Phoebe’s mother’s house was a big space with great views out over Sacramento, filled with expensive furnishings. When her mother walked inside, looking much happier than she had been when she’d been staying with Phoebe, she was surprised enough by her unexpected visitor to let out a small squeak.
“Phoebe?”
“David let me in,” Phoebe said, her voice breaking on the final short word. She’d told herself a hundred times during the drive from San Francisco to Sacramento that she wasn’t going to cry over some guy.
Only, Patrick wasn’t just some guy.
This was exactly the kind of emotion she’d worked so hard to keep from feeling. She’d seen this kind of pain so many times in her mother and her girlfriends, and now it was bubbling away inside of her as she struggled to keep it down.
But she couldn’t stop it. Not this time, not when the full pain of breaking up with Patrick was sweeping over her like a tidal wave.
All these years she’d told herself she didn’t need anyone.
What a huge lie that had been.
Because when push came to shove, Phoebe had realized she didn’t want to be alone. And then the memories of how loving her mother had been with her when she was a child came back to her in a rush, and it had seemed so obvious: if she just went to her mother, everything would be all right, wouldn’t it?
“Oh, honey, what happened?” Her mother sat down beside her, putting an arm around her shoulders.
Phoebe had always been the one comforting her mother, not the other way around. Now, though, she let her mother hold her while she began to cry.
“You drove here like this?” her mother asked.
Phoebe nodded, not trusting herself to speak right then. She could barely remember the trip now. She’d made it, somehow.
And the important thing was that she wasn’t alone.
“All right, Cally,” her mother said. “Whatever it is that’s wrong, I’m here for you and you can stay with David and me as long as you need to. You haven’t eaten have you?”
Phoebe shook her head.
Angela tucked a blanket around Phoebe’s lap and dried her tears with the back of her hands. Just as she had when Phoebe was younger and hadn’t felt well. “I’m going to make us both something to eat.”
Over the past few years, Phoebe had been the one in the kitchen putting together a meal for her mother, grasping for a way to try and cheer her up. And yet, everything was backwards today as she sat there on her mother’s couch, trying to find some way through the knotted maze of pain tangled inside her, and failing utterly.
“Here,” her mother said a short while later, putting a plate of pasta down in front of her. “Eat. It will do you good.”
Phoebe shook her head. “I’m not sure I can, Mom. I feel…”
How did she feel? How could she explain what it felt like, when the sheer heartache throbbing inside her was indescribable right then?
“I know,” her mother said.
Phoebe had the vague thought that it must be one of the reasons why she had come running to Sacramento: her mother was the one person on the planet who would understand the raw anguish that came from losing Patrick, even if Phoebe didn’t fully understand it herself yet.
“Eat,” her mother insisted. “You’ve always said it would make me feel better. And you were always right. Trust me, it will make you feel better.”
The meal her mother made her didn’t do anything to make the hurt go away, but the simplicity and normality of it seemed to almost ground her a little, helped her to think about something other than just how badly things had ended with Patrick. Not only how badly she’d ended them…but what he’d said about her needing to be the one to change her mind about love if things were ever going to work between them.
“Can you tell me what happened now?” her mother asked. “Is this about Patrick?”
“We decided to start dating…and then we split up.”
Her mother took her hand. “It’s all right, Cally. I’m here for you now. Just tell me everything and together we’ll work through it, I promise.”
“We spent a lot of time together in the past two weeks. And then yesterday, we went on the most amazing date. It was incredible.” She took a shaky breath before saying, “He made me breakfast, Mom. No one’s ever done that before. He even said—”
Oh God, it was hard to say the words aloud. Even though she’d replayed him saying them a thousand times in her head already.
“—he said he loved me.”
“Oh, Cally, honey. If he loves you and you lo—”
Phoebe had to cut her mother off before she could actually say it. “But then, he started talking about going back to Chicago for a long term project. And we argued.” Phoebe bit her lip, remembering the things she’d said, the way she’d thrown the word fling at him. “It all went wrong, Mom, and now…now it just feels so bad.”
“It’s going to be okay, I promise.”
Phoebe shook her head. How could her mother say that when it felt like nothing would ever be right again?
“It will be,” her mother insisted. “You’ll get him back, and things will be fine again, you’ll see. Just look at David and me. When I was at your apartment, I never would have thought that things would work out, but now…well, our relationship isn’t perfect yet, but we’re working on it.”
“You think that I’m going to get back together with Patrick after being with him once made me feel like this?”
“I know it hurts right now, but just think of how happy you were when you were together. You could be like that again.”
“I could be like this again,” Phoebe insisted, moving back from her mother on the couch. “If I get back together with Patrick, then I’m just setting myself up for even worse heartbreak later.”
Her mother reached out for her, but Phoebe moved back again. “You don’t know that, honey. He seems like a lovely young man. I don’t think he’d just abandon you.”
“You didn’t think Dad would walk out either, and look what happened there.”
Phoebe saw the hurt look on her mother’s face, and she realized that she’d gone too far. Again. Just as she had with Patrick.
“Neither one of us has all the answers,” her mother pointed out in a gentle voice. They sat there for several seconds like that, before her mother shook her head and said, “You know, honey, sometimes I think I’m never going to understand you.”
“Funny,” Phoebe said, even though right then she definitely didn’t find it the least bit humorous, “I was just thinking the same thing.”
How could they both be so different? How could her mother keep insisting that happiness was just the next man away? Right then, those seemed like questions to which Phoebe would never have the answers. Yet she knew one thing: relationships hurt no matter how you felt about them.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t have brought up Dad.”
“Well,” her mother said softly, “I’ve never been the best of role models when it comes to relationships, have I?”
Perhaps she hadn’t, but Phoebe finally understood that love didn’t follow a strict list of rules and regulations.
It happened whether you wanted it or not.
“You did your best,” Phoebe said.
“We both still got hurt, though, didn’t we?”
Phoebe was only starting to realize that sometimes you couldn’t help hurting people, even when you didn’t want to. Even when you cared about them.
Especially when you cared about them.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“I know. So am I.” Her mother put an arm around her. “You see, making up with someone isn’t all that bad, is it?”
Phoebe shook her head. Her mother was one thing, but Patrick was another. Her mother was family. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be quite as easy with Patrick.
He wasn’t tied to her by blood, so what was to stop him walking away the way her father had? The way so many of the men her mother had dated had?
Yet wasn’t there something almost brave about that? Just as Patrick had once said, “Sometimes the rewards are worth the risk. And even if the odds aren’t great, they’re still so much better than if we never take a risk at all.”
Patrick had been perfectly honest with her from the start about the way he felt, and his belief that love was something to be cherished. It had seemed like such a foolish way to look at life, but now she finally understood that the alternatives weren’t much better.
Phoebe looked up, out of her mother’s window. It was getting dark, but for a moment or two, it seemed like she could see things more clearly than she had for a long time. She impulsively hugged her mother.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“For what?”
“For everything. For being there for me whenever I’ve needed you. For teaching me to love beauty and cherish it.”
“You’re welcome, honey,” her mother said. Phoebe thought she heard something catch in her mother’s voice as she said it. “Are you going to stay tonight?”
“Thanks, but I need to get back home.”
“You’re sure?”
Phoebe nodded. “There’s something I have to do.”