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I DIDN’T BOTHER KNOCKING on the door, just letting myself in and greeting my mother by calling out into the house.
“Hey!”
“Good morning!” she called back. I had come down from the hotel the first chance I’d gotten, and picked up some breakfast for us on the way—my mom’s favorite, bagel with cream cheese and bacon, along with a coffee bigger than her head. She hobbled to the door to greet me.
“You should be sitting down,” I scolded her. She shrugged and plucked the bagel from my hands.
“You really think I’m going to wait around when I can smell bacon in the house?” she replied, taking a bite of the soft bagel and making her way back to the kitchen. Even though she did her best not to let it show on her face, I could see the pain fluttering up and through her body, the little winces and tension she let get the better of her.
I followed her into the kitchen and sat at the dining table to have my own meal. I had stopped by the same diner I’d used to go to on the way to high school every morning, and it looked exactly the same as it had back then. I supposed it was the appeal of the place, the predictability of it. The menu was the same, the woman behind the counter the same, and I was pretty sure the guy in the kitchen, who had been slinging food since I was a kid, was the same too.
“I think I’ll be staying here from now on,” I told Mom as she sipped on her coffee. Her face lit up.
“Really? That’s wonderful news,” she replied. “Maybe you can put the sewing room back the way it was, then.”
I knew she was going to hate what we had done, and she had never been the kind of woman to politely hold herself back and keep herself from saying anything. She wouldn’t have been my mom if she didn’t say what was on her mind.
“Actually, I did that with Nate yesterday,” I explained to her. “Sorry, I should have left a note or something to explain it, but we thought it would be a good idea to move your bedroom downstairs so you didn’t have to worry about getting up to the second story of the house to get to bed.”
She furrowed her brow. I could tell she wasn’t very taken with the idea.
“I’m fine where I am,” she replied, dismissive. But I could still see the swelling on one of her arms, and I knew she must have been all too aware of it too. I didn’t want her to suffer, especially if it was avoidable. I knew she would do anything she could to hang on to her independence, but she needed to understand this was a way for her to do that, not a way for us to undercut her and make a mess of things. We didn’t want to take away her freedom, we wanted to make sure she could maintain it for as long as possible. It was the best we could do, in the face of everything going on right now.
I wished I could get through to her, make her see how important this was, but it would take a while before she would allow herself to come out the other side of all of this. She needed to adapt to a new way of living, a way which acknowledged her frailty, and I doubted she was in any great rush to do so.
I understood that. She valued her ability to take care of herself, and all of this was just a reminder that it wasn’t going to be so easy for her to do it in future. She would need to rely on people around her to help, even when she clearly felt she could handle everything alone. If it hadn’t been for Nate, I doubted I would ever have found out about her fall in the first place—a reality which I was doing my best not to think about. The thought of her having to navigate this by herself, hiding it from me because she didn’t want to let me see how bad things were, scared the shit out of me, mainly because I could see how close I had come to letting it happen.
I pushed the thought away and sipped my coffee. She took another bite of her bagel and gave me an expectant look.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You spent some time with him here yesterday, then?” she asked, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. I knew what she was getting at, she didn’t need to tell me twice—there was a part of me that wished I could just brush her off and convince her there was nothing going on there, but I was sure she would have found out one way or another what was really going on inside my head.
“Yeah, he stopped by so we could talk about the changes we need to make to the house,” I replied pointedly, reminding her he was there to do a job and not just to flirt.
“And you invited him in?”
“Hope that’s okay,” I replied. “It’s the only way he’s going to be able to get to the bottom of everything. He said he’ll help us make the changes, he seems to know what he’s talking about. He was going to go into construction, before he became a doctor.”
“Sounds like the two of you had plenty to talk about,” she replied, a whisper of a smile at the corners of her lips.
“He was just telling me what I needed to know,” I replied. I didn’t want to give her any ideas. I didn’t even know what the hell I was feeling for him, and the last thing I needed was my mother’s opinion on it making me even more confused.
“You must have talked about more than that,” she prompted me, leaning back in her seat. She would never have admitted it, but she loved a little gossip—even more so when it involved her own daughter.
“We were talking about the town,” I replied. “Maple Valley. I didn’t realize how little time he’d actually been here.”
“Yes, he’s not been around for long,” she agreed. “What does he think of the place? It must be a big change for him, compared to the city.”
“I don’t think he likes it very much,” I replied, wrinkling my nose and shaking my head. “He didn’t exactly sound enamored with it.”
“You sound offended,” Mom teased me.
“I mean, he’s barely been here, and he’s already making judgements about the kind of place this is?” I replied, shaking my head. “It doesn’t seem fair. He hardly knows anything about it.”
“You remember how keen you were to get out of here, don’t you?” she reminded me.
“Yes, but it’s different,” I replied. “I lived here all my life. It wasn’t as though I just made a split-second decision and judgement of the place.”
“But you came to the same conclusion he did, by the sounds of it,” she remarked, and I sighed.
“He needs to get to know it a little better before he goes and decides that,” I replied.
“And are you going to help him with that?” she asked. I glanced away from her.
“I mentioned the fair to him,” I admitted, after a moment or two. “He invited me to go with him.”
Her eyebrows shot up so high they nearly vanished into her hairline.
“You’re going to the fair with him?” she asked.
“Yeah, just to show him a little more of Maple Valley,” I replied quickly. I didn’t want her getting it into her head that this was the start of some giant, sweeping romance, when I had no intention of doing anything other than hanging out with him and having some fun.
“So, it’s a date?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “We’re just going as friends. Since he’s going to be here a little longer, I figured it’s only fair I show him some of what this town has to offer, you know?”
“Hmm,” she replied, tapping her finger on her chin and eyeing me. “It sounds very much like a date to me.”
“I’m not going to convince you otherwise, am I?” I asked her with a sigh, though I wasn’t really annoyed.
“Not at all,” she replied briskly, reaching for her coffee. “You know, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of women in this town annoyed you got to him first.”
“I haven’t got to him,” I protested. “We’re just spending some time together, that’s all.”
“Of course you are,” she replied, with that silly indulgent tone she had when she was assuring me of something she knew wasn’t true. I couldn’t help but laugh.
Before I could get out another word, though, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, and found a message from Angela waiting for me, asking if we could have a quick call. I glanced up at my mom, who seemed pretty well-settled, and figured it couldn’t hurt.
“This is work,” I told her. “You mind if I take it?”
“Go ahead,” she replied, waving her hand as she sipped her coffee and looked out of the window. I headed to my car and pulled up the video calling app so I could speak to Angela.
She dialed me a moment later, and I answered at once. Her sharp eyes, her hair pulled back into a severe bun, and the slash of red lipstick made me smile. It had been a while since I had seen her, and it felt a little closer to normality to speak to her again.
“Hi, Angela,” I greeted her. It had taken me a long time to get used to not calling her Ms. Londson, but she had insisted, telling me a million times over that she didn’t want me talking to her like she was some grand dame.
“Ellie, good to see you,” she replied, in her clipped English accent. “How are you? I heard you had to go back home to look after your mother, how is she?”
“She’s...okay,” I replied. It was an overstatement of the truth, but there was no way I could share the reality of the situation with her. We had worked together for so long, and we had never gotten much closer than colleagues. I appreciated her effort in reaching out to me, but I was sure she was really just doing it to check in on when I would be back to work.
I couldn’t blame her. I knew how irritating it must have been, having me drop off the project like that. She was used to me being available any time of the day or night, almost to my own detriment sometimes, and now, I had vanished as though I had better things to do than worry about her. I was sure she was pissed.
Instead, she softened slightly—I saw her brow unfurrow, the first time it had in all the years I had worked for her.
“You take your time there, okay?” she told me. She seemed to sense, no matter how hard I tried to cover it up, I wasn’t going to be back to work anytime soon. I bit back a few tears, not wanting to let my emotions get the better of me.
“I think I’ll be here for a while,” I confessed to her, finally. “I have no idea...I don’t know how long it’s going to take for my mom to get back on her feet.”
She nodded.
“These things happen,” she replied. “I understand. And I understand you may be away from work for a while, but that’s all right, Ellie.”
I wondered if she, too, had been through something similar with her own family. Angela made a point not to talk too much about what went on outside the bounds of her professional life, but she seemed to be speaking from a place of experience.
“Thank you,” I replied, my voice catching in the back of my throat. I didn’t want to let her see me cry. She was still English, after all, and they never took it well.
“Would you like me to pass along some of the new pieces I’m looking at?” she asked, and I nodded at once. A small crumb of normalcy glimmered, and the thought of turning it down seemed ridiculous. I knew I shouldn’t have been thinking about taking on more work, but honestly, the thought of having to hide from it seemed even harder. I wanted something I could hang on to, some small part of what my life had looked like before so I could pretend it wasn’t as lost to me as it felt right now.
“Yeah, that would be great,” I replied. “I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to keep up with, but...”
“Just do what you can,” she replied. I nodded again. If I stayed on this call with her much longer, I was going to start crying, and the last thing I wanted was to let her see it. I wanted to be the woman I always had been, the woman she had known me as this entire time.
“Thank you,” I replied again. “I should...I should get back to my mom now, but you can call me whenever you want, I’ll try and be around to answer.”
“Thanks, Ellie,” she replied, as businesslike as ever. “I’ll speak to you soon.”
With that, she hung up the phone and left me sitting there in the car in silence. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but the emotion was washing over me hard. It was as though it had all hit me at once, the reality of what was happening, the truth of where we were right now. I was back home. For as long as it took. I had no idea how long it would last, but I had to find a way to be all right with it, I had to find a way to hang on to my old life even as it felt like it was slipping through my fingers.
I took a deep breath and gathered myself before I went back inside. I didn’t want my mom to see me like this. The last thing I needed was for her to start to believing she was keeping me from the rest of my life. I loved her too much to let her see this.
No matter how much my heart was craving a return to what I had known before. No matter how tempting it was to leave everything behind and go back to my other life.
No matter how much Maple Valley felt like a distant planet to me now.
