Falling quiet, we both knew what the other was thinking: this phase of our lives was about to be over. Well, no, not entirely. Charles and I were only moving one hundred yards to the east. But I would no longer be calling Olivia from precisely the same places I had called her from since we were kids.
Ever upbeat, she tried to bolster me. A good portion of Olivia’s childhood memories, too, were tied up in Dogwood, maybe just as many as in her own home. Nothing would change. But so would everything. But neither of us said it, so the thought just lingered in the air, each of us picking it up and putting it back down again, letting it float off into the dark night.
“Fine.” She sighed. “I won’t say anything.” She paused. “But do you think it could possibly be true?”
I had cried myself to sleep for several nights after Amelia broke up with Harris. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to find a man who could love her the way she deserved to be loved. And I’d thought he was the man who could do that.
I couldn’t fathom why she had broken up with him. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, and yes, as much as I hate to admit it, I had been a little ugly to her about it. But I’m her mother, and I know best. At least, I thought I knew best. I had been bugging Amelia for weeks, mercilessly, about why on God’s green earth she had let that perfect man go. And now, watching her kiss the boy next door in the dark, in the sound, knowing I should look away, I finally understood.
Greer
JUNE 17, 2016
THINGS WITH AMELIA DIDN’T GO exactly as I had planned. I don’t know what I thought would happen. I guess I thought she would jump up and down, throw caution to the wind, be absolutely thrilled. But she wasn’t.
She said, “Why don’t you just tell them you can’t do it?”
I had scoffed at that. I was here because I was pretty sure she understood me better than most people. But if she had really known me at all, she would have known that I would never say I couldn’t do something. Even this. Even now. I knew I shouldn’t have put it off. I knew I should have dealt with it sooner, but even though I knew logically that I was dying, I don’t think I had quite accepted it yet, and now I was running out of time.
“But I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone,” she repeated again slowly.
“People do it all the time,” I reiterated.
“Do they?”
I mean, yeah. Maybe not exactly like this. But I have to think it happens.
That was when I handed her the check.
Her eyes got wide. I had the feeling that she had never held a check that big before. I hadn’t, either, so I understood how she felt. She shook her head. “This is yours.”
I tried to explain that I would just endorse it over to her. She looked at me blankly. Now I’m worried. What if Amelia was right? Maybe I should have just said no to begin with… Maybe I should just say no now. But I have so much left in me, so much to pass on.
Greer’s Golden Goodness. That’s what the readers nicknamed my column. Because everything I touch turns to gold. I believed it once, I really did. I was the king maker. I wore the crown. I started to think, like they did, that everyone I touched turned to gold, too. Now, as I stood with Amelia, asking a total stranger for the biggest favor I would ask anyone, I reached out to take her hand. To touch her, a last attempt to hope that she, that this project, would turn to gold.
My legacy, my secrets, my future, all placed on this one woman. Could I trust her? Could she trust me? She squeezed my hand. She nodded. And that’s when I knew.
Amelia
GREAT LOVE
I WANTED TO STAY IN our bubble. I wanted to carry on flying to Palm Beach, Parker coming to New York, long dinners and walks in the rain and movie marathons and sending books back and forth in the mail with notes in the margins. I wanted the surprise flowers at work and the writing of real love letters. I didn’t want any of that to be over. Which is why, as I spritzed my neck with perfume in my childhood bedroom, I said, “Hey Siri, text Parker Thaysden, ‘Not tonight.’ ”
She replied, “Texting Parker Thaysden: ‘At twilight.’ ”
I sighed, picked up the phone, and typed the message myself.
Maybe it was all so perfect because it wasn’t real. Our parents didn’t know; a lot of our close friends didn’t even know. So we didn’t have to field the questions about marriage, which I didn’t want, and babies, which I couldn’t have. We could stay in our little cocoon of love and not face anything real. The real part was when it got sucky. I liked this—the lovely in-between, where I didn’t have to worry.
I reached up and touched one of the hot rollers in my hair and, feeling that it had cooled, removed the metal clip, holding the curl in my palm. There was a knock at the bathroom door, and I called, “Come in!” just as my phone vibrated on the counter with You sure? You know we have to get it over with sometime…
But I couldn’t type back because my hands were full of curlers, and I couldn’t voice text because Aunt Tilley had walked in and was wedging herself right beside me on the small window seat, her legs dangling down between the vanity and the toilet, and her full pink polka-dot skirt with the crinoline underneath filling up pretty much every ounce of the bathroom.
“You look beautiful for the ball tonight,” she said.
I studied her face, which was hard because focusing on anything but the vivid red blush on her cheeks took some skill. Was she still here? Was she somewhere else? I never could quite decide. I wondered if this was all an act, a willful undertaking so that she didn’t have to remember. What it was she didn’t want to remember, I couldn’t be sure. But something. Either way, I played along, even when it drove my mother mad. I always played along. Why not? If she didn’t know, she couldn’t help it. And if she did? Well, if she did, it was fun to be lost in her world sometimes. A lot of days it beat the hell out of this one.
“Not as beautiful as you, Aunt Tilley. You will be the belle of the ball.”
She smiled contentedly and fanned herself with one of the vintage hand-painted fans she was never without. I wondered if she possibly felt warm in here, inside with the air turned way down.
“It’s the things you don’t do that you’ll regret, darling.”
I eyed her. “What do you mean, Aunt Tilley?” This was the only hard part. Was she here in my world now, or were we still two genteel ladies discussing a fictitious ball?
She took my hand. “Amelia, I wish more than anything that I hadn’t let Robert run away. I wish I hadn’t sent him off to war without telling the truth. I sent him away with nothing, no wife or child to come home to.” She paused, tears in her eyes and said, “I sent him away to die, Amelia. I see it now as clear as the diamond he tried to give me the night before he left.”
I shook my head. “You didn’t send him off to die, Tilley. It couldn’t be helped.” Robert had not been off at war. He had been killed in a horrible, freak farming accident with a cotton baler. But I couldn’t explain that to Tilley now. She couldn’t hear me, wherever she was.
She shook her head and looked me in the eye. “Amelia, you’re not hearing me.” I put the last curler back in the container, looked straight at her, and pursed my lips, so she would know I was listening. “It is the things we don’t do that keep us up at night, that ruin our lives, that descend us straight into madness.”