My dad furrowed his brows, clearly wanting to push the subject, but I knew he wouldn’t.
After dinner, he went into his room to watch game footage, and I pulled my mother's book out of my backpack and flipped to where I'd slipped my bookmark between the worn pages earlier that day. I'd left off at the beginning of the vegetable section, and before I started reading, I went out onto the back porch and sat on the top stair. Reading her scribbles and working in my garden always brought me a sort of solace, so combining them meant that my breaths came easy and my thoughts smoothed themselves out.
As usual, her handwriting gave me a jolt of nostalgia as I read over the first few lines of text.
Lilah insisted we start planting the vegetables early. We normally plant seedlings, but this year, she wants to do seeds. We'll be trying zucchini, squash, and bell peppers. Maybe next year we'll plant even more, but I didn't want to get in over our heads. Chris built a few raised beds out of some old lumber so Lilah and I would have somewhere to plant our seeds.
Her words overflowed into the margins and I had to turn the book to read them. I wished I could have asked her why she chose to write in a gardening book instead of a journal. She could have filled entire pages with her words, but instead she was confined to the small spaces left over in the margins.
Upon finding her gardening book a few weeks earlier, I'd searched through the rest of her things, hoping to find a journal, but there was nothing else lurking in the boxes. The small gardening book was my final connection with her. At once, I craved to read it all, to greedily rush through every word, and yet, I wanted to savor it slowly and make it last forever. It felt like for those brief moments I had my mother back, the real one who’d been there for the first seven years of my life.
Lilah and I figured out that yellow squash tend to need a bit more water than the zucchinis.
I ran over the text a few times before slipping the bookmark back between the pages and standing up to grab the garden hose. I headed straight to the squash, where the vines were growing wild and big yellow flowers were starting to sprout. I let the water soak into the dark soil, giving the plants extra water just as the book instructed, all the while feeling closer to my mom than I had in ten years.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Lilah
I stopped by Crosby’s Market on the way back from school the next day. I walked through the aisles and paused in front of the display of hair dye. My roots were in bad shape and I couldn’t ignore them any longer.
I stared at the smiling woman on the front of the box of blonde dye. I’d resented her months before, annoyed with her easy smile. Now I didn’t think she was so bad. Even still, I reached for the box of black dye, not because I had an agenda or because I wanted to be a rebel.
Nope, I just liked the black.
I carried the dye in my hand as I walked the mile to Ashley’s house. It was starting to warm up and by the time I reached her front door, I was practically melting. Summer had almost arrived.
Ashley opened the door after I knocked and I held up the box of dye. “Can you spare a few minutes for a friend?”
She scanned over my blonde roots and smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
Lilah
I’d been obsessed with uncovering the secrets and lies of Blackwater, Texas because I had a theory I desperately needed to prove: no one was as happy, as perfect, or as good as they were pretending to be.
For half of my childhood, my mother had been the subject of every whisper uttered in my small town.
She was the bad mom who’d left her daughter.
She was the drug addict who couldn’t get clean.
She was the lost woman with no hope of redemption.
I watched everyone in my small town turn against her, pulling back inch by inch until she was nothing more than a shadow they tried their best to avoid. They’d pull their children back when they saw her approaching, they’d cross the street and avert eye contact. I watched them judge her and dissect her choices, confident that they were better, they were wiser, they were happier. Superior.
I was confused by the hypocrisy of it even as a kid and now I had a journal that proved my theory.
We all tell lies. We all live in delusions.
So why was my mom so terrible? Why were her failures not met with forgiveness?
Because her lies were on the outside. They were written across her face, plain to see. They were uncomfortable and dark and big enough that they made other lies seem small and simple. Infidelity, fraud, gossip were all eclipsed by my mother’s crashing and burning.