Page 88 of The Cottage on Blueberry Bay

“What was he like?” she finally asked.

“Who? Bill?” he asked, confused.

“No.” She tapped her index finger on the middle C lightly so it wouldn’t make a sound. “Jacob.”

“I didn’t know him that well,” Gordon started. “Not like your mother, obviously, but I did help after the accident.”

“Is that when you met mom?” she asked.

“It’s how I met the whole town,” he said. “I went to Blueberry Bay to help with the search. I had just graduated from medical school and worked in Portland. They had asked for volunteers to help. I wanted to help, so I went up there. That was when I first met your mother, when she was pregnant with you.”

“How long were you in Maine?” she asked. Had her parents had an affair? Is that how Jacqueline had left Jacob?

“I ended up working through a local hospital, but I did house calls around the more rural areas, like Blueberry Bay.”

“And when did you leave to work in Boston?” Meredith asked, trying to piece the story together from the details she had heard from the Queens.

“I stayed in Maine for a few years,” he said.

“How did you and Mom…” She didn’t have a lot of time before his friend would come and interrupt. “Get together?”

She could hear him exhale. “She tried working things out with Jacob, tried to make the marriage work, but he was a very sick man. He drank. He became belligerent at times. He’d leave for days. And when he did come back, he wouldn’t leave the house. He stopped talking.”

He stopped for a moment.

“Dad?” she asked, wondering if she had lost him.

“I’m here,” he said. “Look, Meredith, your mother always felt guilty about leaving him. She always felt like she could’ve done more, helped more, but she wanted the best for you.”

Meredith thought back to the cottage when she had arrived—Jacob’s madness displayed in the chaos of his art and the hoarding of it.

“I had been a good friend to her during those years, but nothing else,” he said. “Then I moved to Boston and one day, I walked into the office and saw you and your mother in the waiting room. She needed a family physician and looked me up. And, well, you know the rest.”

Meredith did. As the story goes, when they went into his office, Meredith had given Gordon a hug, and he had fallen in love with the little girl in pigtails. Then just as quickly, he’d fallen in love with her beautiful mother, who he had helped in Maine.

“I asked her to marry me six weeks later,” he said.

Meredith smiled at the idea of Gordon falling deeply in love with Jacqueline.

And that was when Meredith felt the jolt of her mother’s absence again. She wouldn’t ever really know the answers to her questions.

“They worked through things,” Gordon said. “Jacob and your mother.”

“What do you mean?” She wondered if he knew about her statue.

“Your mother connected with him before she died and made amends,” Gordon said. “And she wanted you to do that, too. Not for Jacob, but for you.”

She felt the sting again. She pressed the piano key, and it made a soft noise.

“Are you playing the piano?” Gordon asked.

“Yeah,” she said, wishing she hadn’t made the sound.

“She loved hearing you play.”

“I just played her favorite.”

“‘Till We Meet Again!’” he said loudly, happily remembering her favorite song to play. “She said you brought angels to tears.”

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