Elizabeth didn’t know what to say. Grief was like that: One minute you were tripping the light fantastic; the next minute, an old blue pillow made you cry.
Anita smoothed her hand across the pillow. “Your daddy always tried to get me to take up needlepoint, but I never could master it. Such a feminine thing.”
Elizabeth glanced down at the pillow. It was one of the few mementos she had of her mother. She had often tried to imagine her mother in a rocking chair, working with all that beautiful silk thread, but all she could draw up was a black-and-white image of a young woman looking into the camera.
“Your mama made this pillow,” Anita said. “I can tell by her dainty stitches. That time she came into the beauty salon? She stitched the whole time Mabel cut her hair.”
“I try to picture her sometimes.”
Anita set the pillow down and stood up, then placed her thin hands on Elizabeth’s shoulders and guided her toward the mirror that hung above the bureau.
Elizabeth stared at her own puffy reflection. Her hair was a mess, her face looked pale without makeup.
“When I first saw your mama, I thought she was the loveliest woman I’d ever seen. She and Edward looked like a pair of movie stars together.” Anita pulled the hair back from Elizabeth’s face. “You’re the spittin’ image of her.”
As a girl, Elizabeth had spent hours searching through family photographs for pictures of her mother, but she’d never found more than a few.
She’d been looking in the wrong place for years, and no one had ever told her. All she’d needed to see Mama was a mirror. Now, as she looked into her own green eyes, she saw a hint of the woman she’d spent all her life missing. “Thank you, Anita,” she said in a shaky voice.
“You’re welcome, honey.”
Jack barely slept that night.
Bleary-eyed and hungover, he padded into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Unfortunately, the hot water couldn’t wash away his regret. He’d slept with Sally again last night.
He wished he could believe it wouldn’t matter; he and Birdie were separated, after all. But he knew better. This separation wasn’t a license to screw around. It was a hiatus, a resting period in the midst of a long marriage. If he found out that Birdie had been unfaithful, he would kill the guy.
She’d forgiven him once, but that had been years ago, when they were different people. Back then, she’d been willing to sacrifice a huge amount of herself for their family. Though he’d hurt her, she’d been willing to believe in him again. In them.
But those days were gone. The new Birdie was a woman he couldn’t predict.
She might learn about this mistake and file for divorce.
Or maybe she wouldn’t care anymore. Maybe she’d drifted so far away that fidelity didn’t matter.
He wiped steam off the bathroom mirror and stared at his hazy reflection. After a night of partying, the wrinkles around his eyes were more pronounced, and his skin had a sick gray tinge. It was easy to imagine himself as an old man, stooped by time and bad choices, tottering forward with a cane to steady his walk.
He’d always believed that Birdie would be beside him in those twilight years, still loving him when he had nothing to offer but a shaking hand and his heart. It had never occurred to him—not even in the past weeks—that they wouldn’t always be together.
Now, suddenly, he was afraid. What if he’d finally ruined it?
He had just started shaving when the phone rang. Naked, he walked into the bedroom to answer it. “Hello?”
“Hel-lo, Dad.” Jamie sighed disgustedly. “I told you he was still at home. He forgot us.”
Shit. Today was the day they were going to Oregon. “I was just walking out the door.”
Lame, Jack. Lame.
“Often, people leave for the airport before the plane lands,” Jamie said.
“I meant to.”
“He meant to,” Jamie said, clearly talking to her sister. “How long until you’ll be here? Maybe we should get a room and wait until it’s convenient for you to pick us up.”
He glanced at the clock. It was eight-forty-eight. “An hour, max. I don’t know what traffic is like. Our plane doesn’t leave until …”
“Eleven-forty-nine.”
“Right. I’ll meet you at the gate by ten.”
Jamie sighed. “We’ll be there, Dad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Really.”
“We know. See you in a few.”
Jack hung up the phone, took two aspirin, and rushed to get dressed.
What if Birdie could tell he’d been unfaithful just by looking at him?
Damn. One screwup at a time. For now, he had to deal with the fact that he’d forgotten to meet his children at the airport.
In ten minutes, he was out the door and in a cab, heading toward Kennedy.
That gave him plenty of time to figure out what to say beyond, I’m sorry.