Circle of Three (40 page)

“Yeah, but…” A faint pink colored her cheek. Embarrassment? I’d take that over outrage any day. I started to speak, but she said, “Don’t talk about that here, Mom, okay? You know.” She ran her palm across the brittle grass on top of the grave. “Just in case.”

Of course. Just in case. I felt embarrassed by my own in-delicacy.

On the hill above us, the service was breaking up. We
were ready to go home, but out of respect, we waited for the mourning family to drift down the path to their cars and mill around for a few minutes, getting organized—
you go with him and we’ll go with them, see you at the house—
the necessary social business of grief. Then we three strolled down to Mama’s car.
We’ve had our funeral
, I caught myself thinking,
we’re safe for a while.
As if loss were apportioned fairly, predictably, at convenient intervals. But hope was a deft deceiver, and I was nothing if not full of hope on this savory, soft, sweet-smelling midsummer day in the Hill Haven Cemetery. The future had vistas, potential, it looked like a pastel sky. The only cloud was that everybody I loved wasn’t as full of sappy, sanguine expectation as me. There was something to be said for starting over, for filling your boat with fresh progenitors and sailing off into the downpour. Your new day wouldn’t last long, but that was the nature of new days. Grudges resurfaced, bad habits recurred, slights and hurts and meannesses were bound to muddy the flood-waters before they could even start to recede. But then you started over again. As long as you could love and as long as you could forgive, it never had to end. Good thing, because you’d never get it right for long.

“Mama, let me go with you,” I said again from the backseat of the car, leaning forward, careful to stay out of Ruth’s rearview mirror. “We could have such a good time. Come on. I’d really like to go.”

But she wouldn’t budge. She was going with Birdie, period, and I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t for the pleasure of martyrdom—I knew exactly how that role played out, and today Mama wasn’t playing it. Generosity of spirit? A belated demonstration, better late than never, of the art of letting go? I enjoyed not knowing. I liked giving her the benefit of the doubt.

“I’ve got this great idea,” Ruth said, flicking on the turn signal and slowing down smoothly, conscientiously, for the stoplight. She was going to be an excellent driver. Either that or she had her entire family fooled and she was going to be a
holy terror. Absently, I reached around for my purse; we were coming into town, and Ruth’s great ideas in this vicinity usually had to do with the Dairy Queen or McDonald’s. But she said, “Let’s
all
get tattoos.”

I snorted. Mama rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, no, I mean, wouldn’t that be incredible? When I get mine fixed, we could all three get new tattoos. Just a little one for you, Gram, a little bit of flash. It doesn’t really hurt, not that much, and if we do it together it would be, like, a distraction. What do you think?” Her eyes danced in the mirror, daring me. “Mom, you could get a sexy one, you could get a butterfly on your ass.”

Mama hooted with laughter. “What would I get?” She pushed up her sleeve, holding out her spotty, mottled forearm. “A big bleeding heart with an arrow through it? And underneath, ‘George, Forever and Ever.’”

Ruth guffawed, bouncing in her seat. “Cool, or a skull and crossbones, Gram, right on your collarbone or something. Or your boob! Wouldn’t that blow them away at the garden club?”

They cackled and snickered, thinking up wilder tattoos and more vulgar places to put them. The idea that my daughter was contemplating, had actually suggested, apparently not in jest, getting group-tattooed with her mother and her grandmother—that hadn’t quite sunk in yet. Something to think about later.

Meanwhile, I thought about the tattoo I would get if I ever really did it. Not a butterfly on my ass. What was it called, that symbol of the serpent eating its own tail? It probably signified infinity, endlessness, timelessness. But for me it would mean the effort to love well going on and on, round and round, always imperfect and always forgivable. The best we could ever do for each other.

In the front seat, they’d made decisions. A perfect ankh for Ruth, some kind of flower for Mama—not a rose, though: too common. “Are you in, Mom?” Ruth took her right hand off the steering wheel and lifted it in a fist. Poor
hand, still pink and sore from the last laser treatment. Mama clasped it, chuckling. I surrounded it gently with my hand, and the three of us stuck our joined fists through the sunroof and shook them in the air.

I sat back, wistful, feeling a little heavy from all my fond, precarious hopes. Pastel sky or not, the future came too fast sometimes. It flew by in a blur—not unlike the Dairy Queen. But what could you do? Nothing. Hope for the best. Relax, enjoy, and let your daughter, the expert, drive you home.

E
XCEPT FOR MY MARRIAGE,
the bond between my mother and me is the strongest I’ve ever known, stronger in a few primitive, hard-fixed ways than the one I share with my husband. No one will ever love me the way Mom does. Not that her love is perfect—far from it—but it is steely and constant: smothering, judgmental, stern, tenderhearted, uncritical, and nourishing. There’s nothing I could do that my mother wouldn’t forgive. She drives me crazy. I grow more like her every day.

After publishing
The Saving Graces
, a book about friends, I wanted to tell a story about mothers and daughters—about women in the “sandwich generation” who have both mother and daughter and are both mother and daughter, and who spend their middle years being pulled in different directions by almost-adult children and aging parents. It’s a unique time of singular challenges, and it doesn’t last long—although it can seem like a lifetime.

In
Circle of Three
, Carrie, her mother Dana, and her daughter Ruth, make up the middle and two ends of their own sandwich generation. Each knows how it feels to want to strangle your mother—or your daughter—and how heartbreaking it is to realize that you will, one day, lose them both. In the midst of the push-pull of growing up, growing
old, growing apart, and growing together, they learn that the best we can do, however imperfectly, is to love each other. And to forgive.

Luckily, forgiving our mothers becomes easier the older we get. A line in an Anne Sexton poem tells us why: “A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.”

It really is a circle. When we forgive our mothers for not loving us perfectly, we forgive ourselves.

—Patricia Gaffney

The Saving Graces

Meet the Saving Graces—four of the best friends a woman can ever have.

For ten years, Emma, Rudy, Lee, and Isabel have shared a deep affection that has helped them deal with the ebb and flow of expectations and disappointments common to us all. Calling themselves the Saving Graces, the quartet is united by understanding, honesty, and acceptance—a connection that has grown stronger as the years go by…

Though these sisters of the heart and soul have seen—and talked about—it all, the four will not be prepared for a crisis of astounding proportions that will put their love and courage to the ultimate test.

• Nora Roberts: “A jewel of a book and every facet sparkles.”
  
• Booklist
  : “This ode to the friendships between women could easily become the Northern version of
  Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
  .”
  
• Washington Post Book World
  : “Breathtaking• unique.”
  

Circle of Three

Newly widowed, Carrie is overwhelmed by the guilt of knowing her marriage died long before her husband’s fatal heart attack. Struggling to go on for the sake of her teenaged daughter, Ruth, and her overly possessive mother, Dana, Carrie slowly emerges from the sorrow that has embraced her and begins to pull her life together, with help from an unexpected source—Jess, Carrie’s first love. He re-enters her world and quickly becomes her lifeline.

Inspired by a passion she thought she’d never have again, Carrie must find a way to weave her new life—and love—into a family struggling with its own pain and disappointment, a family threatened by her happiness.

Wise, moving, and heartbreakingly real,
Circle of Three
offers women a deeper understanding of one another, of themselves, and of the perplexing and invigorating magic that is life itself.

• Nora Roberts: “
  Circle of Three
  reminds us what it’s like to be a woman.”
  
• Harrisburg Patriot News
  : “Gaffney’s…[a] gifted writer…[and] a great storyteller with insight into the lives of women.”
  

Flight Lessons

Anna has studiously avoided her aunt Rose—the woman she once loved more than anyone else in the world—since the night Rose betrayed Anna and her mother, Rose’s own fatally-ill sister. In the sixteen years that have passed, Anna has built another life for herself far from her hometown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but she can’t forgive or forget.

Now another betrayal, by a faithless lover, has brought Anna back to her family’s restaurant, where, as it turns out, Rose needs her estranged niece’s help—and trust—more than ever before. Determined to leave as soon as Rose’s struggling business is back on its feet and her own heart is healed, Anna joins Rose in the kitchen of the Bella Sorella, where values clash, generations collide, and personal lives become intricately entangled. Anna has vowed not to follow her Aunt back into the past—even though such resistance could keep her from true love.

• Library Journal
  : “Women’s fiction at its finest.”
  
• Dallas Morning News
  : “A richly layered tale of love, both romantic and between women friends.”