One Night in Boston Read Online Free PDF Page B

arm.
    At the touch, Hillary started and pushed her hair back from her forehead. She turned toward Maggie with a small jerking motion. Then a strange light began to glow in her face. Her cheeks pinked. Her lips curved up. It was as if a switch had flipped somewhere in the wiring of her mother’s brain. No matter how many times she saw it happen, it still astounded Maggie that her mother could be confused one moment and her old, sane self the next.
    “Maggie! You caught me on a bad day.” Hillary brushed at a damp spot on her dress with an embarrassed laugh. “I spilled iced tea down the front of myself at breakfast.” The words were careful, deliberate, as if she were snipping them off like thin bits of thread. But they were coherent, to Maggie’s relief. Coherent and lilting in the gentle cadence she remembered from childhood. The sliver of fear inside her heart fell away.
    “This is lovely, you know,” her mother went on. She gestured toward the window. “Just lovely.”
    Maggie wasn’t sure if she meant the visit or the morning or the view of the lawn outside. Or the color of the curtains. Or a memory running around inside her mother’s head. But she smiled all the same. “It is, isn’t it?” Maggie pulled a chair close and let her purse slide to the ground. One nervous foot bounced on the faded carpet.
    “You’re early today.”
    “I know. And I’m sorry I didn’t let you know sooner that I was coming. It was…sort of last minute.” She hid one hand beneath her leg and crossed her fingers that the next few minutes would be easy. That her mother wouldn’t slip off to a private world halfway through the conversation.
    “Ma, I wanted to ask you a couple of things. About Dillon.”
    Hillary’s eyes moved down toward her lap, where her fingers moved in random patterns. “He was such a good-looking man.”
    Maggie might have argued with that on another day, but she nodded and hurried on. “Do you know where he is now? Is he still living in Boston?”
    The woman began to sniffle, and a single tear rolled down to the tip of her nose, where it balanced without falling. “I miss him so much.”
    “Me too,” Maggie lied. “That’s why I wondered if you knew where I could find him.”
    “Oh, sweetheart,” Hillary said, with such sadness in her voice that Maggie wanted to cry herself. “I thought you knew. He’s gone.”
    Maggie froze. “What do you mean, gone?” She can’t mean dead. She can’t mean that. I would have heard something. Someone would have found me and told me .
    Hillary’s gaze found Maggie’s and held it. “He died. On October eighth. In a car accident.”
    Maggie let herself breathe again. “That’s John you’re talking about. Your second husband.” He drove himself into a telephone pole after one of his nightly stops at Lester’s Bar and Grill, she added silently. Eight years ago .
    Hillary began to cry. Her shoulders shook and tears ran down both cheeks. She made no sound.
    “I’m sorry,” Maggie said, not sure whether she was angrier with herself for upsetting her mother or for not directing the conversation in the right way. She patted Hillary’s hand and waited for the crying jag to pass.
    The clock above the unused mantel struck twelve-thirty, and Maggie shifted in her chair. She had so much to do, so much to take care of, and no time. Never any time. She dug a tissue out of her purse and wiped away her mother’s last tears.
    “Do you remember Dillon? John’s son?”
    Hillary’s eyes watered again, but the tears stayed where they were. “Of course I do. Troublemaker, that one was. I was so glad when he made it out of school without killing himself on his motorcycle.”
    Maggie grinned. Now they were both talking about the same person. “Yeah. Do you know where he is now? You told me once that he’d moved back East, started a business.”
    Hillary frowned. “Yes. I do remember that. That was so long ago, though.”
    Please remember, Ma, Maggie willed.