Page 36 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
“Lina?”
I turned to the voice.
“Mom?” I whispered.
My mother stood in the grass fifteen feet away. She too had on a white cotton dress. It was the one she used to wear for family barbeques. It had a lace trim and ended around her ankles, where she had gold bracelets on each foot.
She was smiling at me. Her long brown hair was in a braid off to the side that she had pulled over her shoulder. Loose strands got caught up in the warm breeze.
My mother extended her hand to me. “Come, Lina. Let’s walk.”
I went. She took my hand in hers, and we walked toward the part of the fence that had fallen down years ago. Daddy had never gotten around to fixing it.
We stepped over the broken wood and made our way through the grass, which was pulled and pushed by the wind and whispered all around us.
“I’ve missed you, Lina,” my mother said. Her voice sounded like a song.
“I’ve missed you too. I think about you every day.”
“I know, baby girl.”
“I’m sorry.”
My mother squeezed my hand, and we kept walking. “You have nothing to be sorry about. I’m the one who is sorry. Your father and I missed out on a lot of time with you. That is my biggest regret. But we watch over you every day, baby girl.”
I frowned. Tears sprang to life in my eyes, and I shook my head as they started to fall.
My mother stopped walking, and I sank to my knees in the grass. She sat beside me, her dress fanning out all around her like she was in a Disney movie. She sighed and clasped her hands in her lap and let my cry.
It smelled like honey and hay here, just like it had when I was growing up. If I concentrated, I could pick up on other smells, too. A neighbor was baking apple pies. Maybe rhubarb. It was hard to tell the difference on smell alone. Another neighbor was cooking steaks. It smelled like hickory and frying onions.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. The tears rolling down my cheeks were warmer than the afternoon breeze.
“Why are you crying, baby girl?” my mother asked.
I shook my head.
She inched closer to me in the grass and took my face in her hands. She wiped my tears away with her thumbs, the way she used to when I was little and crying over a skinned knee or something another child said to me at school. She smiled at me. “You can tell me anything, Lina. Why are you crying?”
My bottom lip trembled. “I just want you to be proud of me, Mom.”
My mother smiled. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her teeth were a radiant white from never drinking anything besides water or green tea with honey. In the summer, on a very hot day, she might have half a glass of chilled lemonade. But besides that, she always favored water. Her eyes were light green like mine but streaked with flecks of gold that shone as bright as the sun above our heads.
She tucked my hair behind my ears. “I am proud of you, baby girl. So proud.”
“I’m not what you wanted me to be.”
“And what did I want you to be, Lina?”
I looked up at her. “Something better than a model.”
My mother shook her head. “No. That’s not true. When you were ten and we went to pick blueberries down at the thicket, do you remember what I told you I wanted you to be?”
I thought hard back to that day. My mother had wanted fresh berries to make a blueberry pie, and I wasn’t the sort of kid to turn down the chance to load up my belly with blueberries, so I went with her while my father stayed home and read the paper.
As we were picking berries, my mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told her I wanted to be a veterinarian—like every other kid on the planet. She had smiled at me and told me that was a wonderful thing to be.
Then, out of sheer curiosity, I had asked her what she wanted me to be.
