Someone Else's Love Story Read Online Free

with two-year-old Natty, the ocean swirling up around their ankles. She’d blown it up to a nine-by-fourteen, framed it, and hung it in her room. Now it was perched on her bedside table, leaning against the wall. “I want him to remember me. More than that. I want Nathan to never, never forget for a second who he is .”
    “Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how Dad would feel about me hanging a big-ass picture of his ex-wife rocking a red bikini. I was positive how Bethany would feel. “I can probably do that.”
    “No. No ‘probably.’ Say you will,” my mother said.
    I sighed, but Natty had never spent more than a weekend away from Mimmy. He might need the picture. I could hang it in Natty’s room so Dad wouldn’t have to look at it. And Bethany never came south of the rich people’s mall in Buckhead. If she did drop by for some unfathomable reason, I could stuff it under the bed.
    “Fine. I’ll hang it.”
    Mimmy shook her head, fierce. “I need you to swear. Swear by something you hold absolutely holy that you will hang that at the condo, no matter what.” Her fingers dug into my arms.
    I thought for a second. I’d grown up between religions, at the center of a culture war, each side snipping away at the other’s icons until I was numb to much of it. There were not many things I held as holy.
    Finally, I said, “I swear on the grave of my good dog Boscoe, and all the parts of Walcott, and—I won’t swear anything on Natty proper, but I could maybe swear this on his eyelashes. Those are the holiest things I know.”
    My mother smiled, instantly glorious, her big eyes shiny from the tears and her nose unswollen. She even cried pretty.
    “Good,” she said. “Good.”
    She stood and dusted her hands off and stretched, then walked past me to the bedside table. I pivoted to watch, but she didn’t pick up the beach picture. Instead, she reached past it, to a much larger rectangle, wrapped and ready to go in brown butcher paper. It was behind the table, but it was tall enough to have been visible.
    “I already wrapped Him up.”
    I knew what the package was, of course, by size and shape. The Myrtle Beach pic had been a decoy, with the real picture she wanted hung at Dad’s place hiding in plain sight behind it. And she wasn’t angry at all; I should have known that when she didn’t swallow the bite, but I’d missed it. Damn, she was good, and in her arms she cradled Praying Hands Jesus, the Jesus who had hung over my mother’s sofa for as long as I could remember. Man, oh man, had I been played.
    My mother dashed her last tears away and added, smiling, “I also pulled down this picture of me and Natty. He asked if he could take it.”
    With that she picked both up and left the room, practically skipping as she went to add the weight of Jesus and herself to the pile of things that I was taking to my father’s house.
    A fter lunch, Mimmy had to get to work. She owned the Olde Timey Fudge Shoppe in a nearby mountain village that was surrounded by rent-a-cabins and vacation homes. The village had a picturesque downtown with an independent bookstore, some “antique” marts, local wine-tasting rooms, and half a dozen Southern-themed restaurants. She drifted, mournful, to her car, looking prettier in the sherbet-colored sash-dress uniform than all the little high school and college girls who worked for her. I’d been one of them myself, until last week.
    After a hundred hugs from Natty and a thousand promises from me to visit soon, she drove off to hand-dip the chocolates she would never sample. Walcott and I finished loading and got on the road.
    Less than two hours’ worth of kudzu-soaked rural highway separated us from the city condo, even with the detour to bounce by Bethany’s Stately Manor to pick up the keys. Still, it wasn’t like The Fridge was going to invite us in for kosher crumpets and a heart-to-heart. I figured I’d be unloaded and moved before sunset. When everything you own