Margie didn’t appear to hear that. She busied herself cutting Bristol a huge helping of the berry crumble she’d clearly made earlier today and fixing one for herself, too. With huge dollops of homemade whipped cream, because ice cream was saved for the evening.
Bristol had missed that, too. Crumbles and handpicked berries and Margie’s belief that dessert was neither a sin nor an indulgence, but good, solid, Midwest medicine.
“Now,” she said after Bristol had taken her first big bite and drifted off into a cinnamon-sugar-berry coma. Of sheer delight. “Tell me what the matter is.”
Bristol pulled herself back from the bliss of her mother’s crumble with great reluctance. “What makes you think there’s something wrong?”
Margie laughed. “I may be a simple woman, Bristol, but I know my own child. It would have to be the end of the world for you to come home of your own volition. So. Tell me what world ended.”
“You make it sound like I hate it here,” Bristol said, frowning. When she would have proclaimed that she did, in fact, hate Ohio and all its works a mere twenty-four hours ago. Even twelve hours ago. “Or that I hate you. When really, it’s just that—”
“Bristol.” And would her name in that tone ever not make her shut her mouth? And sit up a little straighter? She hoped not. Margie was eyeing her with that particular Mom glint in her gaze. “It’s not your job to make me feel secure. I’ve got that covered, thank you. I know who I am. But I also know who you are. And I would love nothing more than to feed you crumble and fatten you up until the cows come home, but since the day you left for college you’ve never turned up on the front porch out of the blue. As much as I love seeing you, we both know you would never decide to come here on the spur of a moment without a reason.”
And to her great astonishment, Bristol felt that hollow cache inside her, the one she’d thought she had such a great handle on, begin to swell. It grew bigger and bigger, and more precarious as it grew, until she thought, oh no—
But then there was nothing to be done about it. It was happening. She broke down, right there at her mother’s table, and sobbed.
For a long, long time.
Until even the crumble tasted a bit soggy when she finally ate her share.
She and her mother moved out to the backyard that rambled this way and that until it ended up in the woods. They settled down in the shade of the biggest, most majestic of the old oak trees where, Bristol could remember so clearly now, she’d spent many a long, lazy summer’s day peering up at the branches thick with leaves and had tried to imagine who she would be when she grew up.
Was that where it had started?
What made you how you are? Lachlan had asked.
“I guess you probably know that I’ve been...dating someone,” Bristol said awkwardly.
Eventually.
“No, honey,” Margie murmured, her gaze up in the branches, too. “Living in Ohio is actually a kind of fugue state in which tabloids don’t exist and no one ever calls to say they’ve seen my daughter plastered all over them.”
“Ouch.”
Margie only smiled serenely. Until that moment, Bristol hadn’t realized where she’d gotten her version of that same smile.
It was amazing the things a person didn’t see because they’d decided not to look.
Ouch, she thought again as that landed.
“I guess the point, the real truth behind all the extraneous noise, is that I don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” Bristol admitted.
And it hurt, but she didn’t take her words back.
“The Grand Tour, from what we can tell from here. All over Europe like the fancy ladies did it back in the day.” Margie’s smile grew less serene and much warmer. “Your father and I’ve been tracking it on a map every time you turn up in a new city.”
Bristol wiped at her face. She blew out a shaky breath. Then she kicked her shoes off so she could press her toes down into the dirt between the thick roots that served as the sides of her chair.
“Everything used to be so clear to me,” she confessed. “I knew, always, that I wanted to get out of this town. That Ohio wasn’t good enough, that the Midwest was too confining, and for some reason I decided my ticket out had to be academics. Once I decided that I was going to be an academic star, that was all I thought about. Because you can always study more, so anything you dedicate yourself to is within reach. If you want it enough. So that’s what I did. Undergraduate degree. Master’s degree. Doctorate. That was the path I was on and I charged straight down it.”
She was staring at her toes, pressed into the dirt the way she’d liked to do when she was little. Except her toes were pedicured now, because that was one of the parts of her maintenance responsibilities that she actually happily had performed regularly. Because there was something about chipped nail polish that made her feel anything but pretty. A glance at her mother’s toes, the same unchipped, glossy, cherry red they always were, suggested where she might have gotten that.
“I don’t know why it never occurred to me that I needed to figure out what to do after I was done with all that charging around,” she said.
Margie made a supportive sort of noise, and Bristol couldn’t believe she’d forgotten how comforting it was to simply sit with her mother. To feel the security of her presence, solid and unmistakable at her shoulder. The quiet side of Margie, not all tinsel and cider and belting out Christmas carols into the December night.
Though, if she was honest, Bristol loved her mother as an elf, too.
“I can’t even remember what made me decide that I needed to push myself academically in the first place,” Bristol continued now, not sure if it was all the sobbing or the sunshine that made her feel almost drunk. Hollowed out in a new way, that might as easily turn to more sobbing—or silliness. “Do you?”
“Of course I know, honey,” Margie said calmly. “School was the one thing that didn’t interest your sister at all. So you claimed it as yours and dug in.”
Bristol blinked at that. She tried to make what her mother had just said make some sense, but couldn’t. “What do you mean?”
“You know Indy.” Margie laughed. “She used to drive you crazy. When you first moved in together your father and I joked that you’d likely kill her within a week.”
“I still might kill her. That’s a given.”
Margie drew her knees up and laughed again. “When you were little she would always follow you around, wanting to do whatever you were doing whenever you were doing it. You hated it. Anything you tried to do—any activity, any craft, any book you wanted to read—in came Hurricane Indy to do it right along with you. She wanted you to appreciate her efforts, naturally. But you did not.”
“I don’t remember having any kind of sibling rivalry!” Bristol frowned, thinking back. And she wasn’t sure if she was shocked or if she found it all funny. “Are you sure?”
Her mother gave her a look, then laughed. “You are a very methodical thinker, Bristol. At a certain point, it must have occurred to you that you couldn’t order Indy away from whatever it was you were doing. Little sisters are notoriously terrible at taking that hint. So you picked one thing after the next until you found something she didn’t want to do. School.”
Bristol felt her mouth drop open. “This is very unflattering, Mom. I was sure you were going to tell me that the entirety of southwestern Ohio was struck down in wordless awe at the force of my intellect. That they begged me to excel, and so I did.”
“There was some awe at the force of your will, maybe.” Margie considered. “And your willingness to push yourself. But your sister is the fighter. You were always quieter. When Indy would blow up, it would be a big storm, but it would blow over and all would be well. But not you. You like to hold things tight and hide them away until all the fault lines are gathered inside and you feel you have no choice but to make the earth move.”
And here, under the shade of her favorite tree, Bristol didn’t have to hide. She didn’t have to pretend. She pressed her hand to her chest, where it hurt the most. And she finally accepted that the hollow thing she’d been pretending was nothing more than an empty space tucked away in there was her heart.
“Ouch,” she said again.
“Here’s what I’m sure of,” her mother said, and reached over to put her hand on Bristol’s leg. The way she had a million times before and would a million times again. It was like an anchor. It was a version of the roots around her, tying her to the earth, to this place even if only in her memories, to her mother and to herself. “I have never known you, Bristol Marie March, not to get exactly what you want. Once you put your mind to it, that’s that.”
Bristol’s eyes felt wet again. “What if I don’t know what I want?”
“Do you not know?” Margie’s gaze was as steady as her hand. “Or are you afraid that you do know?”
And it was so like her mother not to ask directly about Lachlan, Bristol thought then. Margie had employed the same strategy when Indy and Bristol were teenagers. She always seemed to know everything already and would simply gaze at them without asking until they dissolved before her, flinging out their troubles and sins and worries with careless abandon.
“I think my...dating situation is a symptom of a larger issue,” Bristol said carefully. Because yes, she’d signed agreements. But this was her mom. “And it’s bright and flashy and overwhelming, yes, but it’s not real. And it won’t last. Sooner or later, like it or not, I’m going to have to figure out what I want to do with my life.”
“Here’s the thing about life,” Margie said after a little pause. “You never do stop thinking that you need to figure it all out. You never arrive at an age or a moment and think, how wonderful, I’m finished now.”
“I don’t believe you.” Bristol heard her voice crack, but she was safely tucked away in her mother’s backyard in Ohio. It felt almost revolutionary to allow herself to do nothing at all to hide it. “You and Dad seem to have your lives all figured out. You’ve been running that high school from the secretary’s desk for as long as I can remember. And he legitimately loves being a salesman. I mean, I guess you’ll both retire soon—”
“Thank you, but we are in our fifties, Bristol. Not our seventies.”
Bristol grinned. “All I mean is that you’re happy. You’re both happy. Aren’t you?”
“Yes, but you would never be happy in a life like ours,” her mother said with such...casual conviction that it threw Bristol a little. Okay, more than a little. “Not the way we are. Your father and I have always been good at appreciating the things we have. And better still, we’ve liked that we get to sink down deep into those things, year after year. There’s a pleasure in a small life.”
“I don’t... I mean I want to be the kind of person who appreciates what she has, and practices gratitude, and sinks deep.”
“Why?” Margie’s voice was placid. “You’ve always been ambitious. I never was. I wanted...this. What I have. The boy who gave me my first Valentine, two little girls, this pretty house in the town where we both grew up. There’s nothing wrong with wanting something different. We can’t all be the same.”
“Sometimes I wish I was happy here,” Bristol confessed. She didn’t say, in a small life, but she suspected her mother knew she meant it. “It would have made things a whole lot easier.”
“But that’s not you.” Margie sighed a little, but in that way she often did, as if she couldn’t find the right words and was finished looking. “I don’t know what you’re going to choose to do with yourself, but I do know this. You will always work hard, because that’s who you are. And you’ll need whatever you’re working at to be meaningful to you, because that’s your heart.”
“Really? I thought you just told me that, actually, my heart is an angry, bitter ember. Plus earthquakes, and oh yeah, my entire academic life was aimed at Indy all along.”
“That’s the New Yorker in you talking,” Margie said. It wasn’t exactly a compliment. “Don’t forget, Bristol. I know your real heart.”
And they sat like that for a long while, while Bristol wondered if that was why it hurt so much. That her real heart had made itself known after these months of hiding. And the years of narrowly focused obsession that had come before. Her mother had somehow managed to strip all the layers away and get to that real heart with a serving of berry crumble and a trip to the backyard.
Leaving Bristol to try to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do with it, now that she could feel it beating too intensely inside her chest.
She’d been kidding herself about that hollow space. All the times she’d assured herself that she could sort it all out come fall had been like playing pretend with her sister up and down this dead-end road. She got that now.
“And not that I pay any attention to gossip, whether it’s my knitting circle or those awful newspapers in the checkout line,” Margie began with studied indifference.
Bristol snorted. “A bold lie from the woman half the county calls for information, Mom. Any and all information, because you gather it all.”
Margie ignored that. “But I’ve always felt that living in a small town gives a person all the attention anyone could ever need, since I haven’t walked through a grocery store without being recognized since the day I was born.” She flashed that sedate smile of hers again. “Then again, you always did have higher standards. It’s part of your charm.”
Bristol laughed, and couldn’t believe that her mother could make that happen so easily. Without even seeming to try.
She looked up at the branches spread out above her and all the green leaves. The sunshine that filtered through and the blue sky high above, filled with summer hope.
As if fall would never come.
When Bristol knew it would.
And more, that there was no point waiting around for a change of season when she already knew that this wasn’t a job she could do without losing herself. Maybe other women could—and had, as tough as that was to think about. Bristol supported anyone who could play that role and be good at it. Hell, she’d march in the street for them.
But the truth she’d been trying to push off to September was that she wasn’t them.
Her heart had gone hollow and she hated it.
Bristol wanted herself back, and she didn’t need her collection of degrees to know that she wasn’t going to find that loving a man who could never love her in return. Who had contracts drawn up to prevent it.
No matter how many times he tried to renegotiate, Lachlan only saw her as a clause. A business item to be handled—or replaced.
It turned out that she found the reality of that less comforting the more intense things grew between them. Or in her, anyway. Less of a lovely, soothing tide.
More of a scary riptide, hauling her out to sea.
And leaving her there to drown.
Her mother shifted next to her, and Bristol looked over. At the face she knew better than her own and that solid hand on her leg, marked with the lines and dents and years that Bristol imagined would score her own hands one day. Holding her steady, always.
That was what Margie did.
“Lachlan isn’t the guy, Mom,” she said softly, and was surprised how hard it was to say out loud. When she’d known that all along. “He’s only temporary.”
She expected an argument from the woman who had never been averse to a little matchmaking in her day, between elderly widowed neighbors and some of the high school students who found themselves in the principal’s office too often.
But all Margie did was smile.
Bristol spent the rest of her week off from all things Lachlan back home in Ohio and shocked herself by loving every moment of it. She stuffed herself with all of her mother’s cooking. She went fishing with her dad i
n the long, slow, mellow evenings down by the river. She got her feet dirty and she jumped off the old rope swing into the pond out in the woods. She let the sun make her a little crispy, she ate entirely too much hearty food, and she reconnected to the simple joys she’d long since cast aside in her pursuit of bigger and better.
When she got back to Brooklyn, she felt as if she’d taken the first real vacation she’d had in... Well, maybe since the last summer she’d spent in Ohio before she’d gone off to college.
The flight east had been crowded and delayed thanks to thunderstorms in the Midwest. By the time she landed, Bristol was heartily sick of the jeans and T-shirt she’d worn to fly in. Not to mention, it was not exactly the best choice for traipsing all over the city.
Though it did allow her to continue to feel as incognito as she had in her parents’ backyard and the woods. No one was looking for Lachlan Drummond’s latest girlfriend there. Or out wandering the New York streets, disheveled and anonymous.
They were looking for the elegant academic, as one tabloid had called her. Not an anonymous Brooklyn-bound girl in dirty, ripped jeans and a sunburned nose.
Bristol had been half-afraid that when she made it home, New York would seem as ill-fitting as everything else did these days. But instead, she felt that same rush of exhilaration she had when she’d first come here. The energy of the city, chaos and noise and soaring heights. The rush of it, the mix of drama and practicality on every street corner, in every outfit the locals wore to walk the streets, live in them, and flourish here.
And she could admit that she felt a rush of relief at that. She’d been unexpectedly moved to rediscover the place she came from—but that didn’t mean she wanted to pack up and go live there.
You’ve always been ambitious, her mother had said.
And even on its worst and hardest day, New York City felt like an ambition realized.
Bristol rounded the corner of her block, vaguely wondering how it was that she could feel so content when she’d solved precisely nothing. But maybe that was what she’d learned. Life didn’t need to be solved. All she had to do was live it.
The Pleasure Contract Page 12
