Rachel Gibson: I’m In No Mood For Love

His mother had always encouraged him in everything he’d done. She’d been his biggest supporter and most vocal cheerleader. He hadn’t seen her as much as he would have liked, but she’d always understood. Or at least had always said she did.

She had always been his family. His life was full. He and his father didn’t even know each other, and he’d never felt any desire to see him, always thought that if at some point in the future he felt the urge to reconnect with his father-perhaps in his late forties when it was time to slow down-there would be time.

All that changed the day he put his mother in the ground.

He’d been in Alabama, deep into research, when he received the call that she was dead. Earlier that afternoon, while trimming her clematis, she’d taken a fall off a step stool. No fracture or cuts or scrapes. Just a bruise on her leg. That night, she died alone in her bed when an embolus traveled from her leg to her heart. She’d been fifty-four.

He hadn’t been there. Hadn’t even known she’d fallen. For the first time in his life he felt truly alone. For years he’d roamed the world, thinking himself free of strings. His mother’s death had truly cut him free, and for the first time he knew what it was like to be untethered. He also knew he’d been fooling himself. He hadn’t traveled the world without strings. They’d been there. The whole time. Keeping his life stable. Until now.

He had one living relative. Just one. A father he hardly knew. Hell, they didn’t know each other. It was no one’s fault, just the way things were. But maybe it was time they changed that. Time to spend a few days reconnecting with the old man. He didn’t think it would take long. He wasn’t looking for a Hallmark moment. Just something easy and free of the strain that existed between them.

He got out of the Land Cruiser and made his way across the thick green lawn to the flower garden rich with explosive color. Sebastian thought about the diamond stud in his pocket. He thought about giving it to Mrs. Wingate to return to Clare. He’d have to explain where he found it, and the thought brought a smile to his lips.

“Hello, Mrs. Wingate,” he greeted the older woman as he approached. Growing up, he’d hated Joyce Wingate. He’d blamed her for his sporadic and unfulfilled relationship with his father. He had gotten over it about the same time he’d quit blaming Clare. Not that he harbored any love toward Joyce. He didn’t have feelings one way or the other. Until that morning, he hadn’t had any thoughts one way or the other about Clare either. Now he did, and they weren’t nice thoughts.

“Hello, Sebastian,” she said, and placed a red rose in a basket hanging from her bent arm. Several ruby and emerald rings slid on her bony fingers. She wore a pair of cream-colored pants, a lavender blouse, and a huge straw hat. Joyce had always been extremely thin. The kind of thin that came from being in control of everything in her life. Her sharp features dominated her large face, and her wide mouth was usually pinched with disapproval. At least it had been whenever he was around, and he had to wonder if it was her acerbic personality or her domineering ways that had always kept Mr. Wingate firmly planted on the East Coast.

Probably both.

Joyce had never been an attractive woman, not even when she was younger. But if someone shoved a gun in Sebastian’s ear and forced him to say something kind, he could say her eyes were an interesting shade of light blue. Like the irises growing at the edge in her garden. Like her daughter’s. The harsh features of the mother were smaller and much more feminine in the face of her daughter. Clare’s full lips softened the lines of her mouth, and she’d inherited a smaller nose, but the eyes were the same.

“Your father tells me you plan to leave him soon,” she said. “It’s a shame you can’t be persuaded to stay longer.”

Sebastian looked from the rose in Joyce’s basket up into her face. Into eyes that had shot blue flames at him as a kid. A huge bumblebee bumped along on a slight breeze, and Joyce waved it away. The only thing he saw in her eyes today was polite inquiry.

“I’m trying to talk him into staying at least through the coming week,” his father said as he pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his pants and wiped beads of sweat from his brow. Leo Vaughan was a few inches shorter than Sebastian and his once brown hair was turning two-tone gray. The corners of his eyes had deep lines. His brows had gotten bushy in recent years and his “twenty minute naps” now seemed to last an hour. Leo would turn sixty-five at the end of the week, and Sebastian noticed that his father didn’t get around the Wingate garden as easily as he remembered. Not that he remembered a lot about his father. A few months here and a weekend there didn’t exactly make for copious childhood memories, but the one thing he did remember quite clearly was his father’s hands. They’d been big and strong enough to snap small branches and boards, gentle enough to pat a boy’s shoulder and rub his back. Dry and rough, the hands of a hardworking man. Now they were spotted with age and by his profession, the skin loose over his enlarged knuckles.

“I don’t really know how long I’ll stay,” he said, unable to commit to anything. Instead, he changed the subject. “I ran into Clare last night.”

Joyce bent to cut another rose. “Oh?”

“Where?” his father asked as he shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket.

“I met an old U.W. buddy at a bar in the Double Tree. He was there covering a Steelhead’s fund-raiser, and Clare said she’d been attending a wedding reception.”

“Yes, her friend Lucy was married yesterday.” Joyce nodded and her big hat dipped. “It won’t be long before Claresta marries her young man, Lonny. They’re very happy together. They have talked about having the wedding here in the garden next June. The flowers will be in bloom, and it will be just lovely that time of year.”

“Yeah, I think she mentioned Lonny.” Obviously, Joyce hadn’t heard the latest news. An awkward silence passed between them, or perhaps it was only awkward on his end because he knew there would be no June wedding. “I didn’t get the chance to ask Clare what she does for a living,” he said to fill the silence.

Joyce turned to her roses. “She writes novels, but not like your book.”

He didn’t know which shocked him more: that Mrs. Wingate knew enough about him to know he’d written a book, though his wasn’t a novel, or that Clare was a writer. “Really?” He would have thought she was a professional volunteer, like her mother. But he did have a vague memory of her telling him boring stories about an imaginary dog. “What’s she write? Women’s fiction?” he asked.

“Something like that,” Joyce answered, and the old blue flames he recognized flared in her eyes…

It wasn’t until later when Sebastian and his father were alone at dinner that he asked, “So, what does Clare really do for a living?”

“She’s writes novels.”

“I got that. What kind of novels?”

Leo pushed a bowl of green beans in Sebastian’s direction. “Romance novels.”

His hand stilled as he reached for the bowl. Little Claresta? The girl who thought kissing made babies? The weird-looking little girl with the thick glasses who’d grown into a beautiful woman? The beautiful woman who wore a little pink thong and made it look good? A romance writer? “No shit?”

“Joyce isn’t happy about it.”

He picked up the bowl and started to laugh. No shit.

“He told me it didn’t mean anything,” Clare said, and took a sip of coffee. “As if it was okay because he didn’t love the Sears repairman. It was the same excuse my third boyfriend used when I found him with a stripper.”