Chapter 16

Tessa

 

 

“I miss her,” I choked out. I had been fighting back the tears all day, but now, sitting here in the silence, it was too much.

My mom leaned in, wrapped her arms around me. “I know, hon. I miss her, too. I don’t think we’ll ever not miss her.”

I stared at the headstone my mother and I had picked out together. It had taken months for it to be completed and set up. Now, as I sat on the grass in front of the four-foot high edifice that marked my sister’s final resting place, I realized it was worth the wait.

My mom had spent a small fortune on the white stone with an engraving of an angel and my sister’s name. It was beautiful. We had come to the cemetery early to clean up around her spot in this field of sadness. We put several bouquets of new flower arrangements in each of the pots. That was another extra my mom had demanded. She wanted Talia’s grave to be in bloom all the time.

“The headstone is really pretty, Mom,” I told her, knowing she needed to hear it.

She nodded. “It is. She would be proud to have this above her head.” Though she said the words with a smile, I knew she was dying inside.

“How often do you come out here, Mom?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Once a week. Sometimes more if I have the time.”

I nodded, expecting as much. My mom was up here in Georgia all alone. My dad had left us when Talia was a baby, and my mother had stayed single the whole time. She always told us we were her priority. With me in Florida and Talia gone, I wanted her to find someone.

“Are you sure you’re doing okay, Mom?”

She chuckled. “Well, I don’t know how okay any mother can be after they’ve buried a child, but yes, I think I’m doing fine. I’ve joined a group at the church. It’s for single ladies of a certain age,” she winked.

I laughed. “You aren’t going to bars, are you? I don’t think I could handle it!” I joked.

“Tessa, how could you think such a thing?” She lowered her voice. “But we do get together at one of our houses every Friday night and enjoy a few bottles of wine. We call it our book club meeting, but I don’t know that any of us has ever even opened the book we are reading.”

I threw my head back and laughed. “Mom! You wild woman!” I got serious. “I’m glad, though. I really am. I worry about you.”

“Oh, Tessa, don’t worry about me. I’m really okay. I have my friends and the support group. Although, I think we do more baking then talking, but for most of us, baking is therapy,” she assured me.

I nodded. “Okay, if you ever feel like it’s too much, you call me, and I’ll come home.”

She shook her head. “Oh no, you won’t, young lady. You will finish school. I didn’t scrimp and save all those years for you to drop out when the finish line is so near. You keep your head in the game and don’t you dare give up.”

“I won’t. I promise,” I vowed, hoping I could it. It was going to be tough, tougher yet with that whole kiss business to get through.

“Are you hungry?” my mom asked, standing and wiping off her butt.

I didn’t think I was, but I knew my mom wanted to feed me. It’s what moms did. “Sure. What are you in the mood for?”

She looked at me and smiled. “How about that horrible little diner that Talia always made us go to?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Really? You hate that place!”

She shrugged. “I do, but I think it is only fitting that we finish our day here with a meal at her favorite restaurant. Maybe I’ll even get her favorite chocolate milkshake and dip my fries in it.”

That made me laugh. “Mom, I cannot imagine you ever doing something like that.”

“I’ve turned over a new leaf. I’m trying all kinds of new things. What about you? Are you trying new things?” she asked, and I suddenly felt guilt wash over me.

“No,” I blurted out.

She gave me that look. She knew I was lying, but thankfully she didn’t press the issue. I could not even imagine how that conversation would go.

We settled ourselves into a booth at the small diner and waited for a waitress to take our order.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said, in a low voice.

My mom laughed. “Since when did you get picky about where you eat?”

I shrugged, I didn’t think I was picky, but I did have some standards. This place was at the very bottom of the standard pile.

As my mom promised, she ordered a chocolate milkshake to go with her burger and fries. I couldn’t let her commit such a grievous sin alone and ordered the same. We dug in once our meals were served.

“Don’t tell anyone I said so, but this is absolutely divine,” my mom said sucking ice cream off a salty fry.

I nodded my head in agreement. My mouth was too full to talk. It was really good, better than I could have imagined. If only I hadn’t been such a stick in the mud when Talia had tried to get me to try it so many years ago. I wondered if Ian would like it. What the hell? Why was I thinking about Ian and what he did or didn’t like?

“You going to eat those last few fries?” my mother asked.

I raised an eyebrow at her. I couldn’t believe she put away her whole meal. The woman barely broke five-foot-tall and didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds.

“No. Go ahead. Unlike you, my metabolism isn’t quite so forgiving,” I lamented.

“Oh, pooh.” My mother waved her hand, holding one of her snatched fries. “You’re as skinny as ever, and I know you don’t do any kind of working out. You were blessed with my genes. Consider yourself lucky. Your father is probably four hundred pounds by now if his eating and drinking habits stayed the same as they were.”

My mom rarely talked about my dad. None of us did. He walked out and made it very clear he wanted nothing to do with us. We didn’t waste time trying to worry about why and all that crap. My mom was enough parent to be both our mom and dad. Talia and I had wanted for nothing.

“I love you, Mom,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to say it out loud.

She looked at me funny. “I love you too, dear.”

She finished the last few fries, and we headed to her car.

“Do you want to take a walk around the town square? I don’t think you’ve been down there since—” She stopped.

I hadn’t been there since Talia died. It was somewhere we used to hang out a lot together.

“Sure. That’d be nice. It’ll help walk off some of that lunch,” I said.

I sat back and watched the scenery as my mom drove down roads that were once so familiar. I missed the trees in Georgia, covered in Spanish moss. It was so beautiful; I often questioned if my decision to move to Florida was the right one.

Mom parked the car, put change in the meter, and we began our walk. We stayed silent as we walked down the cobblestone sidewalks.

“I don’t think anything has changed,” I mused.

“Well, I think all of these little shops have changed owners, some several times, but they always maintain the name and the goods to make it feel like it’s the same,” my mom said with a knowing voice.

I took her word for it. She dragged me into a few antique shops. I provided the prerequisite oohs and aahs when appropriate, but my mind was elsewhere. It was on Ian. I couldn’t stop thinking about the man, which was making me a little crazy. The kiss had been so great. It was odd that I liked it so much. Not just ‘liked’ — ‘obsessed’ was the right word. Maybe it was the twelve-year age gap compared to other men I had kissed. He had more practice—a lot more practice.

“Something on your mind?” my mom asked with a look that said she knew I was preoccupied.

“No, I was checking out those antique rings. They are very unique,” I quickly said.

She didn’t believe me but didn’t press the issue. Thank God.

My mom would definitely not approve of me getting into a relationship with a professor. I knew that she wouldn’t care about the age gap, but the fact that he was a professor and I was a student, that would piss her off. She would lay into Ian as well as myself.

“I think we’ve done enough walking,” Mom said. “Let’s just head back to the house.”

I nodded in agreement. I wanted some time alone to think about what I should do about Ian. I had to figure it out before things went too far and one of us did something we truly regretted. His job was on the line, as was my degree. We both had too much to lose.

We pulled into the driveway, and I stared up at the familiar doorway and the same potted flowers that my mom always kept up. It all looked as it should, but I knew when I walked through that door, nothing was as it should be. Talia should be in there. But she wasn’t and never would be again.

“Don’t,” my mom started. “I know it’s hard.”

I nodded, blinking back the tears that had formed. I walked inside and went straight to my room. Flopping down on my bed once I was alone, I let the tears fall. I needed this release. As the tears streamed down my face, my mind drifted back to Ian. How many times had he laid in his bed like this, crying over his dead wife and child?

He was a gentleman. Although we had only gotten the chance to talk a couple of times, I had learned a lot about him in the things he said. His passion for the ocean drew me in, but he was more than that. He was kind and considerate. I loved watching him check the desks after each class. He had taken on this caretaker position when no one expected or asked for it.

I had to make sure he understood that we could never be an item. We could never kiss again. Hopefully, once we both said our piece, we could do away with that horrible awkwardness we had on Friday. That was awful, and there was no way I could go the entire school year with him being all weird. It was better for both of us. I know he will understand and be on board.

“Tessa, I’ll be in the garden,” my mom called out, interrupting my musings. I smiled. Whenever mom was stressed, she headed for her garden. She had more produce than she knew what to do with, but she insisted on growing more and more every year.

“I’ll help,” I called out, deciding I could use a little manual labor to get my mind off things and people, namely Ian.

At least my obsession with Ian and the kiss kept my mind off the other more obvious worries. Being back in Georgia would have been much harder had I not had something else to worry about. I guess there was a little good in everything, no matter how horrible the situation was.