My first thought is that something must be wrong.
CeCe and Beau are sitting on the porch swing and he has his arms around her, their heads bent together. If he’s comforting her—I jump out of the car. Tommy was fine when I left an hour ago. The hospice nurse said he was doing okay. CeCe should have called me. Tommy was tired, but he was fine. He was going to take a nap, and then he said he’d feel better.
He said—wait one damn second. Beau is not comforting her.
I slam the car door and they don’t even hear me. “Get your hands off my daughter,” I scream, louder than I mean to. They pull away from each other and CeCe’s face is bright red. “Cecelia, get in the house. Adam, go home.”
“I’m not Adam.” He stands, still holding my daughter’s hand. “I’m not my dad.”
“I said go home.”
He may not be his dad, but he’s got the same white-blond hair, the same ice-cold blue eyes, and I’m willing to bet he’s got the same streak of trouble and destruction and disregard for the people who care about him.
CeCe and Beau look at each other, and I can’t believe I missed this. All the girls on his Instagram. I haven’t checked either of their accounts in the last few weeks. I didn’t think I needed to, they were both here or with Jill or—oh, God. Who knows where they could have been, what they could have done. Right under my nose, and I didn’t see it.
“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” CeCe says.
“Go inside, Cecelia.”
The front door opens and Tommy stands there looking like a ghost of himself. I’m too angry to be embarrassed that Dolly is standing there beside him, hearing everything.
“Everything okay?” Tommy asks in his shrink voice, slow and careful.
“Nothing is okay.” CeCe’s voice is strong but quivering. I can tell she’s on the verge of tears. “I hate you,” she says before running inside. Beau follows her and I don’t stop him even though I want to.
“You handle this,” I tell Tommy before turning and walking away. I’m not sure where I’m going, and I don’t care that the groceries are still in the back of the car. Let them go bad. Everything else around here has.
Out of habit, I turn down Barracuda, but I don’t stop at Jill’s house. I keep walking toward the beach, hoping the calming energy of the water will help me relax. At the bottom of the old, wooden steps, I slip my shoes off and step into the sand.
I walk closer to the water and take a deep breath, letting the salty air fill my lungs. My footprints get washed away as soon as I pick my feet up, as if I were never there. I stop and let the water rush over my toes as I sink deeper into the cold, hard sand.
When they hand you the baby at the hospital and send you on your way, they make sure you know how to change their diaper, how to feed and bathe and swaddle them. But after that, you’re on your own.
It’s like I blinked and CeCe went from a baby to a toddler. I blinked again and she was double digits. And now, she’s a teenager, trying so hard to be a woman. Tommy can handle this. That’s what he does, he handles the hard things.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” a woman says, walking toward me. She looks like she doesn’t have a care in the world, but she’s got to. Everyone has something difficult they’re facing. I want to know what hers is, but I stop myself from asking because I know that’s not a normal thing to say or do.
Instead, I smile and let her pass me by. But I’m tired of smiling and pretending everything is okay. Why do people do that, anyway? It’s not like it’s a secret that life is hard, that it isn’t fair. They say you should be kind to strangers because you don’t know what they’re going through. So why don’t we tell each other what we’re going through?
The next time someone asks how I’m doing, I’m going to be honest. I’m going to tell them that I’m sad and I’m scared and I’m trying to be brave, but it’s hard when you don’t recognize your own life anymore.
I know what Tommy would say. He would tell me that all I have to do is be there. To stay. You’d think I would have learned the lesson by now, but things got tough and off I went again.
The first time Tommy called me out on my habit of running away when things got too hard, he said I should stay and face the music. He told me that some things are worth fighting for.
Of course he was right. He still is.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that Tommy is worth fighting for. So is CeCe. I kick the sand, mad at myself for doing the same damn thing again. I need to find a way to let him know that I’m not going anywhere; even when it gets harder than it is now, I’m going to stay.
There’s got to be something I can do. I twirl the Art Deco ring on my finger, wishing an idea would come to me the way it did when I was at work, trying to solve a stupid marketing problem that in the end didn’t really matter.
What really matters is waiting for me at home; Tommy and CeCe matter more than anything. I glance down at the ring, and suddenly, I know what I have to do. But I can’t do it alone.
JILL’S CAR IS in her driveway, so I let myself in the gate and walk up to the front door. Normally I’d just walk inside, but normally she knows I’m coming.
I knock and Jill opens the door with a dishrag thrown over her shoulder and splatters of something sugary and sweet on her apron.
“Hey,” I say, trying to contain my excitement. But instead of moving aside to let me in, Jill steps outside and closes the door behind her. She puts her hands on her hips and leans against the doorframe. There’s an expression on her face I’ve never seen before. “What’s wrong?”
“Beau told me what happened,” she says in the stern-mom voice I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to replicate for the last fourteen years.
“Oh, that.”
Jill laughs in a way that makes it clear that she finds it to be anything but funny.
“What would you have done if you’d caught them making out?” I ask in my defense. This is not going the way I thought it would.
“I’d be okay with it—they’re teenagers, and they’re our kids.”
“Boys are different than girls.” I hate that I can’t explain how terrifying it felt, seeing my little girl in the arms of her son. Maybe it wouldn’t have been quite as bad if he didn’t look so much like his father.
“I’ve got one of each,” Jill reminds me. Poor Abigail is awfully forgettable.
“Abigail is different, you don’t have to worry about her. CeCe—she’s . . . I don’t even know what she is. And Beau is his father’s son.”
I’m waiting for Jill to tell me she understands. She was married to the man, surely she can see all the ways her son is just like him—but she’s still standing there, glaring at me with an icy expression I’ve never been on the receiving end of before. “He’s also his mother’s son.”
“You’re really mad about this?”
“I’m madder than mad!” She spits the words out and crosses her arms over her chest to make the point. Her eyes turn cold and her lips stretch into a disappointed line. It’s like her whole face shuts down.
I’m speechless, which I’ve never been with Jill. Not ever.
“You insulted my son—twice now,” she says. “He’s upstairs hurting, by the way.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know, I don’t think you are.” We stand there for a second, and I’m not sure what else to say. “I think I heard the timer go off,” Jill says.
I didn’t hear anything, but I let her go.