“George will let you know when your prints for the gala have gone to the framers,” he said.
“Yes.” His mother studied him through the dark lenses of sunglasses she didn’t need. It would be another hour before the sun rose high enough to clear the tops of the Atlanta skyline. “Your business manager and I exchanged emails. Georgina is the one who told me you were holed up at the office again instead of her. She sounds terribly busy. I wish you hadn’t delegated the gala to her, too. It’s a family matter you should be handling yourself. It must be such a terrible imposition.”
“George is family to me,” Mike reminded her. “Jeremy thought so, too. Plus I pay her a king’s ransom for the luxury of imposing on her. And she’s enjoying thinking the gala prints through with me. She misses Jeremy as much as I do.”
His mother sighed at Mike’s reasonable response to her opening guilt salvo. She reached into her Hermès Birkin for another cigarette and lit up.
“Aren’t you going to invite me up?” She released an exasperated stream of smoke into the morning breeze. “You can tell me more about the good you keep insisting you two are doing in these places of yours. Besides, it’s not polite to leave your mother loitering at the curb.”
Mike stared at his boots. “I’m not alone, Mom.”
“Oh?” His mother didn’t have the poker face for feigning surprise. “Is that so?”
“Yes, it’s so. Why do I have the sinking suspicion you already knew that?” And why did his mother suddenly care?
“I suppose when I spoke with Georgina yesterday and she mentioned you were in the city instead of immersing yourself in your small-town escape, I might have wondered at the reason.”
“What I’ve been doing and with whom isn’t something you’ve bothered wondering about for years.” His mother was up to no good. And he didn’t want it anywhere near Bethany. “Let me see my friend off, and then we can—”
“Hey,” a soft voice said from behind him.
Mike’s mother stared over his shoulder and smiled her emptiest smile.
Mike turned toward Bethany and her vibrant, unflinching authenticity. Of course she hadn’t waited upstairs or tried to sneak to her truck without being seen. She glanced between him and Livy. She hesitated. When he didn’t say anything, she focused on his mother.
“I don’t mean to interrupt.” Bethany smiled. “I’m on my way out. But it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Bethany Darling.”
“Of course you are, dear.” Livy drew in another lungful of toxins and exhaled in Bethany’s direction.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry?” Bethany asked.
Livy slid her attention toward Mike. “When the Developing Artist grant director told me what, and whom, you were rooting around in our scholarship archives asking questions about, I asked him to do a little legwork for me. He checked George’s latest reports from your co-op here, to see if there were any connections I needed to be aware of.”
Mike shoved his hat higher on his head. “When was the last time you felt the need to be aware of anything relating to my art centers?”
“Foundation grant money helps seed your nonprofits,” his mother said. “Your business manager sends our legal department monthly updates on the artists whose work is being supported by those donations. For tax purposes, of course. I have to hand it to you, my dear”—Livy directed another stream of smoke at Bethany—“you do fast work. Receiving your residency here less than a month ago, and you’re already moving up the food chain.”
“What?” Bethany’s hand slid into Mike’s, almost protectively, as if he were the one his mother was attacking.
“That’s not what happened.” Mike tried to draw Bethany behind him. She stayed right where she was, facing Livy on her own. “Bethany’s father is my physical therapy patient in a town not far from here. I recognized her name. That’s when I looked into her connection to the Artist Co-op and the JHTF scholarship.”
Livy dropped her cigarette to the curb and ground it out with the toe of her Vuitton. “So I can reassure the foundation’s board that it’s purely by chance that the latest recipient of your largesse at this center is also a new . . . friend, whom you’re taking a personal interest in?”
“I earned my residency,” Bethany told her. “The same way I earned my scholarship.”
“She secured her spot to work at the Artist Co-op entirely on her own, Mother. And she and I have become more than friends.”
Livy took stock of their wrinkled clothing. “Obviously.”
Bethany shifted her backpack higher on her shoulder. “I had no idea who your son was when we met, Mrs. Taylor.”
“And yet here you are, first thing in the morning, stumbling out of his studio. One wonders what comes next. My son’s personal influence with your career? His professional support at a show? He has so many contacts, and he adores helping people”—Livy turned to Mike—“even though his father and I can’t get him to own up to his identity on behalf of his brother’s memory. Or to help with the work Harrison and I have devoted our lives to, trying to eradicate the disease that took Jeremy from us.”
“I’m sorry.” Mike blocked his mother from Bethany’s view, stepping between them and turning to face Bethany. “Let me—”
She kissed him softly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, ignoring Livy. “But I promised Dru I’d get to the Whip early.”
He grazed her cheek with his lips. “Go. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Mrs. Taylor.” Bethany nodded at his mother and headed around the building toward her truck.
“It was lovely to meet you,” Livy called after her.
Livy watched until Bethany was out of sight. Then she sighed.
“Really, Michael?”
He braced himself to let his mother have it. Then he noticed Mateo and his entourage on the sidewalk across the street. They were out for their morning constitutional and had stopped to gawk.
“Either get in your car and head back to the airport,” Mike told his mother, “or come upstairs. I’m not doing the rest of whatever this is on the street.”
“Such a heartfelt invitation. How can I refuse?”
Livy bent to the partially open front passenger window.
“Wait for me here,” she said to her driver.
“This way.” Mike headed down the alley.
He could have waited to see if she followed. He could have taken her through the co-op studio space, which had an elevator. But there were artists scheduled to work that morning, and some of them liked to get an early start. And even if keeping his identity separate from their work weren’t the cornerstone of his ability to do what he did for them, he wouldn’t dream of disrupting the creative energy of the space with the confrontation his mother seemed determined to instigate.
He punched in his code and opened the street-level door to his space, holding it wide, waiting.
His mother balked at the stairs. “In these shoes?”
“Take them off.”
She sighed and slipped out of her man-eater heels. “I guess I should have packed my prairie skirt and sandals.”
Mike didn’t respond to her dig at Bethany. He followed his mother up and listened to her breathing become alarmingly labored before they neared the top. She ignored it, of course, expecting him to as well. He keyed in his code again and opened the door to the studio.
She hovered on the threshold of his private world, his photographs ultimately drawing her inside. She inspected each one with the critical, dispassionate eye of a collector.
“Have you really donated every penny you’ve earned from these?” was her only comment. “Is that some publicity agent’s brainchild?”
“I don’t do publicity.” Mike followed her, not liking how much he longed for her expert opinion of his work—if only her judgment could somehow be separated from the fact that the art was his. “Money was never what they were about.”
“No.” She’d reached the far corner of the studio. She could see into his bed
room and the disarray he and Bethany had made of his sheets and comforter. “They’re about you not wanting any part of your father and me.”
“They’re about searching for what I need in life.” Searching for the kind of love he’d lost with Jeremy, Mike realized, and was beginning to connect with in Chandlerville.
“And installing yourself in places like this Podunk you’re working in now? Is it really necessary for you to flaunt how little chance your family has of you ever coming home for good? People need help in New York, too, Michael. The city’s full of artists and the sick and people with no money. Imagine how much good you could accomplish there.”
“I’m not moving back to New York.” Manhattan was where Jeremy had died. Where their family had fallen apart. New York was done for Mike forever, no matter how upsetting his decision was for his parents.
Livy shook her head. “I keep waiting for you to get all of this out of your system. To accept the life you were meant to live.”
“This”—he looked around his studio, his gaze resting on Bethany’s easel and painting—“is the life I’m meant to live. Wherever I can help. Wherever I can discover something that inspires me to create.”
“And what exactly have you discovered here?”
Livy confronted Bethany’s canvas, then moved to the desk where his work with the image of Bethany’s half-finished painting of the Dixon house was displayed. It was such an intimate, poignant reflection of the family and community Bethany loved, he wanted to click it closed. Protect her somehow from Livy’s jaded reaction.
“Very inspiring.” His mother studied the collage, then the original canvas. “Your new protégé’s good.”
“Bethany’s not my protégé.”
“Then what is she?”
“She’s . . . unexpected. Honest.” Bethany had been showing him how to be honest from the very start, though she’d been running from her own truth, too. “She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met.”
Livy eked out a tight nod, a sliver of a smile. “Is the sex really that good?”
“Leave it alone, Mother.” He wasn’t doing this with her. “I don’t know why you’ve dug yourself out of your very busy life and thought you’d be welcome to meddle in mine. But you’re going to leave Bethany alone.”
Real emotion passed between them for the first time since her arrival.
Livy’s lingering hurt at his years-ago rejection pulled at the hard edges of her sophisticated mask. Her reaction reignited Mike’s pain at her abandonment—when his parents hadn’t come after him when he’d fled New York. Her showing an interest in his choices right after Jeremy’s death might have made a difference. It left Mike feeling violent now.
“Because this girl is your true love?” she asked. “Because you feel some responsibility toward bettering her sad life? Or is this something to do with the anniversary of your brother’s death? Is it possible you’ve made your own existence so lonely, you’d latch on to any stranger who came along, for as long as you needed her to feel better.”
“Lonely?”
“You made your entire teenage world about your brother. And then when he was gone and your father and I, your family, needed you most, you wanted nothing to do with us. Loneliness is the price you pay for that kind of selfishness.”
“My family could have been a part of my life anytime you and Dad wanted. Just not the way you wanted. So you let me go. You were glad to see me go, and the feeling was mutual. I’ve known exactly what I’ve been doing all this time, and so have you.”
And it hadn’t felt lonely—at least not to Mike, not until he’d met Bethany.
“And what exactly are you doing now?” his mother demanded to know. “You could certainly offer this girl and her family a great deal. But how long is it going to last until you’re glad to see them go, too?”
“A woman like Bethany’s not looking for anyone to offer her anything. She’s fought for whatever she has. She gives away more than she keeps. And her family already has a lot.”
A lot that they were offering Mike, as if he had every right to be a part of them.
The collage he’d built around Bethany’s painting of the Dixon home told her foster family’s remarkable story. Creating it and the other collections had consumed Mike, when he could have spent the last few days finalizing Jeremy’s series of prints for the foundation gala.
His photographs of Chandlerville were pretty. But they were a stranger’s idealized perspective of a close-knit community. It had taken Bethany’s art to make them personal and give them heart. It was her work that showcased the unbreakable bond that could form between people who knew how to love deeply and forever.
“The Dixons already have everything they need.”
“And everything you need?” Livy stared at him. Beautiful. Polished. Smart. Intuitive. “What is all of this, Michael?”
She was hurt. Genuinely hurt, beneath her perfect makeup and clothes and Upper East Side calm. She wore the same wounded expression as when Mike had chosen to live his own life and honor his brother’s last wishes—instead of embracing the emotional shambles of a family that would have shackled him to his parents’ glitzy existence.
“Mom . . .”
He put his arm around her. Whatever they’d been through, she was his mother. He tried to find something to say that would help Livy understand what she hadn’t been able to when he’d been nineteen.
That he needed more. That he always had. More than his parents had needed from life and from his brother’s death. Mike had needed more from living than their money and privilege defining everything he would ever be. He’d needed to go and give and feel something besides loss. He’d needed to move.
And now, after a decade, he didn’t anymore.
Bethany and her light and her world were there now. Her Chandlerville. Her journey, so very different but so strangely similar. Her creative energy had inspired him. Her imagination, her passion, was a second chance filling his empty arms. Her love was grounding him for the first time since he was a kid. All that Bethany had become in his life left him aching for more, each moment they were apart.
“Whatever all this is,” he said to his mother, “I need you to stay out of it. I need you to trust that I know what’s best for my life. I don’t expect you to understand. I’m not sure I do yet, not completely. But I’m closer to being happy than I have been in a long time. And I need you to be happy about that. Not suspicious or jealous or tracking me down to make trouble.”
“So now my visiting you is making trouble?” Livy sifted through her purse for her cigarettes. “Like your father and I were making trouble when you and your brother shut us out, even the last months of Jeremy’s life, spending all your time together, wanting nothing to do with us.”
“You had the foundation marketing team filming his final treatments.” The memory of it made Mike sick. “Even when Jeremy was referred to hospice, you were dead set on turning it into a media circus.”
“So Jeremy gave his baby brother his healthcare power of attorney, and you barred me from my son’s room.” Livy’s eyes shimmered with tears that she didn’t let fall. “Harrison and I wanted your brother’s suffering to mean something. To show the world the devastating effects of cystic fibrosis, so we can one day wipe it off the face of the earth and save other families from the loss we suffered.”
It was a noble speech, totally glossing over the worst moments of his family’s rock-bottom.
“What you should have been doing,” Mike said, “was sharing the last weeks of your son’s life the way Jeremy wanted to live them.”
“Which you prevented, by making me out to be a villain instead of a concerned mother. Just like you are now. How could you be so cruel?”
“I learned from the master, I suppose.”
The unwelcome thought made Mike queasy. The fact that he could say it out loud to his mother reminded him exactly who and what he’d come from. He thought of Joe and Marsha Dixon and their blind devotion to raising at-ri
sk kids, many of whom had learned the hard way that they couldn’t trust anyone. He thought of the selfless example Bethany’s foster parents had set—so that Bethany and Shandra and their other kids would grow up wanting to help others themselves.
Livy went to light a cigarette.
He hitched a thumb toward the stairway door. “Outside, if you want to smoke. I’ll walk you back down and make sure your driver knows the way back to the airport.”
“Don’t be silly.” She sounded genuinely surprised. “Take your mother to breakfast.”
So they could have another charming heart-to-heart? And since when did Livy put anything in her body before noon besides Marlboro Lights and cappuccino?
She waved away his obvious skepticism. “There must be at least one decent place to eat nearby. Of course, you’d need to change.”
She wrinkled her nose at his day-old attire, and then his computer monitor and his work with Bethany’s canvas.
“You could make her a star,” Livy conceded. An attempt, perhaps, to extend an olive branch? “Is that what you want?”
“I want whatever Bethany wants from her art.” And Bethany wanted to love freely, and be loved, and through her art to share the world that meant everything to her. “I don’t think being a star has anything to do with it.”
“How quaint.”
“Enough,” Mike snapped. “I don’t know why you’re really here, but none of this is any of your business. And I have work to do.”
“I’m sorry.” Livy returned her cigarettes to her purse, her complexion paling beneath her carefully applied makeup. “Really. I didn’t fly all the way down here to quarrel. I don’t want things between us to be this way. I’m just asking for breakfast. A few hours of your time, Michael, wherever you’d like to go. Let’s call a truce.”
Mike sighed. Truces with his parents had the shelf life of unrefrigerated milk. But something was definitely off with his mother. Maybe it was the anniversary of losing Jeremy. Maybe Livy really was reaching for something with Mike that she hadn’t before. After all, she could have continued snooping into his personal life long-distance, and sharing her running disappointment with his choices over the phone.
His Darling Bride (Echoes of the Heart #3) Page 23
