Page 157 of Tangled Up In You

96

GAVIN

The treadmill was at a six percent incline and the speed was at eight, pushing Gavin to the point where his legs burned. Even breaths were starting to slip away but he kept going, willing himself to get lost in Arctic Monkeys’ brilliant album AM. Singer Alex Turner was a friend and hadn’t taken the least offense to Gavin’s dig at his voice on the Sean Reynolds chat show. Their friendship was based on playful slagging like that, though it was usually done privately.

As he swiped at the sweat dripping down his forehead and temples, a flash of the previous night’s dream came to him. It was fleeting, though, and he struggled to grasp what it had been. But with each increasingly heavy footfall the image repeated in his mind. He finally pulled the emergency stop cord on the machine, took several gulps of water, and headed to his writing room.

He woke the MacBook Pro and opened a search engine. But his fingers hesitated over the keyboard. Suddenly, he felt ridiculous. This dream had sent him chasing after . . . what?

Something about the rose in his mother’s hair. But what did it have to do with anything? He couldn’t remember her ever having worn flowers in her hair, though she had loved to garden and bring fresh flowers inside.

He meditated on the particular connection between roses and his mother for several minutes. That soon led to another excavated memory, that of his normally non-demonstrative father calling his mother “my little rose” when he thought the children were out of earshot.

“Rose,” Gavin said aloud.

He then typed “Rose McManus” into the search engine.

The results were nothing he connected with. He then typed in “Rose” with his mother’s maiden name and found even fewer hits. He thought for a moment more and then typed in “my little rose” and “flowers.”

When the screen refreshed, there was only one result that jumped out at him. It was a phone directory listing for “My Little Rose Flower Shop” in County Wexford. The exact town was called Rosslare Strand, a place he had never been. He remembered that she had often spoken about the garden she could have had if only they lived in sunnier southern Ireland. A town like Rosslare, in the southeastern part of the country, was exactly where she could grow those treasured flowers.

He knew this was where he would find his mother.

The mother who had abandoned her family after the car crash that had killed his baby sister. The mother who by running away had motivated him to funnel his anger and sadness and wounded sensitivity into becoming one of the most famous rock singers of his time.

97

GAVIN

The small village of Rosslare was a seaside resort, attracting local tourism to its swimming beaches and golf courses. Gavin drove through the town proper, noting the abundance of cheery yellow-painted buildings edging around the coast, before finding his way to the outskirts. It was late afternoon when he pulled the Mercedes to a stop in front of the address listed for the My Little Rose Flower Shop. It had only taken two hours to drive south to this spot. His mother had been an easy drive away all this time.

The flower shop was a private home with every bit of land surrounding it used for gardening, either in planters, in neat rows in the earth, or in a greenhouse. Though there was a small plaque noting that the home also housed the business of My Little Rose Flower Shop, it was clear that whatever was sold was secondary to the pleasure of gardening.

He took a deep breath and told himself to get out of the car and approach the front door. But he stayed quite still, comfortably ensconced in the rich leather of the driver’s seat, his thoughts drifting.

He called to mind the way he had comforted himself as a child with the stories of other musicians who had lost, or been neglected by, their mothers. If those artists had had a stable upbringing, with their mothers present for them, it was doubtful that they would have been compelled to create the way they had. Or if they had ended up as musicians, perhaps their work would have lacked the fire that their childhood losses stoked.

It had been an escape, a fantasy, to identify with the list of talented artists that had turned their pain into something bigger to share with the world. And if he were honest, he’d admit that he had gone even further than identifying with them. At some point, he had twisted his own pain into an obsession for the exact purpose of having something to write about.

He and Conor had often talked of artists they admired, and how when they got to a certain age they became fat with success and complacent in their music. They became uninspired and repetitive, or just plain dull. At the corners of Gavin’s mind, he had worried that if he had a resolution with his mother, he might lose the thing that had driven him to creative heights. Sophie had often urged him to seek out his mother and he had been stubborn in his refusal, claiming it was his mother’s responsibility to make the first move. And while he did sincerely believe this, there was a part of him that feared he’d have nothing left to say if the wound he had so carefully cultivated over the years closed over. Three-quarters of an hour passed before Gavin found the courage to get out of the car and make his way up the cobblestone path toward the house.

The Kelly-green front door was partially open. Looking inside, he could see the afternoon sunlight pouring through the window, casting a warm golden glow over the small front room.

There was no one there to greet him, though he could hear noises at the outside rear of the house. Figuring there was nothing left to lose now, he stepped inside and took in his surroundings.

The room was sparsely furnished with a loveseat, a single recliner, and a side table in between. There was a battered steamer trunk positioned as a coffee table of sorts in front of the sitting area. A long, narrow table sat under the large bay window. Two tall bookcases hugged the walls, and fine white lace curtains hung pulled back on either side of the window.

A large, scarred butcher-block counter, served as a bridge between the front room and a partially visible kitchen.

But his eyes lingered on the pale pink roses in small mismatched vases on every surface, even crammed into nooks on the bookcases. A quick estimate put the number of vases scattered throughout the room at nearly three dozen.

The mini arrangements, along with the well-worn but comfortable surroundings, complete with framed Georgia O’Keeffe prints, gave him a sense of familiarity.

The front door was pulled all the way open then, as a plump woman, her brown curls strewn with gray, entered the room. As she looked up and made eye contact with Gavin, she dropped the large bunch of long stem white tulips in her hands, each stem making a dull thud on the wood floor as they scattered.

Gavin felt a sudden rush of bravado.

“Hello . . . Ma,” he said, nodding slightly.

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