“You’re right. Who gives a shit about the rules?” She stroked the cat’s fur as her eyes filled with tears. She’d cried so much the night before, she was surprised she had any water left in her body, that she wasn’t all dehydrated and wrinkled like a raisin.
Maddie rolled to her back and looked up at the shadows spread across her ceiling. She could have lived her entire life quite happy if she’d never fallen in love. She’d be happy to never know the high dopamine rush or the heart-wrenching anguish and despair of having loved and lost. Lord Tennyson was wrong. It was not better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Maddie would have much preferred to have never loved at all than to love Mick only to lose him.
I’m not hurt, he’d said.
I’m disgusted. She could take his anger and even the hate she’d seen in his eyes. But disgust? That hurt to the core. The man she loved, the man who’d not only touched her heart but her body, was disgusted by her. Knowing how he felt made her want to curl up in a ball and cover her head until it didn’t hurt anymore.
Around noon her back began to ache, so she grabbed her kitten and a quilt off her bed. She and Snowball lay on the couch and watched mindless television all day and into the evening. She even watched Kate & Leopold, a movie she’d always hated because she’d never understood why any sane woman would jump off a bridge for a man.
However, this time her dislike of the movie didn’t keep her from crying into a Kleenex. After Kate & Leopold, she watched Meerkat Manor and Project Runway reruns. When she wasn’t crying over Leopold, the poor Meerkats, or the abomination of Jeffrey’s rocker pants, she was thinking about Mick. What he’d said, his face when he’d said it, and what he’d told her about his father leaving his mother for Alice. Alice had been right about Loch’s feelings. Who would have thought it? Not Maddie, or rather she had thought of it, but given Alice’s history with men, especially married men, and Loch’s history with women, Maddie had dismissed the possibility.
Rose’s reasoning for what she’d done was a classic case of loss of control and the feeling of loss of self. The typical “if I can’t have you, no one can” that had been analyzed and studied and found throughout history.
It had been so simple, and right in front of her the whole time. Knowing the truth made writing the book easier, but on a personal level, it really didn’t change anything. Her mother had still made a bad choice that ended in her death. Three people died and three children were left devastated. Motive didn’t really matter a whole lot.
At around midnight she fell asleep and woke the next morning feeling as bad as ever. Maddie had never been a whiner or a crier. Most likely because she’d learned at an early age that whining and crying and feeling sorry for yourself didn’t get you anywhere. Even though she still felt like emotional roadkill, she took a shower and moved into her office. Lying around and feeling bad wasn’t going to get her work done. That was the thing about writing her books, she was the only one who could do it.
Her timeline was pinned to the wall and everything was ready. She sat down and began to write:
At three p.m. on July ninth, Alice Jones put on her white blouse and black skirt and sprayed Charlie on her wrists. It was the first day of her new job at Hennessy’s, and she wanted to make a good impression. Hennessy’s had been built in 1925 during Prohibition and the family had prospered by selling grain alcohol out of the back….
At around noon, Maddie got up to fix lunch, feed Snowball, and grab a Diet Coke. She wrote until midnight, when she fell into bed, and woke the next morning with Snowball under the covers and curled beneath her chin.
“This is a bad habit,” she told her cat. Snowball purred, a steady rattling of love, and Maddie couldn’t quite bring herself to kick the kitten out of bed.
During the next several weeks, Snowball developed other bad habits as well. She insisted on lying in Maddie’s lap while she wrote or walking on the desk and batting off paper clips, pens, and blocks of sticky notes.
Maddie kept herself busy, writing ten hours a day, taking occasional breaks out on her back deck to feel the sun on her face, before getting back to work until she fell into bed exhausted. During those moments when she wasn’t thinking about work, her mind always turned to Mick. She wondered what he was doing and who he was seeing. He’d said that he wasn’t going to think about her, and she believed him. If not thinking about the past was easy for him, not thinking about her would be even easier.
On those occasions when her mind wasn’t filled with work, she recalled their conversations, their lunch at Redfish, and the nights he’d spent in her bed.
She wished she could hate Mick. Or even dislike him. It would be so much easier if she could. She’d tried to recall all the mean and nasty things he’d said the night she’d told him who she was, but she couldn’t hate Mick. She loved him and was fairly sure she’d love him forever.
On the anniversary of her mother’s death, she wondered if Mick was alone, remembering that night that had changed their lives. If he felt as alone and sad as she did. As the clock struck a minute after midnight, her heart sank as she realized she’d been holding on to a tiny shred of hope that he might show up on her porch. He didn’t, and she was forced to accept all over again that the man she loved didn’t love her.
The last day of August, she dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and a black cotton tank and took Snowball for her vet appointment. Leaving her kitten in the big hands of Dr. Tannasee was more traumatic than Maddie was willing to admit. She ignored the little burst of panic as she walked out of the examining room without the crazy-eyed, bucktoothed, rule-breaking ball of white fur, and she was forced to face an inconceivable fact. Somehow, Maddie had become a cat person.
When she returned home, the house seemed intolerably still and empty, and she forced herself to work for a few hours before moving out onto the deck to take a break in the fresh air and sunshine. She sat in an Adirondack chair and tilted her face to the sun. Next door, the Allegrezzas stood on their deck, laughing and talking and barbequing something.
“Maddie, come over and see the twins,” Lisa called out to her. She stood and took a quick inventory, but she didn’t spot a Hennessy. Her black flip-flops slapped the bottoms of her feet as she walked the short distance to the neighbors’.
Wrapped like burritos and lying in the same baby carriage shaded by a big ponderosa, Isabel and Lilly Allegrezza slept, oblivious to the fuss around them. The girls had dark glossy hair like their father and the most delicate faces Maddie had ever seen.
“Don’t they look like little porcelain dolls?” Lisa asked.
Maddie nodded. “They’re so tiny.”
“They both weigh a little more than five pounds now,” Delaney said. “They were early, but they’re perfectly healthy. If there was the slightest concern, Nick would have them at home in a germ-free bubble.” She looked over at her husband manning the grill with Louie. She lowered her voice and added, “He’s bought every gadget imaginable. The baby book calls that nesting.”
Lisa laughed. “Who would have thought he’d be a nester?”
“Are you talking about me?” Nick asked his wife.
Delaney looked over at the grill and smiled. “Just saying how much I love you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“When are you going back to work?” Lisa asked her sister-in-law.
“I’ll open the salon again next month.”
Maddie looked at Delaney and her smooth blond hair, cut straight across at her shoulders. “A hair salon?”