A Mother's Homecoming - By Tanya Michaels Page 0,2

revisiting their roots in a different light.

She turned onto the long and winding gravel driveway. The Wilson mailbox was the same faded, ugly mustard yellow. An enduring copse of trees still blocked the view of the house from the road. However, the weeping willow that had once been at the front of the wild and unruly yard was gone.

Mae’s 1980 LTD Crown Victoria was parked in the carport attached to the brick two-bedroom home; the rusted vehicle clearly hadn’t been roadworthy in some time. Pam leaned forward, staring through her windshield. The car wasn’t the only thing in a state of disrepair. Instead of curtains or the familiar living room suite visible through the house’s grimy windows, there were large flat boards blocking further view. The concrete slab generously called a front porch had cracked, and flower-topped weeds flourished in the fissures. Several roof shingles had fallen atop neglected shrubs, and another hung precariously, as if it were barely holding on and planned to give up the ghost at any minute.

Pam knew the feeling.

She parked the car, sagging back against her seat. Defeat and relief swirled in a bitter cocktail. Mae didn’t live here.

No one lived here. It didn’t appear as though the house had been sold, what with the Victoria parked in its habitual spot. If not for the deliberately boarded windows, she might have worried Mae had simply slipped and broken her fool neck with no one the wiser. Pam experienced a rare twinge of regret that she and her mother hadn’t kept up some sort of communication over the years … Christmas greetings, postcards, hate mail with a return address.

Had her mother moved into the nursing home in Mimosa? Surely not. Although the woman’s lifestyle had probably aged her prematurely, she was only in her fifties. Had she perhaps moved in with her pursed-lip, disapproving older sister Aunt Julia? Pam shuddered at what that household would be like. Poor Uncle Ed.

Pam opened her car door, though she wasn’t sure why she felt the need for a closer look at her childhood home. She didn’t have a key. Breaking in to the tiny residence would be relatively simple but also relatively pointless. She doubted she’d find more than spiders and field mice. Why waste time here when she should be tracking down Mae? As much as the thought of talking to her mother ripped at the lining of Pam’s stomach, that’s what she had come all this way to do.

During a discussion with Annabel about making amends, she’d groused in a moment of self-pity that it was too bad Mae had never joined the program because there was a woman with some amends to make. No-nonsense Annabel had pointed out in her wry, get-a-clue way that hating Mae was damaging Pam far more than her estranged mother.

Pam had decided that if she couldn’t get forgiveness from the people she’d hurt—Nick’s face flashed in her mind—the next best thing she could do was to forgive the person who’d hurt her. Maybe once Pam made peace with her mother, she could truly move forward. Because right now, Pam’s life was as much in shambles as this pitiful little house.

Kicking a rock out of her path, she stepped closer. The room on the corner closest to her was the kitchen. The majority of meals in Pam’s childhood had consisted of cereal or microwaved entrées. Every once in a great while Mae had cooked up something fantastic, mostly to impress new boyfriends when she was sober enough to care. There had been one guy, a truck driver, who’d returned to them again and again for an entire winter. He’d taught Pam how to play guitar. It had been one of the happiest seasons of her life. She had fond memories of strumming in the living room and losing herself in the discovery of new chords.

Bittersweet were the later memories of that same living room when she and Nick, juniors in high school, had lost their virginity together on the couch. They’d been kids, completely inept at what they were doing. Yet how many times in the years since had she wished she could once again sink into his embrace, those arms made muscular by football practices, and made safe by his love?

According to Nick’s mother—furious that Pam had the gall to phone after all these years, even if it was only to get contact information for an apology—Nick was happily remarried and raising his daughter in North Carolina. Our daughter. Pam’s chest