Page 4 of Forget Me Not
CHAPTER 2
I feel my back lengthen, my posture suddenly ramrod straight as those words,an accident,light up my nerves like an electrical shock.
“What do you meanan accident?” I ask, registering Ryan perk up beside me. A look of concern flashing across his face. “What kind of accident? What happened?”
“She’s fine,” my dad says. “But she’s a little banged up. She can’t walk up the stairs, which, of course, makes navigating the house a bit of a challenge.”
“What happened?” I repeat, irritation bubbling up at the way he’s directly avoiding my questions. The same thing he’s always done.
“She fell through a board on the back deck,” he says with another sigh, almost like he’s annoyed by the whole thing. “Broke her leg in three places. Sprained her wrist, bruised a few ribs.”
I exhale, a sense of relief flooding through me. I’m not close with my mother, either—I haven’t been in years—but I realize now that those few seconds of thinking I might have lost her had sent aninexplicable panic through my chest. A surprising sensation I don’t know how to explain.
“That deck is a mess,” I say, not sure why that’s the first thing to pop into my head. “It’s been falling apart for years.”
“Yeah, well, the house is old,” he says. “And you know your mother. Never been one to fix things herself.”
We’re both quiet, his insinuation, whether intentional or not, digging up old, buried resentment.
“Anyway, it might be good for you to come back for a little. Lend her a hand around the house.”
“Come back,” I repeat, the idea almost too foreign to fathom. The nonchalance of his statement, like he doesn’t understand the scale of what he’s actually asking.
“Yes, come home,” he reiterates. “Your mother could use some help at home, Claire.”
“But I have work—” I start, though I suddenly stop myself, sensing Ryan leaning farther in my direction. Obviously picking up on my lie.
“It would just be a few weeks,” he continues. “Can’t you write from anywhere?”
I stay quiet, annoyed at his assumption that I can just abandon my life at a moment’s notice—as well as the fact that he’s more right than he realizes.
“You know she doesn’t like asking for help,” he says when I don’t answer. “The only reason I even know about it myself is because her neighbor called me after she found her trying to drive herself to the hospital.”
I sigh, pushing my fingers into the corners of my eyes as I imagine my mother’s ratty black Civic juddering down the driveway; clipping a curb before it limped down the street.
“She’s gonna kill herself,” he adds. “Or someone else, for that matter, if she tries to drive again.”
I release my hand, twisting my beer across the counter. Watching the little wet rings start to swirl as I rack my brain for some other excuse.
“She doesn’t have anyone else,” he continues, apparently switching tactics from logic to guilt.
“Let me think about it,” I say, eager to get off the phone before he can start dredging up talk of my sister, all the still-gaping wounds of our past.
“Yeah, sure,” he says, palpably relieved that I’m even considering it, and although my parents have been divorced for over twenty years now, it’s moments like these when I can tell he still cares.
I glance over at Ryan, managing a half-hearted smile to let him know I’m all right.
“And Claire,” my dad adds, drawing my attention back to the phone. “Don’t tell her it was my idea, okay?”
I hang up, the voices around me turning to static as my eyes drill hard into the bar. I can practically feel my skin buzzing as the thought of going back snakes its way through my system, my limbs suddenly heavy like they’re filled with sand.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
I blink back to the room, the loud clack of billiard balls in the background as a new voice cuts its way through the fog.
“I was starting to think you weren’t going to show up.”
“Mike,” I say, squaring my shoulders as I attempt to shake off that conversation, my former boss materializing by my side.
