“Thank you for trying to warn me. He found me at work.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know where his sudden need to be involved is coming from, but he says he wants visitation.”
“Of the dog?”
“Yes. He first said he wanted her—”
Margo’s hand flew to her chest. “No way. No how. He brought Flossy home for you.” And truthfully, that dog had somehow wormed her way into Margo’s heart, too. Margo had never owned pets and had convinced herself she and dogs didn’t mix, until Flossy climbed on her lap and settled in. Now she carried Flossy like a baby, sometimes even for her walks.
“I know. He’s not going to win this, though. If I have to get a lawyer, I will.”
Margo heard the exasperation in her daughter’s tone and noticed the dark circles under her eyes. Last night had been her third night of call. “Anyone deliver in the VIP suites?” she teased, to lighten the mood. “Did someone deliver in a champagne bath?”
It earned her a snort, which was a win in her column.
“We had a couple of admissions to the suites. But, I’m going to bed. Can we talk later?”
Cut-and-dry—that was her daughter’s style.
“Yeah, sure.” Margo looked away and pretended to sift through one of the cooking magazines that had come in yesterday’s mail. With Diana, one couldn’t just force their way in. Diana revealed her emotions in spurts, and only patience was rewarded, especially these days, when an unshakable cloud seemed to have descended around her. Margo just wished that it would be sooner than later, since she was days away from getting on a plane.
Which was another sore spot between them.
“Might as well try to sleep, since the contractors are a little late. Don’t forget, they start the master bath today.” Diana looked at her watch and opened her mouth to say more, but her phone rang. She kissed Margo swiftly on the cheek. “But don’t worry about your boxes, okay? I’ll help you when I get up. Or I can unpack them when you go on your trip.”
“All right, sweetheart” was all Margo could say, because there was no sense arguing with her daughter at this time of the morning. She watched the back of Diana’s robe disappear up the staircase, and wondered how the hell this was all going to work.
* * *
When Margo’s friends had complained that their grown children had boomeranged home, Margo celebrated in silent reverie that her dearest Diana had flown the nest without once looking back. Diana had been born on her own trajectory, with an infant sleep schedule that allowed Margo to continue her work without great difficulty. Margo barely had to convince Diana, as a child, to do her homework, to clean her room. In junior high, while Diana’s friends had gone through that god-awful stage of not brushing their teeth, there Diana was every night over the sink, brushing and flossing and washing her face. Margo hadn’t once worried about the college and career process because her girl had made her own plans and knew exactly what she wanted from her life.
No one told Margo that it was her mother that she should have been worried about. Leora, who had been a titan in every respect, who lived to ninety-nine, transformed in the last year of her life from fairly independent and lucid to a woman Margo didn’t recognize and had to care for full-time. And no one had told Margo that in the autumn of her life, she would find herself living under her daughter’s roof. Talk about a convoluted circle.
Margo entered the garage and flipped the light on. Not all town houses in Old Town had garages, and while they were lucky to have one, it didn’t function well for its intended use. These buildings were built tall and narrow, and despite attempts at modernizing the space, the garage could barely fit a sedan without risking damage to its sides. But it made for good storage, which most homes in Alexandria lacked.
Storage totes lined the back of the garage, from the concrete floors up nearly to the ceiling. Each plastic bin was labeled with its contents in her daughter’s neat block letters, so unlike the stereotypical doctor’s scrawl.
Margo’s boxes, on the other hand, had taken up the middle of the garage, along with the materials for the renovation that Diana and Carlo had planned before Diana properly and rightfully shoved him out the door.
The placement of Margo’s boxes was the perfect representation of her intrusion into her daughter’s life.
The construction aside, Margo had to admit: she was messy. Her stuff was everywhere. It jumped out, mismatched from her daughter’s things. So, despite agreeing to rest, Margo couldn’t. The least she could do was empty a box or two. Maybe three.
She spotted a small box behind the rest of her stash. The cardboard was discolored to a light brown, a sign that it was one of her mother’s. Opposite her own penchant to keep things, Leora had been much like Diana—a minimalist. And Margo did not remember if she’d gone through it. She jostled the box; it shook easily. This she might be able to tackle.
The door into the home opened. “Ma.” Diana’s voice pierced through the quiet garage.
Margo jumped. “Goodness. You keep doing that.”
She laughed. “Paying you back for the years you listened to my phone calls on the landline.”
“I didn’t do that!” Margo gasped, but her feigned ignorance was short-lived. “Okay, so I did. You knew?”
“Yes,” she said pointedly. “Anyway, that was Sam who called. I’m going to meet her at the center and go for a quick run.”
Margo frowned. It was freezing, and Diana hadn’t slept well in days. Then again, on tough days, Diana needed a friend, and Sam was her bestie. But the circles under her eyes begged for Margo to ask anyway. “Are you sure? You were headed straight to bed.”
“Yeah. And since I know you’re not going to stop unpacking, I’ll bring a couple of boxes in for you. Just two, okay?”
“Okay.” Margo relented, though Diana’s words left a bitter taste in her mouth. It wasn’t what she said but the way she said it—as if Margo herself needing managing. She was seventy-five, not dead. And when Diana kissed her on the forehead like a toddler who needed a mother’s encouragement before a difficult task, Margo’s insides stirred with unease.
The tables, in fact, had turned significantly.
Chapter Four
Diana tucked her chin into her quarter-zip when she stepped out her door, and the shock of cold sent shivers up her spine. It had snowed the previous week, and a fuzz of white coated the tops of bushes and tree branches. The temperature had stayed at a balmy thirty-nine degrees during the day, cold enough that even at a sprint she didn’t break into a sweat but warm enough so a windbreaker wasn’t necessary. She shook her arms and legs out to wake them. Exhaustion had permeated every part of her being, but after a night like she’d had, a run would do her good, and Sam had given her the perfect reason to head back out into the sunshine.
She took off at a jog, choosing the sidewalk through a block, then hopping off onto the street, minding the cobblestones and potholes. At 9:00 a.m., Old Town was just starting to wake, with deliveries to local businesses underway and parents walking their kids to school. After a quarter mile, she got into a rhythm, and slowly, her night faded away.
A half mile later, Diana arrived at the Georgian town house business front and jogged in place, waiting for the door’s swing. Sam was notoriously on time, so when five, six minutes passed, Diana entered the Old Town Women’s Center to retrieve her running partner.