“We’re still figuring it out,” he said, and once again, he let it go.Now isn’t the time. Leave it on a good note.
“We are. Work hard. Meet all your obligations.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile.
He cocked his head. “What?”
“You said you had to do work so you could take tomorrow afternoon off. Clearly you have obligations.” Darlene headed for the door but paused to look back over her shoulder. “I want to be wrong about her. Please prove me wrong. If she makes you happy, if she has your best interests at heart… Then hold onto her. And tell me to back the hell off so you can. I don’t know how to be a mother. You’re going to have to help me learn. I’m sorry for that.”
Then she was gone, leaving Gregory to stare at the open door and wonder what had just happened.
8
Fear of the Dark
“And then, she asked me to tell her to back the hell off so I could have a relationship with you. She said she didn’t know how to be a mother, she was sorry for that, and I’d need to help her learn.”
Hanna stared across the cafe table at Gregory, fork lifted halfway from her plate but paused at the surprise of his words. “She what? Are you sure that was your mother, and not an alien who stole her body? Or a clone? Do we know she didn’t fall down the stairs and concuss herself?”
“I can’t attest to any of those. As far as I know, it was an alien in a clone body who fell down the stairs and concussed itself. That would make as much sense as what she said.” He adjusted his grip on his sandwich to take another bite.
He’d almost forgotten what it felt like to take gratuitous and entirely unnecessary time off. Mental health days had gone the way of the dinosaurs, extinct so long he could only speculate at what they’d looked like, since he’d taken over the company. Plenty of people in similar positions spent all their time on vacation and dialed into business calls when they couldn’t avoid it. Gregory had tried to hit the ground running and maintain a breakneck pace as he established himself, stabilized the company, and took care of his family. He hadn’t taken even part of a day to go do something enjoyable since before he’d arrived in England.
He didn’t realize how heavily it had weighed on him until Hanna appeared in his office doorway late that morning, dressed in a casual but put-together outfit and wearing an anticipatory smile. One look at her told him how she looked forward to their afternoon out, just the two of them, and the answering excitement in his heart said he’d come to look forward to it, too. Stepping out of the office with her felt like dropping a world of weight on the floor and walking with lighter steps toward the waiting car.
The drive through the countryside had felt like a mundane kind of magic he could attain if he reached for it. Beautiful countryside. Light chatter. A jolt of pleasant surprise through his nerves as their hands found each other on the seat of the car. Neither of them had pulled their hands away. After a few minutes of doing his level best to ignore the feel of their hands together, he found they’d clasped together at some point and he had no inclination to let go.
Not as they drove. Not when they arrived and found a cafe that looked promising to eat at. They’d held hands with all the shy attraction of nervous adolescents stealing touches between classes, walking from locker to locker locked together at the palms and hoping no one would notice them together. Even now, as they sat at the tiny outdoor table, their feet touched in such a way that they could blame it on proximity and not admit they hadn’t quite finished touching.
Fairytales had begun this way. As he’d watched her obvious delight at their adventure, he deeply wanted to give her one of her own. No one else had bothered, and she deserved a happiness that extended far into the mythical ever-after. Perhaps, in doing so, he could share it with her, and thus have a piece of one himself.
Hanna finished taking her bite, chewed with a thoughtful deliberateness, and swallowed. “Maybe she finally realized she would lose you forever if she didn’t behave herself. Or even realized she’d started to act like a person she didn’t want to be.”
“Maybe.” He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I want to think she did. And I can’t tell if I’m ashamed at myself that my first thought, which continues to lurk in my mind, was to wonder what she was up to. Or what she wanted. She never comes down to my office if she can help it.”
“I don’t think you should be ashamed, no. She’s earned some of that thinking.”
“She has. Though I’d just gotten off that equally strange call with Robert, so I worried I’d projected some of that onto her.” He took a bite.
While he chewed, Hanna said, “Maybe it was a bit of column A, a bit of column B. Though… Tell me if I’m reading into this, but is it a little too coincidental that you had a strange call with Robert, and a little bit later, your mother showed up in your office, where she never goes, to have a strange conversation?”
One eyebrow went up as Gregory swallowed his food. “I’m not sure. Though, now that you mention it, the timingwasa little strange. Robert calls. I know he didn’t get what he wanted from me. Then my mother shows up minutes later to talk about more than you. She said ‘meet your obligations’, then spun it into me taking a day off when I pressed.”
Hanna canted her head. “That’s strange phrasing.”
“The phrasing was why I pressed her.”
Her fork clinked against her plate as she set it down. “Do your mother and Robert know each other?”
“More than ‘know’. I guess they dated pretty seriously when I was little.” He turned his sandwich around in his hand, as if considering his next angle of attack for eating it, but found he didn’t care to take another bite.
“So they’re very familiar.”
“Familiar, but I don’t get the idea their split was amicable. My understanding is, they broke it off just before I went to live with Gran. That was how Robert ended up involved with the company. My grandfather took a shine to him while he was dating Mom, and Grandpa kept him around while Mom went off to party.” He set the sandwich down.
Hanna’s foot pressed tighter to his under the table. “Is that during the time you don’t remember?”
“Seems that way. No one much talks about it, and even though I know they lived together, I don’t recall him being there.” He mustered a smile. “Guess he wasn’t very notable, if I don’t remember it. I always kind of assumed my mother had driven him off.”
“Which is not an unfair assumption, but might be wrong.” Hanna smiled at him, sweet and comforting. “We don’t need to dig into it now. Not when we’re having a nice lunch. I really just wondered if maybe Robert had called your mother to nudge you about whatever he was being weird about.”