“Mel! God, I didn’t know where you went. You scared me!” A woman I immediately recognized as Lissa’s Aunt Bree emerged onto the sidewalk from the grocery store, eyes pinched tight with concern.
Her gaze landed on my chest, climbing until she met my eyes, and recognition hit.
“Leon. You’ve never changed.” She smiled, then her cheeks pinkened. “Well, you got bigger, obviously.”
I smiled back at her. “Nice to see you, Bree.”
“Wow.” Her brows lifted. “Voice got deeper, too, huh?”
She blinked a few times before clearing her throat and turning to Lissa’s mom. “You get everything you need?” Her eyes roved like lasers all over her sister’s face.
Mrs. B pushed her hair off her face and nodded. “Yep. All done.”
“Great.” Bree smiled again, but it looked strained, tight. Like she had to force it. “Car’s this way.”
“Of course, it is.”
Bree turned with a small wave, flicking her dark blonde braid over her shoulder. “Nice seeing you, Leon.”
My hand lifted, but I couldn’t muster up a genuine smile as I watched the pair stride down the sidewalk and get into the silver car parked four down from mine. The car Lissa’s mom had walked past three times.
Bree climbed in the driver’s side and pulled away from the curb. Mrs B. hadn’t so much as thrown me a parting glance.
Weird as fuck.
TWENTY-TWO
LISS
“Yes, Bella,” I squeezed the words out between clenched teeth as I stared down at the cupcake trays on the kitchen counter. “I followed the damn recipe.”
“They look like a cat ate them, then spat them back out. These are even worse than the last ones.”
I burnt the last ones.
My sister lifted a cupcake from the tray and held it up to her scrunched face, eyeing it like it had personally offended her.
Planting an elbow down on the countertop, I bent forward and dropped my forehead into my palm. Fucking cupcakes. Who the fuck knew they were so hard to bake?
“What are those?” Bree murmured, breezing into the kitchen in dark wash skinny jeans and a thin, taupe-colored sweater, her dark-blonde hair braided down the middle of her back.
I rubbed my eyes for the twentieth time and reached for the coffee. “Cupcakes. For Bella’s dance class’s bake sale tomorrow.” I raised a brow as I turned to her. “Can’t you tell?”
Bree grimaced, glancing up. “Uh, yeah. Maybe your mom could help?”
“No,” I said quickly, turning away. “She’s busy packing. I said I would.”
Since coming home from college, there’d been days when I’d been able to fool myself into believing my mother was fine. She’d act normal for long periods, but then she’d forget something simple—some routine task or piece of information, or she’d repeat herself without knowing it—and I’d struggle to breathe as I watched her grasping for memories she no longer possessed, watched her try to grapple with the reality of her situation. And then when she couldn’t do anything but succumb to the tragic hopelessness of it all, and she lashed out in frustration, it was so shockingly out of character; it rocked me to my core.
Melinda Bedford was as placid as they came, meek, mild-mannered, polite, but mood swings and changes in behaviour were another part of her condition, and every time I witnessed it, I had to fight the urge to run. Because the mother I’d always known disappeared before my eyes, and the person left behind was a projection, a vision of the future.
A future I still wasn’t ready to face. And might never be.
Most days, I tried to carry on as if everything was normal. Whenever Bree or my mom tried to talk to me about it, I shut them down. I was here, and I’d stay here, and that had to be enough. For now. I didn’t want to climb out from beneath the avalanche of denial I’d buried myself under.
I handled things the way I knew how, by pushing them down. I’d come home to be strong for them… not to fall apart. They didn’t need that.
I’d noticed my mom struggled more with some things than others, recipes being one of them. So, when I’d picked Bella up from dance class last weekend and saw the flyer clutched in her grip, flapping in the breeze, I’d immediately offered to bake the cakes.