Page 101 of Holding Out

Her mouth fell open.

“You don’t have to answer that right away.But I thought you should know that I want us—both of us—to keep on growing up together.And I want every Friday Night Dinner from now on to be foreplay for what we do when we go home together.I want to wake up every morning and have donuts and coffee with you.I want All.The.Things.”

Becca was laughingandcrying, and he reached out and brushed tears back from both her cheeks, then took her face between his palms and kissed her until she stopped shaking.

“All the things is good,” she said, when he let her go.

She reached her hand out and he took it.Her hand in his felt small but strong and warm.

She got a funny look on her face, and his stomach clenched with worry.She wasn’t having second thoughts, was she?

“Or would it beall the thingsaregood?I’d better learn to be grammatically correct if I’m going to be acting like an expert in the tutoring department,” she said.The thought made her smile, thousands of lumens of glorious summer daylight, as she tipped her face up for another kiss.

50

Becca’s chest felt tight as she rang the doorbell to the little Portland bungalow where her mother was now living.Part of her wished she’d taken Griff up on his offer to accompany her—or Alia, who’d said she and Robbie could serve as reinforcements.But no, this felt like something Becca needed to do on her own.

Footsteps approached the door and it swung open to reveal a woman so stunning in her familiarity that Becca almost took a step back from the impact.Her mother’s face was framed with shoulder-length ash-blond hair, streaked with silver, and her face had new lines in it, but she was still the woman Becca remembered.The face moved slowly into a smile—tentative, a little fearful.“Becca,” her mother said.

“Hi, Mom,” Becca said.

There was an awkward moment where a hug might have happened for other mother-daughter pairs, and then her mother stepped back, revealing the living room behind her.“Do you want to come in?”

No, said something still wary inside Becca, but she ignored that voice and stepped forward.And got walloped by another familiar sight.

The couch was the couch of Becca’s childhood, where she and Alia had sat to watch movies on the television—this television.The knickknacks on the mantle and tables were the ones she had played with, broken, repaired.She drew a deep breath, intending to steady herself, butoh, God,the roomsmelledlike her childhood, as if the house were only a shell, and Becca suddenly, unexpectedly, found herself near tears.

“I’ll make some tea,” her mother said.She gestured to the couch, and Becca sat, trying not to breathe too deeply because if she did, she was going to start crying in earnest.

Her mother hurried into the kitchen, and Becca heard the hiss of an electric kettle and the clink of spoons on mugs before her mother reappeared with two steaming mugs.She handed one to Becca.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, formally.

“I just thought—” Becca began, and stopped.She didn’t have a plan.She hadn’t rehearsed any words or decided what this visit was about.She’d simply woken one morning and thought that it was probably time.She and Griff had been together a couple of months, and her worries that he’d grow tired of her, or leave, or—she didn’t even know what—had dried up and blown away in the face of his love and devotion.

Because Griff was not a man who stopped loving easily.She adored that about him above all else.

“Becca,” her mother said, and Becca realized with a start that her mother was crying.“I’m so, so sorry.I wasn’t there for you.I was a terrible mother.”

Becca’s first impulse was anger.She felt trapped by the apology.Because if she accepted it, did it mean her own suffering was swept away?And if she refused it, did it mean she was heartless?Her mother had, after all, done the best she could.

For a moment she hovered there, gobsmacked and miserable, and then her eye fell on a china shepherdess on the mantle.She’d loved that shepherdess, and she’d played with it over and over, until, inevitably, one day, she’d broken it.She’d sat over the pieces, crying, and Alia had found her and gathered her into a hug.And then her sister had dug in the junk drawers in the kitchen and found a tube of Krazy Glue (that Alia had, no doubt, herself purchased at the grocery store).Alia glued the shepherdess back together and said, “Look.Good as new.”

Becca had cried more, then, because Little Becca knew there were cracks and she would never be as good as new.

But the newest version of Becca, Becca 3.0, saw things differently.Those cracked places, mended by her sister, were the strongest parts of that shepherdess.

Jenina was right, after all.New Becca’s project had been to wall herself off so she couldn’t be hurt, but that wasn’t the trick.The trick was to love even though you could be hurt, and to trust that the people around you would help put you back together again.

And really, if this house was about anything, it wasn’t about the woman sitting across from her, still uncertainly waiting for ...something.It was about how Alia had made Becca safe and loved when safety and love were in short supply.

Becca was lucky.She had Alia and Nate and Robbie, Jake and Mira, Jenina, Griff—to name just a few of the people she knew would die before they’d let anything bad happen to her.

If you were well loved—and Becca was—then you could afford to be generous with your own love.

“You were hurting,” Becca said, and tears rolled down her mother’s face.With surprise, Becca realized there were tears on her own cheeks, too.She reached a hand out, touched her mother’s knee, and her mother’s hand wrapped around hers and held tight.“Do you remember,” she said slowly to her mother, “how you used to make pompom caterpillars with us?”

After all, she wasn’t a kid anymore.She didn’tneedher mother.But she could stillloveher.

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