Page 76 of Sometimes You Stay

Marie took a slow breath as she released Jessie from her high chair and set the toddler on the floor. “Forgive me, but I don’t understand. I mean, I get that your job requires you to travel. But couldn’t you have a home base, a place—people—to come home to?”

Cretia turned away as her eyes began to burn, but staring at the ceiling didn’t ease the stinging. It all sounded so lovely.

In theory.

“I tried to.”

Marie froze, the teakettle suspended in her hand over the stovetop. She opened her mouth and then quickly closed it again, questions flashing across her face.

Cretia closed the dishwasher, leaned a hip against the counter, and turned to face her hostess. Fighting for at least a hint of a smile, she gulped a little breath. “My mom is ... difficult. She’s the only parent I’ve ever known, but after my abuelita—my grandma—died when I was seven, my mom changed. She’d lost so much that she refused to get rid of anything else. We never used the term, but she became a hoarder. There’s no other way to describe it.”

Marie’s eyebrows pinched together, and she whispered, “I’m so sorry. That must have been so hard.”

“It certainly wasn’t a picnic.” She snapped her mouth closed and glanced up apologetically. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

Marie waved off her apology. “Family relationships are hard. Sometimes they bring out the worst in us.”

Cretia nodded slowly. Finn hadn’t said it in as many words,but he was trying to make his father proud and prove him wrong at the same time. It wasn’t bringing out his best either. Apparently, they had more in common than she’d thought.

“I moved out when I was a senior in high school and worked a live-in nanny job for a few years. The family asked me to go on a cruise with them, and that’s where I began taking videos and picking up travel tips. My platforms grew from there, and before I knew it, so did my income.”

When the kettle whistled, Marie nodded to it, an unspoken question between them.

“Yes, please.”

Marie got out two cups and set them on the counter. “So, you started making money?”

Cretia couldn’t hold back a good-natured snort. “That’s putting it mildly. I grew up in a border town, living in a two-bedroom stucco house with no air-conditioning and temperamental plumbing. I barely graduated from high school, and I thought making fifteen hundred dollars a month as a nanny in addition to a room was upper-class. But I discovered a whole section of the internet eager for tips and tools to make travel easier, more affordable, more enjoyable. And I could give them that. I did my research. I explored the world. I was real about what I liked and what I didn’t. Pretty soon I had a million followers. And that year, I made almost that much money. Of course, most of it goes into traveling and equipment. But my followers kept growing, and with them the opportunities and income.”

With a chuckle, Marie said, “Natalie and Brooke said you were famous, but I didn’t realize. Here we’ve been hosting a star, and we didn’t even know it.”

Cretia responded with a laugh of her own. “Absolutely not.I’m not a star. I just found my niche, my people. And I thought I could use that money to help my mom. I thought maybe I could have a place to go home to.” Her smile melted away, and her lips trembled as the memory surged through her.

Pressing a flat hand to her back, Marie ushered Cretia to a stool at the counter and set a steaming cup of tea before her. “What happened with her?”

She shook her head, not sure if she could speak the truth, or even begin to convey the way her mom’s face had twisted with rage or the way her screech had rung through the house. “I-I-I hired a professional organizer. A team, really. I called my mom and told her we were coming. That we were going to help her take her home back. And that I could come visit—stay with her when I wasn’t traveling—if she would just clean it up and throw out the trash.” Cretia took a sip of her tea, the warmth sliding down her chest to her stomach. “It didn’t work.”

“What do you mean? She couldn’t keep it clean?”

“No. She wouldn’t even let us start.”

Marie looked stricken, though Cretia didn’t know why. It wasn’t like Marie’s mom was so far gone.

“When the team picked up a trash bag—even before they threw it into the giant dumpster they’d brought with them—my mom lost it. Crying and raging, screaming and throwing things at us.” Cretia wrapped her arms around her middle, trying to ward off the memories that, once begun, flowed off her tongue. “I tried to calm her down. I tried to rationalize with her. I even resorted to blackmail. If she didn’t get her house in order, I told her I would never set foot on her property again. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t hear me. She wouldn’t. She’d made her choice. She’d rather have herjunk than have me in her life. And just before I left that day, she screamed that everyone always said I was just like her. And I was going to end up in a house just like hers.”

From the other side of the island, Marie reached out a gentle hand. “Oh, sweetie, I am so sorry.”

“This is the part where you tell me that she’s the only mother I’m ever going to have and I need to try again.”

Marie’s forehead wrinkled along her hairline. “Not at all. Why would you think that?”

“Because that’s what the organizer said. She said I should wait a few months and call her so we could try again.”

“Well, it sounds like that organizer didn’t come from a dysfunctional family.”

Cretia shrugged. Probably not. But she was also one of the few people who had witnessed her mom’s meltdown.

“Can I tell you about my relationship with my dad?” Marie asked.

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