Page 60 of Like First Love, Again

Her mother raised her eyebrows and shook her head like it was obvious. “I thought she broke your heart again,” she said, voice thin like she was trying not to cry.

“Ma, she never?—”

“She did,” her mother said with absolute finality. “Although, now I believe she didn’t do it on purpose,” she added as if to herself.

Suspicious, Tori narrowed her gaze. “What does that mean?”

Her mother looked up at her with a guilty wince on her face. “Let’s go inside. We don’t have to?—”

“Ma.” Tori crossed her arms over her chest and sat on the edge of the open trunk.

A deep breath and more muttering later, her mother sat next to her. “It used to devastate me to see you looking at her with so much longing when you were kids.” She took Tori’s hand and rubbed her arm like she had when she was little. “I wondered so many times if she was cruel to lead you on.” She looked up at her, eyes glistening. “But when I mentioned your crush. Well, she’s either a talented actress or?—”

“She really didn’t know,” Tori confirmed.

“But how not?” she asked like she’d been holding that question back for weeks. “Everyone could see the way you looked at each other.” She smiled. “Your father and I kept waiting for you to come in one day holding hands, so nervous, and finally tell us.” She shook her head. “I thought at the very least by prom. I talked to Rosie about suing the nuns if they didn’t let you go together.”

“Rosie?” Tori laughed, chest so full she might not survive to recklessly clear her un-clearable schedule. “She’s a wills and trusts lawyer.”

“Well, the nuns wouldn’t know that,” she replied with a grin before worry returned. “Did I overstep in telling her?”

Tori dropped her head onto her mother’s shoulder and looked out at the residential street. “No,” she decided. “The truth needed to come out sometime, and I don’t know that I would have ever had the guts to do it.”

Her mother patted her hand. “Your guts are plenty good.”

Before her mom remembered that a few yards away a cooler was waiting to be refilled, Tori told her mom about Mia’s divorce.

“What happened? Doctor stray?” her mother asked more angrily than Tori expected. “Women throw themselves at them, you know. Remember Margarita’s grandson? The kid is a podiatrist and gay. Does that matter? Nope.”

“He didn’t cheat,” Tori insisted.

“Well what did he do, then?”

Weirdly protective of a man she’d never met, but of whom Mia only spoke highly, Tori angled herself to face her mom. “I don’t know that it’s my place to say.”

“Now you have to tell me.” Her face flashed with maternal concern. “I love that girl like a daughter.” A smile shone briefly through the worry. “And one day soon it will be official, you’ll see.”

Ignoring her mother’s reference to marriage when she and Mia hadn’t even had the GF conversation, she shared what Mia had told her about her losses. How the fallout consumed her relationship with Eric. Every second that Tori spoke, her mother grew quieter. Stiller. Like she was collapsing in on herself.

“I don’t know how to help her. I don’t know what to say to lighten her grief.” Tori’s emotion rose in her chest like a cresting wave. “You should see her face when she talks about it. It’s like the pain is so fresh.”

“It’s not the loss, it’s the surviving.” She took a deep breath that made Tori hold her own. “The pain doesn’t go away.” Her mom’s voice was a distant whisper. “You just learn to make space for it. Let her know she’s not alone in the making.”

Tori watched her, trying to understand why her energy had shifted. Before she could ask if she was okay, her mom blinked hard and turned away.

“Let’s go,” she said, pretending a lash had fallen in her eye. “The ice is melting.”

It wasn’t.

Her mom walked ahead without waiting for her, shoulders squared like she was bracing for something.

Tori followed, that strange tightness still coiled in her chest, thinking maybe her mom needed a little space too.

Thirty-One

It had taken Mia three long months to wrap up her entire life in Philadelphia. As soon as they emptied the house of communal furniture, Eric moved to a beautiful Logan Square apartment just blocks from the hospital. All that was left was an air mattress on the guest room floor and a dozen neatly arranged and labeled boxes in the living room.

In a house full of stuff, the small pile represented all that was worth keeping. In a week, the movers would take it all to Miami and the house would be ready for its new owners. And that would be the end of that.

---