was. But she’d learned differently.
As she floated from place to place, observing, hesitating to join in, she twirled the stem of her glass. A wineglass to hide the fact that she was drinking seltzer instead of something alcoholic.
Because she was one.
A recovering alcoholic, to be exact. Except that alcoholics never really recovered, she thought wryly. They were doomed to an eternal dance, always careful to avoid the very thing that they would always, on some level, crave. A drink. But she had been sober two years now and she was determined to remain that way.
Nodding and smiling, she didn’t pause to talk to people who looked inclined to engage her in conversation. She was still picking her time, taking it all in. It felt strange coming home. In part, it was as if she’d stepped into a time warp and five years had just melted away, never having passed.
But they had passed.
They’d left their mark on her in so many ways. Too many for her to think about now. Besides, there really was no point.
Go forward, don’t look back.
It was something she told herself almost daily, a mantra she all but silently chanted within the boundaries of her mind. And now, finally, she was beginning to adhere to it.
“They’re your family. They won’t bite, Gloria. Mingle.”
Her mother. She’d caught the scent of her mother’s perfume a beat before the older woman had said anything.
Gloria glanced over her shoulder at the diminutive woman. At sixty-two, Maria Mendoza still had the same figure that had first caught Jose Mendoza’s eye, no mean feat after five children. She was wearing her shoulder-length black hair up tonight. The silver streaks added to the impression of royalty, which was in keeping with the way she and the others had viewed her when they’d been children. It was her mother who had summoned her like the queen mother to return home.
Gloria smiled to herself now. Her mother had no idea that she’d been toying with that very notion herself, not for any so-called family reunion or to come rushing back to an ailing father who in her opinion looked remarkably healthy for a man supposedly battling chest pains, but to relocate. Permanently. To set up her business and her life where it had all once began.
Home.
She’d fled Red Rock five years ago when she’d felt her life spinning out of control, when the effects of alcohol and drugs had all but undone her. She’d thought that if she got away from everything, from her mother’s strong hand and everything that had contributed to her feeling of instability, the temptation to drink herself into oblivion and to drug her senses would disappear.
As if.
Because everywhere she went, she always had to take herself with her. It had taken a great deal of soul-searching and one near-fatal catastrophe—her nearly falling off a balcony while intoxicated—for her to finally face the fact that the problem was not external but internal. If she wanted her life to change, then she and not her surroundings needed to change.
So she’d shed the poor excuse for a husband she’d acquired in her initial vain attempt to turn her life around and then scrubbed away every bad habit she’d accumulated since she was a teenager. To that end, she’d checked herself into rehab, probably the hardest thing she’d ever done, and prepared to begin from scratch. And to learn to like herself again.
She knew the process was going to be slow. And it had been. Like molasses rolling downhill in January. But every tiny headway she made was also fulfilling. And as she grew stronger, more stable, more certain, she realized that she wanted to return to a place where people—most people, at any rate—liked her.
She’d wanted to return home.
And home was her parents. It was also her sisters, but that hurdle she hadn’t managed to take yet. When she’d left, she’d left her relationships with them, especially her older sister, Christina, in shambles.
She still had to do something about that.
One step at a time, Gloria cautioned herself.
She’d gotten everywhere else so far and she’d get there, too. Just maybe not tonight. She’d already seen her sisters, both of them, but from a distance. And that was what she intended on keeping tonight: her distance.
The same height as her mother, except that she was wearing heels that made her almost two inches taller, Gloria inclined her head toward the older woman. “Papa looks terrific for a man who’s had a heart attack,” she commented, not bothering to keep the smile from her lips.
“Chest pains,” Maria corrected, as if the reason she’d given both her older girls had not been a creative fabrication. “I said he’d had chest pains.”
Gloria could feel her brown eyes fill with humor as she looked at her mother—and saw right through her. “More like indigestion maybe?”
Maria shrugged her shoulders, dismissing the topic. It was obvious that her mother was not about to insist on the lie. It had done its work. It had brought her home. “He wanted you here as much as I did.” Maria fixed her with a look that spoke to her heart. “As I do.”
There was no point in keeping her decision to herself any longer. Gloria slipped her arm around her mother’s shoulders. “Then I have something to tell you.”
But her mother cut her off, as if she was afraid she would hear something that would spoil the moment and the party for her. “Whatever it is, I am sure it is fascinating, but you can tell me all about it after you get my shawl.”
Gloria looked at her uncertainly. If anything, the press of bodies made the air warm, not cool. “Your shawl?”
“Yes, I left it in the den.” Already turning in that direction, she placed her hands on her daughter’s back and gave her a little initial push to start her on her way. “Get it for me, please.”
Gloria paused, then shrugged in compliance. Going to get her mother’s shawl gave her an excuse to withdraw for a moment. Just because she’d made up her mind to uproot her life for the second time in five years and come back home didn’t mean that the idea didn’t make her just the slightest bit uneasy. She supposed it was because she kept thinking about that old line she remembered from her high school English class. Some author, Wolfe? Maybe Hardy? Whoever it was had said you couldn’t go home again.
She prayed it was just a handy title for a book and not a prophecy.
The immediate reason she’d left Red Rock was that she’d blacked out after a drinking binge only to wake up to find herself beside a man she’d had no recollection of meeting. But in part she’d fled to San Antonio because relations had also deteriorated between her and her sisters. They’d been so close once, but that had been as children and children had a tendency to overlook things adults couldn’t.
Such as cutting words and deceptions that should never have taken place. She and Christina had worked for the same financial firm, Macrizon, naive in their enthusiasm. And were easy prey for a woman named Rebecca Waters who took perverse pleasure in pitting one of them against the other.
Maria, looking impatient, ran her hands along her arms. “Please, Glory, I’m getting cold.”
She
