Page 4 of Reclaim Me

“Get back to work, missy,” I demand, shooing her back in the direction she came from. She heads off without argument, or at least none that I can hear, and I put the phone to my ear. “Hey, Dee.”

“You know she’s talking shit about you as we speak, right?”

My best friend’s unorthodox greeting makes me laugh. Deanna Tyson always makes me laugh. That’s how we became friends in the first place. Her off-the-cuff, dry-as-a-bone sense of humor caught my attention on the third day of first grade. I was the only person in the class to laugh when she asked our teacher, Mrs. Mac, if her first name was Mary and followed it up with a question about why she wasn’t wearing black. That shared giggle from across the classroom lost us both our recess that day and earned us both a friend for life.

“Yep, I’m probably being called everything but a child of God,” I say, moving out of the kitchen and down the hall to the room Aaron will use as his home office. Right now, there’s nothing in here besides his desk chair and stacks of boxes that contain his degrees from Stanford, as well as an array of accolades denoting the list of achievements leading to the promotion that brought us here to New Haven.

I plop down in the desk chair and turn my back to the closed door, gazing out into the massive, manicured backyard. When we viewed the house in early January, our realtor told us we would be stunned by how gorgeous the yard would be in Spring. It’s the middle of March, so the season technically hasn’t started yet, but Aaron and Marcy are already talking about all the elegant outdoor outings we can host for their family, friends and his co-workers. I advocated for a smaller place, something that wouldn’t stretch us so thin financially, but in the end, the yard and all it’s possibilities won out.

“Let’s just hope she uses the curse words right this time. I can’t have my niece going around calling people mother-shitters,” Dee quips, reminding me of the first and last time I gave Riley permission to curse. We laughed for days at her odd combinations.

“As her mom, I think it’s probably my job to hope she never gets them right.”

“She’s a smart kid, Rae. You know she’s going to figure it out eventually. Those kids at her fancy little school will probably have her cursing like a pro by the end of her first day.”

“Oh, God,” I groan, knowing she’s right because private school kids are the untamed monsters everyone wants us to believe public school kids are. “How long until she starts calling me ‘mother’ and rolling her eyes at everything I say?”

Dee snorts. “I’d say you probably have a good month or so left.”

“Damn. I guess it was fun while it lasted.”

“We had a good run,” she agrees, a laugh slipping through the cracks of the severity she’s forced into her tone. “How are you feeling about being back in New Haven?” she asks, switching gears now that we’ve gotten our signature banter out of the way.

Pulling my legs up into the chair to sit crisscross applesauce, I mentally prepare myself to answer such a loaded question. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had friends and even complete strangers ask me how I feel about moving back to my hometown. Each time, I’ve answered with the expected enthusiasm about sharing the place where I had all of my firsts with my daughter and putting down roots with Aaron. While none of those answers have been dishonest, Dee is the only person with whom I can be completely truthful because she knows everything.

The set of stairs I fell down and broke my arm.

The park bench where I had my first kiss.

The hospital room where I said goodbye to my mother.

The burial plot I picked for my brother.

The graves I’ve visited and the one I dug for a love I had to bury before it killed me.

“Rae?” Dee’s voice is soft now, all traces of humor gone. “You okay?”

“It’s weird,” I answer, jumping straight in because there’s no point in tiptoeing around it. “Everything is different but the same. It hasn’t been home for a long time, but I don’t feel like a stranger.”

“You can leave New Haven, but New Haven will never leave you,” she murmurs, repeating an old adage her mom, Emma, would recite whenever she’d hear us talking about how ready we were to put this small town behind us. She’s been gone for two years now, but we still find ourselves quoting her at the most random times.

“The older you get, the more you sound like her,” I muse, a soft smile playing on my lips even as my heart breaks for her again. Losing a mom is the kind of pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially my best friend and her little sister.

“Jayla says the same thing.”

Even though I can’t see it, I know she’s rolling her eyes. Dee hates it when me and Jayla agree on anything. She swears we do it just to gang up on her, even if we express our similar thoughts at different times.

“Did she tell you we ran into each other at the mall yesterday?”

“Yeah, she said Riley and Sonia hit it off instantly.”

“They did. Riley’s already asking when we can have them over.”

“Of course she is; that girl loves a gathering.”

I laugh. “She really does. I don’t know where she gets that from ‘cause it’s certainly not me.”

“Well, there is a whole other set of DNA you have to account for,” she reminds me, making my heart sink into my stomach.

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