Page 53 of Before the Storm

“Is there anywhere I can lie down for a while?” Josie asked quietly.

“Of course. You must be tired from the trip,” Cindy said, furrowing her brow with worry.

Tara thought,Why are you so worried now, Mom? We needed your worry twenty-four years ago! It’s a little late!

But she tried to quiet her mind. Those thoughts wouldn’t help her.

“There’s a guest bedroom down the hall. Third door. There are clean sheets and clean pajamas in the drawer. Take whatever you want, darling. My Josie.” Cindy took Josie’s hand and squeezed it gently.

Josie winced. Tara guessed that everything hurt right now.

Tara watched Cindy’s eyes as Josie left the room.

“She’s tired, Tara,” Cindy repeated. “Why is she so tired?”

Tara guessed the cancer news wasn’t hers to share. But it also stood to reason that Cindy could see Josie’s illness plain as day. Cindy was Josie’s mother. She knew her. She always would.

“It was a long journey,” Tara said tentatively. “But we’ll rest up at a hotel tonight. We’ll leave you alone.”

“No,” Cindy blurted, her eyes darting. “Please, stay here tonight. I’ve been alone since he died, and I haven’t been able to take it.”

Tara knew she should say no. She should draw a boundary between herself and her mother and her mother’s heartache. But she thought of Josie, asleep in the guest bedroom, and she imagined soft mornings with their mother, drinking coffee and talking about forgiveness, and she leaped at it.

Maybe she would regret it. Right now, she didn’t care.

It wasn’t till thirty after eight that everyone cleared out of the house. A few of Cindy’s closest friends hung around the longest, including one of them who, Tara guessed, had answered Cindy’s phone for her when Josie called. Cindy introduced Tara as “my baby,” and only one or two of them seemed to understand thesignificance of their relationship. Tara felt too soft and gentle and tired to care.

Near the food table was a large bulletin board of photographs from Bob’s life. When Cindy went to the bathroom, Tara stood by the board and examined the eras of her father’s life—when he’d been a boy on Nantucket, when he’d graduated from high school, when he’d joined the Marines and gone off to war. Tara had never asked her mother what it had been like when Bob was gone. She guessed his leaving had something to do with how much Cindy loved him, even now. She’d seen what her life was like without him, and she hadn’t liked it.

There was one photograph of Bob holding a baby Tara.

Josie was nowhere on the board at all.

And there weren’t any photos of Tara later on. It was almost as though, in the photo, Bob was holding some random baby rather than his own.

Tara felt woozy. She was beginning to regret having come.

Cindy crept back into the living room with two glasses of wine. “I haven’t drunk all day,” she said. “I feel like I deserve an award for that.”

Tara laughed nervously and sat on the sofa next to her mother. She could feel her mother’s eyes studying her.

“I’d ask you to say cheers to your father’s life,” Cindy said hesitantly. “But I imagine it’s complicated for you.”

Tara raised her shoulders.

“If it were me who’d died, I imagine you’d feel the same,” Cindy offered.

Tara flared her nostrils. She couldn’t look at her mother. Why was she being so forward about the darkness in their shared past? Then again, hadn’t Josie dragged Tara out to Seattle for a conversation like this? But where was Josie? Josie needed to be here. She needed an apology from their mother, too.

Cindy drank too much of her wine at once. “Your sister is sick, isn’t she?”

Tara forced her eyes to her mother’s. It wasn’t hers to tell, but she couldn’t lie, not now. She nodded.

“What is it?”

“It’s cervical cancer.”

Cindy closed her eyes. “She had chemo?”

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