Page 32 of Promise Me This

“You’re absolutely right.” She takes a sip of something, her slurping echoing through the receiver and making me cringe. “But would a couple weeks at home kill the man?”

“He did spend an entire career sitting at a desk. Can you blame him?”

Dad retired early as one of the highest paid accountants at Stabler Electric, a multimillion-dollar automation and energy management company. Whatever that means. I gave up trying to understand the jobs of his coworkers after joining them for my fifth annual Christmas party as a teenager. They were mostly attended by old men with unruly white nose hair who talked nonstop of combining technologies to achieve real-time automation with the bright-eyed interns who soaked up every word out of their mentors’ mouths. I’d hover at the edge of the room, waiting for the night to be over.

After I was old enough to drive, I skipped them altogether.

Once my brother and I were done with college and married off to our respective spouses—that is to say, officially off our parents’ purse strings—my father made the decision to go ahead and retire. He and my mother had saved up more than a measly nest egg. They squirreled away an entire hard-earned coop, which only made moving home and crashing their party that much more devastating.

I settle against the wrought-iron headboard, stretching one arm out while the other clutches the phone to my ear. “I miss you, Mom.” The words are a whispered admission, but she hears them loud and clear.

“I miss you, too, Leona. When are you coming home?”

My heart lurches at her words, mostly because I don’t feel like the place that she’s referring to is my home. I don’t know if I really have one anymore, if I’m honest.

“I don’t know, Mom. I’ve still got a couple things to take care of here first.” My gaze drifts to the window and the slate-colored sky beyond it. A stillness fills my mind at the sight of it, despite all that I’m juggling internally.

“Are you doing all right on money?”

“Yeah, I’m working under the table for the owner of the inn where I’m staying.” I giggle before adding, “Don’t report me to the Irish authorities please or you’ll get me deported.”

“My lips are sealed,” she says, and I imagine her drawing pinched fingers across her lips before tossing the secret over her shoulder. She’s been doing it since I was a child, back when my biggest secrets were that the boy I liked in kindergarten had tried to hold my hand on the playground.

Inconsequential, but she kept it like an oath.

“The owner is actually Callum’s mom, if you can believe it.” The line goes dead for longer than it ever takes my mom to form a sentence. I grow nervous in the silence, adding, “Small world, huh?”

“Extremely,” she murmurs.

This time I let the silence stretch out between us till it turns a shade of awkward that’s not typical of our conversations.

“Leona, what exactly are you doing there? You haven’t mentioned Callum in years, and all the sudden you’re flying halfway around the world to see him.” She pauses, letting the dust settle around her words. “I just don’t understand what the goal is here.”

“There’s not a goal, really.” I bring my finger to my mouth, nibbling at a stray cuticle. My sweet mother, after years spent managing a household for two busy kids and a workaholic husband, still breaks everything down into a goal and steps to execute. In her world, there is a plan and a set of milestones to hit for every task. If you’re not checking off your to-do list, then why even waste the time? Traveling constantly in their retirement is just as much for her as it is for my dad. Plan a trip, check the trip off the list, rinse, and repeat. It gives her purpose in life.

Something she’s terrified I don’t have. And I’m beginning to understand her worry.

“Well, what did he say when he saw you? Surely he has a wife now, some kids.” She adds the last part flippantly, but I hear the moment she regrets it. Her thoughts nearly audibly snap into place, clamping her mouth shut around the end of her sentence.

“He, um, hasn’t really said much.” I close my eyes, picturing his face the day I showed up on his doorstep, stone-cold and sharp. It morphs into the man that sat across from me in the firelight, open and yearning for answers, with a sleeping Niamh stretched out between us. “He has a daughter.”

Mom hums sadly on the other end of the line. “How old?”

“She’ll be five in January.” I know because she reminds me all the time.

“Can I ask you something? Without it upsetting you?”

I feel the tension coiling in my neck, and I tuck a pillow behind me as if it can relieve this type of ache. “Sure, Mom.”

“Is he the father?”

A sob lodges itself in my throat, cutting off my access to oxygen. My trembling hand finds its way to my cheek, and suddenly I realize it is wet with tears I never felt falling. When did they begin? When I heard my mother’s voice? When I said Callum’s name?

“Yes,” I whisper, using what little air is left in my lungs. “I have to go, Momma.”

“Oh, baby,” she sighs. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll talk to you soon.” I hang up before she can reply.

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