Deconstructing Lila (Entangled Select) (18 page)

Lesson Number Twenty-One —

Take advantage of time you have alone with your man. Maybe it is only a few minutes in the barn, or a whole night in bed. Make it count with lots of touching, kissing, and sweet words.

Chapter Twenty-Three

W
ord came in from the LP Ranch today. Luke made it to market and sold his herd. Got a good price, too, from what one of the hands told.

Now I know, at last. Where he went and for what reason. Although I told my dear Luke it was over between us, I never expected him to vanish. It was a sad occasion, the day I realized I was hurting him more than helping. Yes, I could ease the physical stresses of his body, but I could never give him the peace of mind he craved like a thirsty man searching for water.

Luke needs a companion, a helpmate. A wife. A partner. After I turned down his offer to live with him, he continued to visit me here in my rooms, but I think we both knew it would end soon. I could see him slipping further and further away from his own life, sleeping here, taking his meals here. He came to know everyone at the Two Nellies by name, bestowing courtesies like my girls were ordinary women on the street. He was insinuating himself into my life, since I had refused to do so in his.

He may not have noticed the hostile stares from people about town, but I did. And I could hear the questions mumbled behind my back.

“She’s draining him dry. He won’t have a penny when Pru’s done with him. What’s she have over him, anyway?”

My heart felt like a brick of ice this last month, waiting for news of his whereabouts and health.

It has been difficult lately in the Acre since I told the mayor I would not help him corrupt the new sheriff. The decision has brought me grief on two fronts, from both the mayor and the sheriff, the latter intent on cleaning up this end of town. After the mayor’s last vicious threat, I worried for Luke. His association with me would bring him nothing but shame and ruin. But I never should have doubted. Luke is too good and strong to be tainted by small men.

If only I can hang on until the mayor learns bullying a woman like me gets him nothing, if not barred from every establishment in the Acre. I decreed he is no longer welcome in my rooms or the Two Nellies. Not if he continues to threaten people so he can collect protection money.

Who will stand up for the poor, the sick, and the vagrant?

Nobody. Except me. A short, skinny, unschooled whore. If I don’t take a stand now, I might as well turn over and run. I have encountered his kind before.

When will people learn that no good comes from men like the mayor? They cannot be paid enough money, or kowtowed to enough. They are landlords, fat off the labor of their tenants.

“The courage of the Irish.” I hear it whispered in the hall and in the kitchen when no one knows I am around. Irish, indeed! We are a tough lot to be sure. It will take much more than threats and bad words to put me off my cause once I have taken to it.

I just pray the people who have courageously chosen to rally around me hold. If not for their own sake, then for the good of the town.

And Luke, my darling, my heart. I say a blessing for you every night. That one day, your mind finds peace and your heart love.

Lila put the journal down as the doorbell chime sounded outside her bedroom door. Granny had gone out with the Bombshells again, deciding upon next season’s uniform. Something about choosing pink pinstriping this time around in an effort to be subtler. Lila didn’t think subtle could be achieved with the Bombshells, not with all that white/silver/blue hair and vibrant pink lipstick they favored.

The bell rang again. “I’m coming!” Jeez, some people were so impatient.

She opened the front door and a slim, middle-aged woman stood on the other side of the glass storm door.

“Can I help you?” Lila said after several seconds of waiting for the stranger to state her business.

“I’m looking for Barbara Gentry.” The woman’s voice croaked, throaty and low. Lila guessed she’d been a heavy smoker at one point in her life.

“She’s out. Would you like to leave a message?”

The woman stared at her, hard, and it unnerved Lila. Did she know her? From before, growing up in Hannington? She looked at the stranger a second time, taking in the faded blond hair, still healthy and shiny, worn loose around her shoulders in a simple but elegant cut. She equaled Lila’s height, if not a bit taller, with longer legs. Or it could have been a trick of the eye with her breezy butter-colored linen pantsuit.

Her features were even and delicate, but deep wrinkles, heavier than a woman her age should have, surrounded her eyes and mouth.

The woman’s makeup highlighted her warm brown eyes and her cupid mouth. A small crescent scar marred her lip line, a familiar image triggering a flood of memories.

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. This woman could not be Sarah Gentry. Could she?

The woman noted Lila’s shock and reached for the handle on the storm door. “Perhaps we could talk until Barbara returns?”

Lila beat her to the handle and locked it from her side. The other woman jerked her hand back at the sound of the lock clicking into place.

“Who are you?” Lila demanded, sweat breaking out on her brow.

“I didn’t mean to upset you. I apologize. I’ll return when Barbara is available.”

She started to turn, heading for the steps.

“Stop right there! Who are you?” Lila knew panic rang in her voice. She could hear the shrill ring of anger, despair, terror, hurt, expectation, hope, and grief bounce back off the glass and into her face.

“Please,” the woman began.

“Cut the crap, lady, and just tell me who you are.”

But she knew. She knew from the way those damn brown eyes pleaded with her to understand. “You’re Sarah. My mother.”

Sarah nodded.

Lila fell back, knocking the hallway console table sideways and sending Granny’s collection of knickknack hummingbirds to the carpet.

“You’re Lila, right?” Sarah said from the other side of the glass, the fingertips of her right hand resting gently on the door.

Lila couldn’t speak. She shook her head.

“You are. I can see your father’s nose and chin and my forehead and mouth.”

Lila picked herself up and stood ramrod straight. She didn’t know what to do. Let Sarah in along with the waves of grief pushing against the walls of her heart or slam the door and call Jake, sobbing out her fears and doubts?

What would Jake do? He’d run from the emotions, the commitment. Just as he ran from Lila. Unwilling to let anyone, even himself, have a second chance.

Lila took the few steps to the door and unlocked it, letting Sarah inside. They stood staring at each other. Neither one obviously knowing what to say.

“I was hoping to ease into this, talk to Barbara before I went looking for you.”

“Well, that’s screwed. You got me.”

Sarah swallowed and looked down to the mess of the hummingbirds. She bent and picked them up, setting them one by one back onto the half-moon-shaped entry table.

“Barbara always loved birds. Does she still keep feeders out for these little devils?”

Sarah’s hair swung forward, leaving the back of her neck bare. Lila noticed an old scar, although still pink, running across her spine.

That sudden vulnerability deflated the bulk of her anger. She backed up and squatted down to Sarah’s level, restoring the last bird back to the table.

“Come in and I’ll get some coffee started.”

Sarah nodded and Lila turned, not waiting to see if she followed, but knowing now there wasn’t any going back.

She pulled the coffee down from a shelf and scooped the grounds into the coffeemaker. Sarah didn’t say a word, but she could feel the other woman waiting patiently. A calm emanated from her, surprising Lila.

How could her mother be so calm about coming home after pulling a disappearing act for twenty-five years?

The weight of the time made Lila shake her head. Twenty-five years. She hadn’t seen her mother since she turned five years old. Lila remembered it like it was yesterday.

I
t had been a warm September day and she’d woken early to dress for kindergarten, unable to sleep from the excitement. She’d only started a week earlier, but had already found friends and couldn’t wait to get back to school.

Sarah had helped her get dressed, pack her lunch, and brush her hair. At the time, she remembered thinking how much her mom loved her. Sarah had spent the morning showering her with attention, letting her have two glasses of chocolate milk instead of one, putting pink bows in her ponytail, and letting her wear her special Sunday church shoes to school.

Lila had felt so happy and so very loved. But then Sarah didn’t show up after school. She’d waited and waited on the playground, but Sarah never came. So a teacher had called Barbara at her bank job.

Granny came right over, scooping Lila up in a big hug. They got some ice cream at Miller’s on the way home and she forgot all about her mother’s disappearance until they pulled up into the driveway.

Granny had tried to act normal, but she could tell something had gone terribly wrong. She found her grandmother sitting in her mother’s room on the bare bed, looking into the empty closet.

Sarah had cleared out, taking everything with her and leaving the room as clean as if she’d been a guest and not Granny’s daughter-in-law.

At the time, Lila didn’t really understand Sarah wasn’t ever coming back. But as the years passed, it became painfully clear her mother had abandoned her for a different life.

A life that involved a vivid scar on the back of her neck.

Lila looked up from the brewing coffee to Sarah. “So where have you been for twenty-five years?”

“California.”

No hesitation, no remorse, no apology. No, “Hey, kid, sorry I ran out on you when you were five, but you know, life sucks sometimes and you gotta run.”

“So you just had a whole different life out there?”

Sarah’s measured stare started to piss her off again. How could the woman be so calm?

“Not a good one, or one that I’m proud of, but the last five years have been better and I’ve been gathering the strength to come back.”

Lila turned away with two polka-dotted mugs, filling them with coffee. She set a steamy cup in front of Sarah before she met her eyes again.

“Why come back now?”

“Because”—and here, Sarah’s throaty voice faltered for the first time—“I have responsibilities and a family. And I wanted to see you.”

She almost spit the coffee in her mouth back into the cup. “You have responsibilities? Are you kidding me? I’m thirty. I don’t need a mother. I have Granny, thank you very much.”

Granny, who had been everything to Lila. And still was.

“I know. And you’re a very beautiful thirty. I tried to picture you, what you’d look like, but nothing I dreamed of even came close.” Sarah lowered her eyes with a wistful smile and took a drink, leaning a hip against the counter. “What I mean to say is I owe you and Barbara so much, and I would like the opportunity to get to know you two again. If not to be a mother and a daughter, to be a friend. If that’s possible.”

She couldn’t believe this conversation. A mother who wanted to be her friend. It was too surreal.

“Frankly, Sarah, I’m unsure. There’s a lot about you I don’t know. What am I saying? I don’t know the first thing about you. I don’t even know why you left.”

The recrimination didn’t faze Sarah. She remained cool and collected, but then Lila noticed her white-knuckle grip on the edge of the countertop.

“Yes. I realize that. I’m hoping you will allow me to explain myself—not to justify or excuse what I did—” she talked right over Lila’s protest. “—But I know you need to know. And I need to tell you, as part of my own therapy on the road to healing.”

“So this is about your need to heal? To move on? I don’t think I can help you there.” She set her mug on the counter and brushed past Sarah out of the kitchen and through the back sliding glass door to the chain-link-fenced backyard.

Maybe Sarah would get the hint and leave. Come back when Granny was here and she wasn’t. But then Granny would have to deal with the pain and right now, more pain was the dead last thing she wanted for her grandmother.

So when Sarah followed her out back and sat in the patio chair across from her, Lila didn’t react.

“I have been in therapy for quite some time Lila, figuring out who I am, the repercussions of choices I’ve made, and how to make wiser decisions from here on out.”

Therapy, she could relate to.

“I’m finally putting my life back together. After twenty-five years, I know who I am and what I want and I’m not afraid to go after it.”

“So what was the problem when I was five? Did you just decide being a mom was crap, and moved on?” She knew her words were ugly, but she couldn’t stop them. Maybe it would be better to take her frustrations out on some innocent lawn furniture.

“I understand your anger, Lila. And it’s valid. One hundred percent.”

But
. Always a but.

She waited for Sarah to continue, to apologize, beg forgiveness, do something besides sit there looking at her with sympathetic eyes.

Sarah looked away finally, at the crepe myrtle trees in beautiful full bloom. The chiffon-like dark pink flowers shaded the patio table and added a tranquility Lila usually appreciated.

“After your father didn’t come back from the Middle East, I tried to keep it together. For both our sakes. I knew I had the most important job in the world, raising you, but it was hard. So very hard without your father, and I eventually lost the battle to hang on to myself. I got lost, too, in a way. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I was doing. I had to leave to go and find me before I, too, went missing in action.”

Lila wanted to say, “But you were my mom. The most important person in the world.”

Sarah zeroed in on Lila, no longer watching the wind blowing through the blossom-heavy trees. “What I discovered was that I was right here all along. Everything I wanted. Everything I needed was right here. I wasn’t lost. I was blind. And Lord help me, it took almost twenty years to figure that out.”

Silent tears escaped at the corners of Sarah’s eyes and for the first time, Lila saw a chink in her composure as her mother fumbled in her pocket for a tissue.