Page 20 of Holding On To Good

“I still think you rooming with Emory is a bad idea,” Miles said. “You need to meet new people.”

“I know enough people.” She looked around. “Too many, actually. There are a few right here at this table I’m thinking of cutting out of my life just to make more room.”

“Not me, though,” Ian said, eyes wide and worried behind his glasses, chocolate milk staining his upper lip. “Right, Aunt Vee?”

“Never you, bud.” She patted his hand. “Not ever.”

But he didn’t look completely convinced and that killed her.

Damn Silas for being such a rare presence in his son’s life. Didn’t he know what that did to a kid? How much it must hurt Ian, knowing he had a parent out there who’d rather spend time fighting wars than be with him?

Sometimes her brothers could be such wienies.

But then, their parents’ deaths had messed them all up to various degrees. How could it not, especially when they’d all been so young? Silas had taken it the hardest, diving headlong into teenage rebellion. Luckily, Urban had managed to keep him mostly on the straight and narrow path and out of jail.

They all bore the scars of being orphaned, though. They just handled the healing of it differently.

All of them, it seemed, except her.

What was there to heal when she barely remembered her mom and dad? How was she supposed to miss a life she’d never known? She had so few memories of their parents and no stories of the good times.

She’d give anything to have known their parents the way her brothers had. To have firsthand knowledge of her mother’s laugh, of what her dad’s aftershave smelled like.

All she had was a photo album filled with pictures from when she was a baby and toddler, a couple of VHS tapes of what life had been like before she’d arrived on the scene at the Jennings house, and her mother’s wedding band, tucked in the back of her jewelry box.

She had nothing of them. Sometimes, it was as if they’d never existed. They were fictional characters in a story, one told before she’d come along.

Other times, it was as if their deaths had left a hole in her, an emptiness she could never fill.

And the older she got, the more conflicted she was over which one was worse.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky, warming the top of Willow’s head and bare shoulders as she watched guests mingle, converse and laugh in her parents’ flawlessly landscaped backyard. A string quartet set up in the gazebo provided background music, playing everything from Brahms to Ed Sheeran. Servers in black pants and crisp, white shirts poured champagne and cleared tables. Plates were filled from the buffet table featuring the best of Binge’s catering service: a variety of fancy finger sandwiches, gourmet salads, and hors d’oeuvres as pretty as they were delicious. The centerpiece was a glossy, three-tiered chocolate cake, each layer wrapped in matte pink ribbon, the top decorated with lush pink roses.

And seated like a queen on her throne on the paved patio below, Willow’s pregnant younger sister, Lily, opened gift after gift after gift with unfailing cheer and gratitude, golden hair swept back, belly bulge prominent in a clinging white sundress, her face glowing from the sun and heat and pure joy.

“I’m in hell,” Willow muttered.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” her older sister, Dr. Rose Kincaid-Parker, said in the calm, soothing tone she probably used with the patients at her psychiatric practice. “There is way too much pink here for this to be hell.”

Willow eyed the pink, pink and more pink festooning everything from the tablecloths to the centerpieces to the banners hung along the gazebo proclaiming Happily Ever After! and It’s a Girl!

“There might be this much pink in hell,” Willow said. “The whole idea of hell is to suffer and being surrounded by all this for eternity? Torturous.”

“If you hate pink, why are you wearing it?”

“I don’t hate pink.” And the flowers in her floral-printed strapless dress were mauve, not pink, but she wasn’t about to argue that when she was still working on arguing this. “It’s like a flock of flamingos exploded here. Where did she find so many feathers?”

Sarah Kincaid-Parker, Rose’s wife, had been put in charge of the decorations. Every shade of pink imaginable—from the deepest of dusty rose to the palest of soft corals—was represented in the crepe paper streamers, table decorations and flower arrangements. But the worst were the four huge neon pink urns stuffed with fat, poufy six-foot-tall feathers.

“They aren’t real flamingo feathers, are they?” Willow asked.

“Of course not. You know Sarah’s vegan. That’s why I gave you my favorite leather boots when we moved in together.”

“If Sarah asks, I feel sick with guilt every time I wear them.”

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