Love Me for Me(39)

“Very well,” he said, looking out over the water. The bay was so large at that spot that there was nothing on the other side but the thin, gray line of the horizon. “Other than the fact that I can’t ever take a walk by myself again, life is good. Can’t complain.”

Her strong, confident, capable Pop was no longer standing before her. Little by little, time was stealing his independence, and it bothered her far more than she let on. She didn’t want him to think she pitied him, but the sadness she felt over it was so great. She wished she could rewind time and make it all go away. Clearly, from his comment, Pop was trying to keep things light, so Libby tried to be upbeat about it as well. “There are worse things, I suppose,” she said.

His eyebrows went up in thought. “You are quite right,” he said, Pete moving beside him and patting him on the back.

“How are ya, Pop? Enjoying the party?”

“I always enjoy a good party. You’d better get back, though. I saw the chefs arrive with the lobster a while back.”

“You had the party catered?” Libby asked, surprised. “Fancy.” No wonder Jeanie hadn’t needed to bring food.

The corners of Pete’s mouth turned up and he shook his head back and forth. “I’m sure that’s right up your alley,” he kidded.

“Oh!” Helen’s voice sailed over the lawn toward them. “Wait! Let’s take a photo! Pop, you get in the middle. Libby and Pete, get on either side!” She held the camera up to her face. “That’s nice!” she said from behind it. “Smile! One, two, three!” As Helen meandered off into the crowd, Libby took that moment to look at Pop and Pete together. It had been a long time since she’d been with just the two of them, everyone happy.

She remembered Pop, when they were kids, leaning over the kitchen table at Helen’s while Libby and Pete finished their homework. Pop, who was exceptionally good at algebra, would spend hours going over different rules for solving problems. She’d thought how he could be doing countless other things with his time, but he’d spent many evenings doing schoolwork instead. He was more like a dad than her own father.

She wanted something for her memory box, but there wasn’t anything around that she could grab. She wanted to remember that moment by the shore, when Pop was still lucid enough to know them all and when Pete was happy and sweet to her. It was sad to let the moment go without something by which to remember it.

When they got back up to the yard, Pete tended to the caterers, and Libby checked her phone while she was far enough inland to have good reception. A slew of emails that had probably been trapped in cyberspace waiting for a signal pinged into her phone. One of them was from an accounting firm in New York. Her heart leapt at the sight of it. She almost didn’t want to open it so that she could maintain her excitement a little longer. She was terrified to read it, fearful that it wasn’t everything she’d hoped for: her ticket back to New York, her only shot out of White Stone. She wandered around the side of the house to read it.

In all this bad luck, she’d started to doubt herself. She’d wondered if maybe her Manhattan job had been a fluke. She’d worried that she’d seen the peak of her career. When she had a city apartment, her designer clothes, a fantastic job and a handsome boyfriend, she felt like she could move mountains. Perhaps that had been her mother’s coaching, but it didn’t matter now. It was a part of who she was. She wanted to get her life back on track.

In the city, she watched mothers push strollers through Central Park wearing Stella McCartney boots and Fendi scarves, drinking lattes as they met the other mothers in the park. She wanted to be one of those mothers, going to the Children’s Museum on the Upper West Side on Saturdays. She wanted to have children to share her years with and a husband to care for and who cared for her. The first step in that journey was to get another job in the city. Once she was back, she’d meet more people, go out, and begin living her life again.

She scrolled through the email on her phone. They wanted to set up an interview, and they left a number to call. We are interested in finding out more about your skill set… Please call us at your earliest convenience… We’d like to have you in as soon as possible… The further she read in the email, the more her life came into focus. While White Stone was a lovely place to be, it wasn’t where she should be.

She read the words over and over, her heart pounding harder with every word. She had to rearrange her lips to mask the grin that wanted to spread across her face. She felt like screaming and running around the yard, waving her phone! Everything she’d worked for her entire life meant something at that moment because it proved that on paper, she was as worthy as everyone else she knew in New York. She had the right experience for the position being offered, and if she played her cards right, she’d nail the interview. She read the email one more time just for kicks.