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 discussing? Pam’s exciting life beyond Mimosa?”
Exciting was one word for it. Pam reached for the ends of her hair, a nervous girlhood habit. She had a moment’s disorientation before she remembered that she’d hacked a good six inches off of it last year and had been keeping it short ever since. She rose. “Can I help you with that tray, Aunt Julia?”
A pitcher of tea sat between a plate of muffins and—hallelujah—a china bowl of sugar.
“I think not,” her aunt said. “This pitcher is vintage. Everyone knows fatigue makes people unsteady, and you look like you haven’t had a full night’s sleep in a month of Sundays. You’ll stay with us tonight, not out there at Trudy’s.”
It took Pam a moment to process the imperious decree as an invitation. “Thank you. It’s kind of you to offer.”
“Well, we’re kin.” Julia sniffed. “Not that you could tell from the number of messages and letters we’ve had from you over the years.”
Now, beneath the criticism, Pam heard the decade plus of worry. “I’m so sorry I never let you know where I was.” Sorry for all of their sakes. If she’d allowed herself that familial anchor, would she have turned to them for help before she hit rock bottom?
Probably not. Hitting rock bottom was why she’d finally admitted she needed help.
“We knew you were in Tennessee, of course,” her uncle offered with exaggerated joviality. “It was something else, seeing you on television!”
“Oh.” Pam had only been on a regional cable channel, and she’d never been entirely sure whether her show was available this far out. “Thank you. I went to California after that. Guess I was hoping to do even more television, but it didn’t pan out.”
She’d first been “discovered” playing guitar and singing in a Tennessee bar. All those juvenile dreams she and Nick used to spin—about her eventual fame, and his leading an NFL team to the Super Bowl, where she would naturally sing at halftime—had kept her afloat when she was alone and scared out of her mind. Despite a small-time talent agent’s attempts, she’d never progressed beyond the periphery of the music industry. In the fading heyday of music videos, she’d briefly held a job as a video jockey, hosting a weekly country music countdown and reading entertainment-news bulletins.
But she’d yearned to find validation through stardom and quickly grew unhappy reporting on other people’s fame. So she
