A Mother's Homecoming. Tanya Michaels

day. Pam opened the door to her room, checking the impulse to ask Trudy why she’d let Nick up here? “Good morning. You’re the second surprise visitor I’ve had today.”

      Trudy’s snowy brows lifted. “And this is how you greet visitors? Where are your clothes, girl? Day’s half over.”

      “I drove to Mississippi from California. I had some sleep to catch up on.”

      “You just be sure and catch up on your sleep alone.” Trudy craned her head, scrutinizing the bedroom. “That Nick Shepard isn’t still up here, is he? He promised he’d take only a few minutes of your time and that he needed to see you immediately because it was a family emergency.” She snorted. “I suppose you’re gonna try to tell me you two are cousins?”

      “No, ma’am.” Given how bleak her morning had been so far, Pam couldn’t help the small, perverse moment of humor she took in startling Trudy as she revealed, “He’s my ex-husband.”

      Trudy’s mouth fell open, but she recovered quickly. “You’re the gal who cheated on him in North Carolina?”

      So it had been an affair? He’d implied as much, but Lord knows, there were lots of different ways to betray a loved one. Pam couldn’t imagine any woman throwing away marriage to Nick. She herself wouldn’t have left him if it had been just the two of them. He’d made her feel safe in a way no one else ever had, before or since. Plus, he was a wickedly good kisser, although, now that she’d seen him, that memory was uncomfortable. Nick was no longer abstract nostalgia but a living, breathing, solidly male part of her present. There’d been such heat coming off of him that Pam fancied a red-and-yellow outline of his body might still be visible if you were looking through one of those thermal scanners they used in movies.

      “I’m not the one from North Carolina,” she said. “And I didn’t cheat on him.”

      “Just how many wives does this guy have?”

      “Only two that I know of.” She recalled his saying he’d moved back to Mimosa “after the divorce.”

      Reassured that Nick wasn’t a bigamist, Trudy turned her disapproval back to Pam. “And I suppose you think you can do better than him?”

      Pam smiled sadly. “Not really.” She’d feared more than once that Nick Shepard would be the best thing that ever happened to her. “But that doesn’t mean I get to stop living, just because the good old days are behind me. Right?”

      Trudy pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t know. I’m smack in the middle of my prime.”

      PAM’S FIRST SIP of god awful tea in her aunt’s antique-filled living room dredged up a long buried memory.

      “Mom, do I have to drink it?” Even as a first-grader, Pam had been appalled by the idea of unsweetened tea. Iced tea in the south was synonymous with generous amounts of sugar. The bitter flavor of the special herbal blend aside, she’d also been alarmed by the long list of “beneficial” ingredients her aunt had recited. “She said there were geckos in this.”

      Mae had looked blank for a second, then laughed, smiling at her daughter with amused affection. “Ginkgo, Pammy Jo. Not gecko. Although lizards probably taste better.”

      Now, decades later, Pam’s fingers clenched around the glass. It seemed surreal that the frosted vintage set her aunt had used since the seventies was exactly the same when so much else had changed. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

      Julia Danvers Calbert sniffed. “Then you’re deluded. The way my sister drank and carried on, the mystery isn’t that she’s passed, it’s that she lived so long.”

      “Julia!” The one-word rebuke from quiet Uncle Ed was unprecedented. It was clear just from the seating arrangements who reigned over conversation. While Julia sat as regally and straight-shouldered as a queen in a richly upholstered wing chair, Uncle Ed was wedged into a ridiculously dainty chair with a heart-shaped back and gilded gold legs. It looked very expensive and very uncomfortable.

      “I’m only telling the truth,” his wife protested. “And she’s grown up enough to hear it. She’s not little Pammy Jo anymore.”

      “Still …” Flushing a bright pink that shone through his salt-and-pepper beard, Ed gave his niece an apologetic smile. “Whatever her age, she’s a woman who just lost her mama.”

      “Just?” Julia shot to her feet. “No, Mae died months ago, if you’ll remember. And we had to deal with everything. Because this one—” her words illustrated by an accusing jab of the index finger “—was off gallivanting who knows where.”

      “California,” Pam declared reflexively.

      “Exactly!” Julia nodded, repeating the word with some venom. “California. I suppose you’ll content yourself with putting a few flowers on your mother’s grave and then head right back to the Sunshine State with little thought for the rest of us?”

      Pam opened her mouth to inform her aunt that the Sunshine State was actually Florida, but bit her tongue. She’d never seen Julia, the proper, understated Danvers sister, quite so worked up before and didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. Pam never would have said that her mother and aunt were close—indeed, they seemed to hold a mutual contempt for each other’s lifestyles—but Julia’s hands were trembling and she blinked as if determined to keep tears at bay. Was she grieving Mae’s death?

      “I won’t be returning to California,” Pam said. She doubted she could scrape together the gas money to get as far as Alabama, much less the west coast. “I don’t honestly know what my plans are from here, but—”

      “You don’t have a job you need to get back to, then? A husband waiting for you?” Julia’s voice had softened, more weary resignation than censure.

      “No, ma’am.”

      Her aunt, like most normal people, might view the lack of a family and a career as failure. But what Pam did have waiting for her if she chose to return were weekly meetings and a sponsor. Which meant there was at least a chance for some kind of eventual success; that was more than she’d been able to say in a long time.

      “I should bring out the rest of the tea,” Julia announced abruptly. Never mind that all three of their glasses were still full.

      Pam shot a questioning look at her uncle. Since when was Julia so high-strung? When he said nothing to fill the ensuing silence, she prompted, “Is Aunt Julia okay?”

      “The circumstances have been hard on her,” Ed answered, so quietly that Pam strained her ears to follow his words. “Losing her sister, to some extent. But mostly … losing you.”

      “Me?” Pam had grown up with the vague sense that Julia didn’t like her. Julia had never seemed to much like anyone.

      “There were things between your mama and your aunt.” He stopped himself, shooting a guilty look toward the kitchen. “If Julia was ever hard on you, it’s because she wanted better for you. She loves you. You know how she always finishes her Christmas shopping so early? That fall, when you left town, I found her in our room, crying over a package with your name on it. It’s still in her closet. She’s refused to donate it to charity, even though we didn’t know if you were ever coming back. Or if you were even alive.”

      Tendrils of guilt curled through Pam like smoke, making it difficult to breathe. After her reckless flight from Mimosa, she’d spent sleepless nights alternately regretting the way she’d left Nick and hatefully hoping that her mother was worried sick. It had genuinely never occurred to her that her sudden absence might hurt Julia and Ed. Even with the picture he painted, Pam still couldn’t imagine her starchy aunt shedding tears. I wasn’t worth them.

      “Uncle Ed, I’m …”

      “You’re what?” Julia asked from the doorway, her expression suspicious. “Sorry to interrupt, I just couldn’t contain my curiosity. What have the two of you been