Speak of the devil. She’d been thinking about her mother more on this afternoon, framing and arranging family photos, than she had in months. And here was a greeting card from her.
She sat down at the desk chair and pushed her finger under the flap, tearing the envelope open across the top.
The card was generic, a watercolor of two bells tied with glittery ribbon. Best Wishes on Your Wedding, it read. When she opened it, a slip of paper slid out. Bev caught it before it fell, but she tucked it behind the card and read that first.
On the inside was an innocuous little rhyming poem about happiness and true love. Bev glanced at it but didn’t read it. On the blank left side, her mother had written: Thanks for the invite. Sorry I couldn’t make it. It made the Boston papers, though. Looks like you’ve done well for yourself. Congratulations.
She’d signed it Jane. Not Mom, or even Mother. Her name.
Bev pulled the slip of paper forward. It was a check. For five dollars. There was no address on the top of the check, either. Just her mother’s name.
Staring at this last bit of venom from her mother’s fangs, and hating the way it made her head buzz, Bev picked up her phone and called Nick.
He answered right away. “Hi, bella.”
“When will you be home today?” Asking her husband when he’d be home settled her down a little.
“A couple hours. Why?”
“My mom sent us a card.” Her voice cracked on the last word. Why was she so upset? They’d barely had any relationship at all since she was eighteen. Since her father’s death, she’d seen her mother twice and spoken to her maybe four times. Total.
“I’m coming home now. Fifteen minutes. I love you, Beverly.”
~oOo~
“If you want to confront her, I can find her.”
They were curled together on the sofa, Nick’s arms snug around her. Since he’d been home, she’d tried to call her mother, but the number she had was disconnected. She had cut her out completely.
“No. I don’t even know why I’m so upset. It’s not like this is going to change my life at all. We’ve never been close.” She sighed and blinked back tears. It pissed her off more than anything that she kept trying to cry over this. “What she did was just so mean. I don’t know why she had to be mean.”
“I want to confront her.” There was menace in his voice.
She sat up and turned to face him. “No. It’s better if she doesn’t know I reacted at all. Let her think I don’t care. I shouldn’t care. I don’t know why I do.”
“She’s your mother. She’s supposed to love you.”
“She never forgave me for scandalizing the neighborhood by trying to kill myself. With the divorce, and then that, I think the Maddoxes were the talk of the book club for a while. Appearances are important to her. She hated that I was fat, too. Which only made me fatter. And more suicidal.” Getting buried in memory, Bev shook off the weight of it with a sigh. “You’re lucky. You have an awesome mom. Your whole family is wonderful.”
He kissed her head, and she leaned into it. “They love you. Every one of them. I think they love me more because of you. You’ve made me more a part of my own family. They’re your family, too, bella.”
“Then I’m lucky, too.”
“Yes. You traded up. But if I ever meet Jane Maddox, she won’t soon forget it.”
~oOo~
“Hey, Bev.”
“Donnie!” Bev was sitting on the floor in what Chris had called his ‘transition’ stacks and she and Katrynn were turning into the poetry section. Donnie held out his hand and helped her up, and they hugged—the tight, sincere hug of good friends. “I thought I was meeting you there.”
He shrugged. “Don’t call me a pussy, but I didn’t want to walk in on my own.” His voice was different now because his mouth didn’t move the way it once had. He was about halfway through a long, arduous surgical journey as doctors tried to give him back something like a normal face. Right now, the skin on the right side of his face was so tight and smooth and featureless it seemed synthetic. His right ear was still mostly gone. That would be the last thing they fixed.
He had been a baby-faced guy, his features so symmetrical he’d been almost beautiful rather than handsome. From the left profile, he still was. But he would never be classically handsome again, no matter what the doctors did.
He’d retained his goofy good humor, though—or he’d gotten it back, just as Bev had found her true self again, too. Most of her scars were on the inside. Today was a test, she thought, to know how healed she really was on the inside. Donnie, too.