She continues. “Imagine Darnelle Bogart if she heard that one,” she breathes, leaning close to me with a conspiratorial smile. “Can you think how fast that would travel around town? Like lightning, I guarantee you!”
I smile. “Mom, we’re talking about someone I love.”
“Of course, Rebecca,” she says, remembering herself. She continues smiling in slight amusement though, and while I wish she had reacted more seriously, I’ll admit I’m relieved she’s not chiding me about his lifestyle—or my own choices.
I explain about the break-up, about how he couldn’t seem to let go of Alex, and her expression grows much more serious as she listens quietly.
“That only means he’s loyal,” she observes gently.
“But not to me.”
“No,” she disagrees. “It means he’s loyal to anyone he loves. And you say he loves you?”
I stare at her hardwood floor, tears threatening to fill my eyes. “He did. But it’s been almost two months.”
“Well, of course he still loves you then, Rebecca,” she says. “Because he is loyal, you can count on it. Just like he’s loyal to this Alex.”
“Mama, I think he’s waiting for me.”
“He probably is,” she agrees.
“That scares me.”
“Rebecca, love is never without its risks or doubts, precious,” she begins thoughtfully, an appreciative expression filling her face. “Love is patient; love is kind. Love bears all things. Hopes all things.” She’s doing it again: wrapping life’s plain truths in Scripture; she always makes it seem that the one can’t be separated from the other.
Love bears all things. Of her words, those are the ones that reverberate right through me. I love Michael. I loved him before, and I still love him now. Couldn’t I have borne his grief long enough, until he found his way through to the other side of it? Was my own love so tentative and fragile that it wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of his sorrow?
I bow my head, tears filling my eyes, and my dear mother simply sits beside me, wordless. She slips her arm around my shoulder, squeezing. After a time I look up, wiping at my eyes.
“You don’t care that he’s been with a man?” I ask, trying to picture Michael assimilating into my hometown culture, a world where Darnelle Bogart could slingshot the risqué news of our romance down Main Street in a single afternoon. “You don’t worry about the gossip back home?”
“Oh, honey, I was joking,” she assures me. “How will they ever know?”
“They could find out.” There’s always the National Enquirer, but I don’t remind her of that.
She swats her hand at me. “Like we care!” she laughs. “Daddy and I have weathered all kinds of gossip and survived.” That’s true enough: with a hometown celebrity for a daughter—one with a TV expose devoted to her—they’ve been through it all.
“Well, this may come as a surprise to you, Rebecca Ann,” she laughs. “But I have lived a little. And in my experience, there’s nothing more important than the loyal love of a good man.”
Inside her house right then, the phone rings: it’s the moving company calling for directions. Our conversation is interrupted; long enough for me sit in her garden surrounded by her wind chimes and small pavement stones and sculptures, and think of how I’ll miss my mother once she moves tomorrow. As long as she was here I could always run home and be safe.
I’m safe right now, but life—to be truly lived—involves risk. And I know that it’s time I started living again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Michael
I’ve done my best to make a lot of things right in the past few months. To establish more credibility in my life, to get more honest. Coming clean with Andie about our family was the biggest of those steps. Sitting here on the back deck, deliberating about trying to call Rebecca one more time, I know that there’s another call I should make. That I need to make, but I’ve been putting it off for more than a year now.
I pick up my cell, turning it in my palm, and know that I need to tell my father that Alex died. That we had a daughter together, years before that. And that he’s a grandfather.
Truth is, ole George has tried calling me plenty of times in the past few years; I just never take the calls. I think about Ellen’s words that day up in Santa Cruz. That I’m a dad, too, and I know how that kind of estrangement must be killing him.
I stand up and walk to the sliding doors that lead inside. I lean in through the open door and call out to Andie. “Sweetpea, there’s somebody I’m going to want you to talk to in a little while. I think. So when I call you, come on out here, okay?”
She makes a sharp cry and tells me that she just beat her high score on Super Mario Cart. I listen for a moment, smiling as she talks to herself, and know that she’s starting to come alive again. That she’s healing.
And more than ever, I know I have to go make that call to my father because I’m healing, too.