The Sea Glass Cottage
Page 2
“Oh no. Is it one of your boys?” Oh please, she prayed. Don’t let it be one of the boys.
Melody had been through enough over the past three months, since her jerkhole husband ran off with one of his high school students.
“No, honey. It’s not my family. It’s yours.”
Her words seemed to come from far away and it took a long time for them to pierce through.
No. Impossible.
Fear rushed back in, swamping her like a fast-moving tide. She sank blindly onto the sofa.
“Is it Caitlin?”
“It’s not your niece. Stop throwing out guesses and just let me tell you. It’s your mom. Before you freak out, let me just say, first of all, she’s okay, from what I understand. I don’t have all the details but I do know she’s in the hospital, but she’s okay. It could have been much worse.”
Her mom. Olivia tried to picture Juliet lying in a hospital bed and couldn’t quite do it. Juliet Harper didn’t have time to be in a hospital bed. She was always hurrying somewhere, either next door to Sea Glass Cottage to the garden center the Harper family had run in Cape Sanctuary for generations or down the hill to town to help a friend or to one of Caitlin’s school events.
“What happened?”
“She had a bad fall and suffered a concussion and I think some broken bones.”
Olivia’s stomach twisted. A concussion. Broken bones. Oh man. “Fell where? Off one of the cliffs near the garden center?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know all the details yet. This just happened this morning and it’s still early for the gossip to make all the rounds around town. I assumed you already knew. That Caitlin or someone would have called you. I was only checking in to see how I can help.”
This morning. She glanced at her watch. Her mother had been in an accident hours earlier and Olivia was just finding out about it now, in late afternoon.
Someone should have told her—if not Juliet herself, then, as Melody said, at least Caitlin.
Given their recent history, it wasn’t particularly surprising that her niece, raised by Olivia’s mother since she was a baby, hadn’t bothered to call. Olivia wasn’t Caitlin’s favorite person right now. These days, during Olivia’s regular video chats with her mother, Caitlin never popped in to say hi anymore. At fifteen, Caitlin was abrasive and moody and didn’t seem to like Olivia much, for reasons she didn’t quite understand.
“I’m sure someone tried to reach me but my phone has been having trouble,” she lied. Her phone never had trouble. She made sure it was always in working order, since so much of her freelance business depended on her clients being able to reach her and on her being able to Tweet or post something on the fly.
“I’m glad I checked in, then.”
“Same here. Thank you.”
Several bones broken and a long recovery. Oh dear. That would be tough on Juliet, especially this time of year when the garden center always saw peak business.
“Thank you for telling me. Is she in the hospital there in Cape Sanctuary or was she taken to one of the bigger cities?”
“I’m not sure. I can call around for you, if you want.”
“I’ll find out. You have enough to worry about.”
“Keep me posted. I’m worried about her. She’s a pretty great lady, that mom of yours.”
Olivia shifted, uncomfortable as she always was when others spoke about her mother to her. Everyone loved her, with good reason. Juliet was warm, gracious, kind to just about everyone in their beachside community of Cape Sanctuary.
Which made Olivia’s own awkward, tangled relationship with her mother even harder to comprehend.
“Will you be able to come home for a few days?”
Home. How could she go home when she couldn’t even walk into the coffee shop across the street?
“I don’t know. I’ll have to see what’s going on there.”
How could she possibly travel all the way to Northern California? A complicated mix of emotions seemed to lodge like a tangled ball of yarn in her chest whenever she thought about her hometown, which she loved and hated in equal measures.
The town held so much guilt and pain and sorrow. Her father was buried there and so was her sister. Each room in Sea Glass Cottage stirred like the swirl of dust motes with memories of happier times.
Olivia hadn’t been back in more than a year. She kept meaning to make a trip but something else always seemed to come up. She usually went for the holidays at least, but the previous year she’d backed out of even that after work obligations kept her in Seattle until Christmas Eve and a storm had made last-minute travel difficult. She had spent the holiday with friends instead of with her mother and Caitlin and had felt guilty that she had enjoyed it much more than the previous few when she had gone home.
She couldn’t avoid it now, though. A trip back to Cape Sanctuary was long overdue, especially if her mother needed her.
“Thanks again for letting me know.”
“I’m so glad I called. The minute you find out anything about Juliet, let me know.”
“I will. Thanks.”
After she ended the call with Melody, Olivia immediately called her mother’s cell. When there was no answer there, she dialed Caitlin’s phone and was sent straight to voice mail, almost as if her niece was blocking her.
She glared at the phone in frustration.
Left with few other options, she finally dialed the hospital in Cape Sanctuary. To her relief, after she asked whether her mother was a patient there, she was connected almost instantly to a room.
“Hello?”
Her mother did not sound like herself. Usually Juliet’s voice was firm, confident. She wasn’t exactly brusque, merely self-assured and determined to waste as little time as possible.
Today, Juliet’s voice was small, hesitant, almost... Frightened.
With her own emotions frayed from the week she’d had, Olivia was aware of a subtle thread connecting them for once, as unexpected as it was unusual.
She was frightened, too.
“Mom. What’s going on? Is it true you were in an accident?”
“How did you find out?” Juliet asked.
Not from you or from Caitlin, she wanted to answer tartly. The two people who should have told her hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone, had they?
Otis came running over with his favorite toy and sat at her feet, happily chewing.
“Melody called me, saying she’d heard bits and pieces and knew you had been injured. Apparently you had a fall. Are you okay? What happened?”
“It’s the stupidest thing. I’m so embarrassed.”
“I don’t think the word embarrassed needs to enter the conversation here. You’re hurt. You had an accident. You didn’t break a bottle of pickles at the grocery store. Did you fall off the roof?”
Juliet released a breath. “I was up on a ladder, trying to hang some baskets I had just potted to the hooks in one of the greenhouses, and...something went wrong.”
Olivia frowned at that momentary hesitation. “Something?”
“The ladder buckled or it wasn’t set up right in the first place. I don’t know exactly. To be honest, everything’s a bit of a blur. Of course, that might be the pain medicine talking.”
“What were you doing up on a ladder? You’re the boss. Don’t you have people to do that?”
“We’re shorthanded. Don’t get me started.” Juliet’s voice sounded somewhat stronger. Talking about the garden center she loved must have helped take her mind off the pain and fear.
“I spent three years training Sharon Mortimer to be the assistant manager under me and she decides two weeks ago to take a job running the nursery at a box store in Redding. Can you believe it? Where’s the loyalty?”
She didn’t want to deal with the garden center’s personnel issues right now, wh
en her mother was lying in a hospital bed. “What are the doctors saying?”
“You know doctors. They only want to give you bad news.”
“What did they say?”
Juliet sighed. “Apparently I have a concussion. And I broke two ribs and also my right hip. That’s the side I landed on. They were afraid my wrist on that side was broken as well where I tried to brace my landing, but it seems to be only sprained.”
How far had she fallen? Good heavens. It sounded horrible. “Oh, Mom.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Juliet assured her. “I was only on the ground for a few minutes before one of my customers found me and called paramedics. And they were there right away. So handsome.”
Juliet seemed to be drifting away again.
“What are the doctors saying about your recovery? Will you need surgery? A cast?” Olivia pressed again. She had no idea how a broken hip was treated.
“Dr. Adeno, that nice new orthopedic doctor, was just here and she wants to do surgery tomorrow. I still haven’t decided if I want to go through with it.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “It’s not like Botox, Mom. It’s not about whether you feel like it or not. If you need orthopedic surgery, you don’t have many options. Not if you want to walk again.”
“She says I’ll be in the hospital three to five days and need four to six weeks of recovery. I can’t be away from the garden center that long! The whole place will fall apart, especially without Sharon.”
Everything always came back to the garden center. Why was she so surprised?
After Steve Harper’s tragic death, her mother had stepped up to run the business that supported her family and had surprised everyone—probably most especially Juliet herself—by being great at it.
Olivia had tried not to resent her mother’s long hours as she had immersed herself in learning the business.
She had never been gifted with the green thumb of her father, or her older sister. Steve and Natalie had bonded over their time in the garden. Nat had loved playing in the dirt while Olivia much preferred digging into a good book.
“This couldn’t have happened at a worse time.” Juliet suddenly sounded close to tears.
“Spring growing season.”
“Right. Our busiest season of the year. And that traitor Sharon deserts us for stock options and a better 401(k). What am I going to do? I can’t have surgery tomorrow.”
Again, her mother sounded frightened and Olivia had no idea how to handle it. Juliet was one of the most together people she’d ever known. Hearing this vulnerability in her voice disturbed her almost more than the accident itself.
“I’m sorry,” she said gently, not knowing what else she could say.
“I wish you were here.”
The small, frail-sounding words came out of nowhere, almost as if Juliet didn’t really know she had uttered them.
Olivia stared into space while she felt something odd and sharp tug at her chest.
Her mother needed her. For once, Juliet wasn’t the invincible almost-fifty-three-year-old widow running a successful business and raising her teenage granddaughter on her own. She was an injured woman who needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it.
In the end, that was all that mattered. Olivia reached for a piece of paper, already mentally going through the list of things she would have to do in order to take extended emergency family leave from her job, close up her apartment and head out of town.
“I’ll come down for a few days,” she said instantly, without giving herself time to panic. “I’ll be there as soon as I can make the arrangements.”
“Oh. Oh no,” Juliet said quickly, as if coming to her senses and realizing what she had said. “I know how busy you are. Anyway, what will Grant say?”
Grant was her ex-fiancé. Though he was an executive at her job, he wasn’t directly over her department and had nothing to say that mattered. At least he hadn’t in the six months since they broke up. “Don’t worry about me, Mom. This is an emergency. I can take some time.”
“Oh. I hate to be a bother. I feel so stupid.”
“You’re not a bother and you’re not stupid.”
What kind of weird universe had she slipped into where she was the one giving her mother counsel? That wasn’t the natural order of things. Usually Juliet didn’t need Olivia or anybody. After Olivia’s father died, her mother had tried very hard to prove that to the world.
“I’ll get down there soon as I can.”
“I’ll be fine, honey. I promise,” Juliet continued to protest. “Don’t come. Do you hear me?”
Before Olivia could answer, Juliet switched gears. “Oh. I need to go,” she said. “Caitlin just came in.”
Of course her mom needed to go if Olivia’s fifteen-year-old niece was there. She almost insisted her mother hand the phone to Caitlin so Olivia could yell at her for not calling her the instant she found out about Juliet’s accident, but she had a feeling Juliet would refuse, ever protective over the daughter of the child she couldn’t save.
“All right. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Don’t come down, honey.” Her mother suddenly sounded far more like herself, her voice brisk and in control. “I mean it. We’ll be fine. I may not be able to get around for a few weeks, but I can supervise operations at the garden center just fine from a wheelchair. I’ll call you later in the week. Bye. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she started to say, but by then, her mother had already hung up the phone.
Olivia sat for a moment, her dog happily chewing his toy at her feet and full-on rain splattering the window now.
She was half tempted to listen to her mother and stay right here in Seattle, especially after Juliet had just bluntly told her not to come. But then she thought of Juliet’s frightened voice and knew she couldn’t stand by. For once, her mother needed her. If that meant Olivia had to bury her own anxieties and juggle work and clients to make it happen, she could do it.
2
JULIET
Juliet Harper ended the call to her daughter, aware even through her fuzzy, painkiller-addled brain of the usual funny catch in her chest that always showed up when she talked to Olivia.
Their relationship seemed so...wrong. She always ended up saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing.
Every time she spoke with Olivia, she had the best of intentions, determined this would be her chance to heal whatever was broken in her interactions with her daughter.
Instead, she would end up bumbling her way through a conversation, never saying what was really on her mind or expressing how much she loved and admired Olivia for all she had overcome.
She knew what was at the heart of it. She had failed one daughter so miserably and was desperately afraid she would screw up with the other one. The great and terrible irony in the whole situation was that her very fear was the main thing in the way of forging a warm and loving mother-daughter relationship with Olivia. The one she yearned for with all her heart.
“Who was that?” Caitlin took a sip from the soda she had brought up from the hospital cafeteria after Juliet had made her granddaughter go down and find something to eat.
Why couldn’t her interactions with Olivia be as easy as those with Caitlin?
“Your aunt Olivia. I asked you to call her. Why didn’t you?”
“I sent her a message,” Caitlin said, her tone defensive. “Maybe she missed it.”
“I told you to call her, not message,” she said. Caitlin always did things her own way and had since she was a baby. When other children would stack two or three blocks together, Caitlin would use them like percussion instruments. Instead of playing with dolls, she had dressed up the wriggling cats and tried to have tea parties with them.
She shifted in the hospital bed in a futile effort to find a more comfortable position.
She should have known. She wasn’t stupid, though nobody would know that by the traumatic events of her day.
The pain meds were wearing off. Instead of asking for more or surrendering to her discomfort, Juliet forced herself to focus on her granddaughter.
She looked so much like her mother, with Natalie’s blond hair, bold eyebrows, stunning hazel eyes. Where Natalie had favored layers and big curls, like the style of the day when she was a teenager, Caitlin wore her hair short in an almost elfin cut. She dressed in her own unique style.
“Olivia must have got my message. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known you were hurt.”
“She only knows because Melody Baker called her. She and Olivia were tight as could be when they were in school. Always together. If you saw one, the other one was close behind. Kind of like you and Jake Cragun.”
Caitlin made a face. “We’re not together that much.”
Both of them knew that wasn’t true. Their neighbor had been Caitlin’s closest friend since grade school.
Caitlin had girlfriends, too, good ones, but Jake was her BFF, her confidant.
Juliet had always thought it was so sweet, the way the two of them were always talking a mile a minute to each other. When they weren’t together, they were texting each other or sending memes back and forth.
They had supported each other through some pretty tough things. Despite her young age, Caitlin had been a rock to Jake when his mother died of cancer three years earlier.
Juliet felt a pang when she thought of her dear friend Lilianne, who kept a smile on her face even when she lost her hair and when the grueling effects of chemotherapy treatment kept her on the couch for days afterward.
“How’s your English homework? Did you finish the essay you needed to write?”
“You’re in a hospital bed and you’re still going to nag me about my homework? Really, Mimi?” Caitlin said. She always called Juliet that, from the days when Caitlin had been learning to talk and instinctively tried to call her Mama, since Juliet had been her primary caregiver most of her life.