“She’s lonely, Charley.” Gemma’s expression turned sympathetic.
“Well, let her go be lonely at your house.”
“I work. I can’t very well have her hanging out at my office all day, scaring my clients away.”
“So she has to come here and scare all the dead people away instead? I have clients, too.”
“She’s hurting right now.”
“I know, I can feel it. The sadness. Every time she comes over, all I can think about is Dad, and it breaks my heart all over again. As long as she keeps coming over, I can’t heal.”
“Charley, maybe she needs to heal, too.”
“I’m sure she does. I just don’t care.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“You can’t be serious. After everything she’s put me through, you would still defend her?”
“Maybe she needs your forgiveness. She knows what she did was wrong.”
“What she did?” I asked, growing more annoyed by the second. “You say that as though there was only a single transgression. She did everything wrong, Gem.”
While Denise took to Gemma like a duck takes to à l’orange, she’d never quite bonded with me, if the menacing scowls and the constant digs were any indication. Any mother—step or otherwise—who tries to get her daughter committed to a psych ward because she’s a little different from the other kids at the park doesn’t deserve that daughter’s love. But I’d tried. For years, I’d tried to be more like Gemma so our stepmother would like me. I once studied for two days for a spelling test just so I could get an A on a paper that would sit next to Gemma’s on the refrigerator. I was so proud when I’d succeeded that I ran all the way from the bus stop to show it to her, and I fell on the way, but I made it home relatively unscathed. Denise took the paper with the bright red A on it out of my hands, gave it a quick glance, then sent me to my room without dinner for ripping my backpack when I fell.
That night, when I snuck out of my room to get a spoonful of peanut butter, I found the test wadded up in the trash. About three seconds later, I had an epiphany: There would be no winning her over. Denise despised me. Period. It’s hard when the only mother a girl has ever known despises her. To learn that at age seven was quite the blow to the ego. I took the test back to my room, smoothed it out the best I could, and pinned it to a corkboard where I kept pictures my dad had taken of my real mom while she was pregnant with me. Before she died giving birth to me. They served as a reminder. Anytime I tried to gain Denise’s approval, I looked at that crinkled A and rethought my objectives. The way I saw it, my acceptance of Denise’s indifference saved a lot of heartache for me and a lot of disappointment for her.
“And she knows that,” Gemma pleaded. “She knows she did everything wrong. What she doesn’t know is how to talk to you about it. How to apologize. You make it so difficult.”
“I make it difficult?” I asked, astonished.
“Charley,” Gemma said, using her clinical voice, soft and nonjudgmental, “until we talk about it, until we sit down and really delve deep into our pasts, none of this is going to be resolved.”
What Gemma so often forgot was that no matter how soft and nonjudgmental her voice was, I could feel the emotions raging beneath her calm exterior. We’d been having this same conversation for weeks. No, months. And I could feel her frustration. Now that Denise was open to the idea, Gemma wanted us to bond. To be besties and go shopping together.
I’d rather walk into a den of hellhounds.
“You mean if we don’t have a long heart-to-heart, issues that have gone unresolved for decades will continue to be unresolved?” I asked, feigning horror at the thought before lifting one shoulder in an apathetic shrug. “Works for me.” I turned and climbed the stairs, effectively ending the conversation.
I heard Gemma release a sad sigh.
3
CREMATION OF THE BODY IS FINAL.
—SIGN IN FUNERAL HOME
I decided to finish getting dressed in the bathroom while Cookie and Amber put on their final touches in the bedroom. Walking down the narrow hall, I felt the history of the place leach out of the walls. The wood slats creaked beneath my weight, and I could just imagine what it would have been like being a nun here two hundred years ago. Well, not a nun, but a person, interacting with the Native Americans, watching their children play, growing food in the gardens below. What a rewarding life they must have led. And they were brave, the women of the frontier, whether a nun, a native, or a homesteader.
Yet their lives must have been so hard, especially without cell reception. I balked at the challenge of having only one bathroom on the entire floor. Every room had a sink and mirror, but when you had to go, you had to go. Thankfully, Reyes had added central heat and cooling, but I feared him changing the tone of the place, its historical feel, so we hadn’t upgraded too much. We kept the rooms upstairs small and sparse, with stoves in each one. Even though they were no longer used, they still worked and could heat the tiny rooms quite nicely. We also kept the downstairs almost all original, patching the walls here and there and fixing the flooring. The former convent would make a great restaurant and B and B for the right owner, but it needed to be registered with the Historical Society to preserve its richness.
Another small renovation we did was add a working bathtub and separate shower in each of the two bathrooms, one upstairs and one down. Though not so fancy as George—that is, the stone shower in Reyes’s apartment—the bathrooms had really come along, compared to the originals. While they’d been updated back in the 1940s, plumbing had improved by leaps and bounds since then.