“You should be. Amelia posts all sorts of stuff.”
“Of course she does,” Liz said before she could censor herself. At least she didn’t roll her eyes. She didn’t need Macy wondering about the state of her familial relations. Before Macy could formulate a theory, Liz added, “Amelia is a lovely girl.”
“In every way,” Macy agreed.
Was she being tart? For once, Liz couldn’t tell.
They parted ways shortly after that. Macy headed back across the cul-de-sac to her creamy brown colonial with the wide front porch and the four hand-carved rockers. She would curl up in the sunroom with her tablet and write God only knew what on Facebook and maybe Twitter. Such an appropriate name for shrill little birdies chirping away. Liz was sure that there were others, too. Sites with names she didn’t recognize and that would make Macy feel superior to announce. But Liz was determined not to care. Tomorrow wasn’t about Macy or resurrecting a Key Lake tradition. It was about Quinn. About reclaiming something good and innocent and real. Liz had to focus on that.
A shelf in the basement contained Liz’s flower arranging supplies, and she carefully selected a glazed clay urn in a dreamy, midnight blue. It was heavy, the sort of object she would have marked with a Post-it note and left for Jack to carry up the stairs. But she was her own woman now, self-sufficient in a way that she didn’t know she could be back when her kids began to grow up. She had practically been a child bride, though twenty wasn’t so out of the ordinary when she’d said “I do.” Several years later she started having children of her own. And now. Who was she now? A wife, former. A mother, still. And yet.
If nothing else, she was strong enough to carry the urn.
Liz plastered it to her chest, wet foam blocks, flower wire, and a roll of green tape tucked inside. She shuffled up the stairs one at a time, straining against the weight even as she relished the tight knot of her muscles, her body performing a task that made her feel powerful. Alive. Guilty, because she was here and Jack was not. Guilty, because a part of her was glad that the roles were not reversed.
Maybe she was going through some sort of late midlife crisis.
“Buy a new car,” she huffed at her reflection in the hall mirror. “Have some work done. Take a lover.”
The last one surprised her. A new car was always on the table and Jack had joked on more than one occasion that he’d happily underwrite a boob job. Of course, he didn’t say it like that. Jack wasn’t crass. But Liz knew that his carefully timed comments and fleeting glances at her less-than-perky barely C cups were wistful. She’d be a liar if she said she hadn’t entertained the thought herself. But, a lover?
Liz laughed.
She was more interested in Quinn’s love life than her own.
There was newspaper on the kitchen table, spread out and ready for the heavy urn and the rough bottom that might scratch the hand-scraped hardwood. Liz hefted the container onto an article about one local woman’s exquisite quilts and set to work. She soaked the wet foam in water from her rain barrel and trimmed the stalks of delphinium. Stripping the stems of leaves, she placed them one by one into the foam, enjoying the sharp snitch of sound as each flower found its place. Even before it was finished, the centerpiece was artful, gorgeous. The sort of arrangement that could be featured on the cover of a decorating magazine. Sometimes Liz wondered if she could still do that sort of thing. Mark the world in some way more significant than the thin and fleeting likeness of herself in her children.
They didn’t want any part of her, anyway.
It was a hard knot of feeling in the center of her chest. A tangle of emotion that had been pulled tight with time, stony and dense and silent. As cool and bittersweet as the spice of damp air in her grandmother’s root cellar. Liz blinked away sudden tears, furious at herself, at how ridiculous and sentimental and old she had become. She had done well by her children. There was nothing to be ashamed of.
So why were they ashamed of her?
No matter. She was still their mother and she would fix what she could fix. Whether they liked it or not.
Maybe she should have done this years ago. Taken the bull by the horns, so to speak, and steered it in the right direction. As it was, she had no choice but to interfere now. And if things got messy? Well, it was true what they said about love and war. And whoever coined that particular phrase wasn’t a lover—she was a mother.
When the arrangement was Better Homes and Gardens centerfold worthy, Liz grabbed her purse off the hook in the entryway and let herself out the door. She had been raised well, and she knew how to right a wrong. A good old-fashioned “I’m sorry” went a long way, but a gift certainly didn’t hurt. Liz knew just what to do.
She cut another armload of delphiniums, a bouquet almost as impressive as the one that would soon adorn her banquet table. Wrapping the stems in newspaper that she dampened with the garden hose, she laid them carefully on the floor of her back seat. Then she was off to the liquor store, where she spent a good ten minutes reading wine labels. What was good? Jack Sr. had liked his whiskey expensive and his wine cheap, so Liz had never really learned to pick out a bottle of wine. She finally settled on a French Chenin Blanc with a label that looked like old sheet music. Pretty, even if the wine turned out not to be to Quinn’s liking.
Sometimes Liz felt like she had spent her whole life keeping the peace. Settling disputes between her children, running interference between Jack and his daughters. Well, mostly Nora. And swallowing disappointment like bad medicine because what other choice did she have? To call out her husband—to name the lies they both knew he told—what good would that have done? It would have split up a family. Left her destitute, abandoned, alone. Nobody would have won. Least of all Liz.
She was a good peacekeeper. Shush now, be content, let it go. Peacemaking—now that was a different thing altogether. That was bombs and battles, wars waged for the sake of starting over, from the scorched earth up, on something pure and worthy. Peacemaking meant casualties, and Liz was all too willing to fall on a sword of silence if it meant life could go on the way it always had.
? ? ?
The sun was slanting high overhead when Liz arrived at the A-frame for the second time that day. It was time to start thinking about supper, to maybe take a pound or two of ground beef out of the freezer to start thawing for burgers on the grill in just a couple hours. Beer thirty, Jack Sr. had called midafternoon in summer, and it struck Liz that maybe she and Quinn could resurrect an old tradition and open a bottle of wine on the dock.
She knocked on the door this time. A quick, happy, four-note rap that sounded to her like, “Honey, I’m home!” Then she stepped back and waited with a smile on her face.