maya nodded, feeling as guilty as a schoolgirl caught cheating on a final exam.
“Hon, you’re twenty-nine years old. And sex is a celebration of life. It’s acknowledging that you’re not just a good, decent upstanding, respectable person, but a woman. A real live red-blooded, glorious woman. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, all right, technically, it’s a broken commandment, and the Reverend Jackson would probably disagree with me. But God forgives, daughter. And Heexpectsus to slip up now and then.”
Maya looked up, sniffling. “You really think so?”
“Of course I do. Making mistakes and learning from them is part of the whole point of the human experience. So long as you used protection, there’s not a thing in the world all that terrible about a grown woman….” She let her voice trail off, probably because Maya’s eyes had flown suddenly wider and her hand had clapped to her mouth. “Maya? Honey? You…youdiduse protection. Didn’t you?”
Her mother pulled Maya’s hand from her mouth. “Didn’tyou ?’’ she repeated.
