A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

lose Mom. Not now. Not after all these years of…I don’t know, misunderstanding…between us. I have a chance to make things right. And I can’t do that if I’m sneaking around, lying to her. She doesn’t like you much, and I can’t put her through that again—falling for some guy she disapproves of. And I want her to be happy. You know? I don’t want to mess up her life any more than it’s been messed up.”

He opened his mouth to argue with her, but he understood what she was saying. Hell, he’d spent a lifetime trying to make his father happy. Why had he ever thought she wouldn’t side with her mother?

“I understand.” He almost gagged on the words.

She looked away, tears spilling from her eyes. Dammit, he wanted so badly to dry those tears. Why did her tears propel him to action, when he’d always wanted to run from his father’s grief? He had no explanation.

“No, I don’t think you really do understand.”

Her words were like sharp knives aimed at him. He responded in kind. “Okay, you want to explain it to me?”

“Mom deserves a guy like Jim. Hell, if I had to go pick a father from the daddy store, I’d choose Jim. In fact, I wish I could call him Dad the way you do. You are so incredibly lucky. And I want Mom to have that. You know. Because my father wasn’t like that at all. My father was an a-hole.”

She sniffed back tears and wiped them from her cheeks before she continued. “I told you that I had a relationship with him before he died. What I didn’t tell you is that he turned out to be every bit as bad as Mom said he was. When I looked him up, he was still living in Chicago, which is where Mom left him in the dead of night on Christmas Eve when I was only three years old. He’d been in and out of prison a couple of times. I tried to have a relationship with him, you know? Stupid me. I thought I could love him and save him or some idiot thing like that.

“But Mom was right. He wasn’t a good person, and he didn’t love me. He was perfectly happy to use me for booze and drugs. He drank himself to death. So, you see, I want Jim as my father. And I want Mom to be happy. And that leaves no space for us.

“Besides, there isn’t really an us, you know? Just two horny people having some fun. Right? And we should stop. Now. And we should get with the program and help Mom and Jim any way we can.”

“Yeah. I guess so,” he managed to say around the choking mass in his throat.

“And besides, the timing is all wrong. I mean, I’ve had a lot of fun these last few weeks, but I need to stand on my own two feet for a while.”

“Of course you do.”

She nodded. “It’s going to be awkward for us. But we love our folks, right? We can do this.”

He nodded. “Of course we can.” If only he actually believed that.

Chapter Twenty-Five

After two days in the hospital and a battery of tests, Mom was diagnosed with persistent atrial fibrillation. Dr. Wilson, Mom’s cardiologist, put her on medications that would regulate her heartbeat. Her blackout at the engagement party had been caused by low blood pressure, created by the irregular heart rhythm. After she was given a complete cardiac workout, the docs were sure she hadn’t had a stroke or a heart attack.

So the episode had been a scary warning that Mom needed to destress. Her doc told her to go home, eat healthy foods, get regular exercise, and take up yoga. Mom had taken this prescription seriously. On Thursday, she and Jim bought yoga mats on their way back from the hospital. And on Friday morning, they went out to practice positions on the beach at sunrise.

On Friday night, at a dinner Granny hosted at her condo, they seemed so happy together talking about the beauty of stretching on the beach while the sun came up. It had been a lovely family gathering, but Dylan hadn’t been invited.

So Mom hadn’t sniped at him. And he hadn’t sniped at Mom. And Ella hadn’t had to sit at the table with him, feeling heartbroken.

Still, it was so unfair. Dylan wasn’t at fault for the disasters that befell the engagement party. But Mom had made him the scapegoat for some irrational reason. And Jim hadn’t stopped her from doing so. But then again, Dylan hadn’t hidden his dislike of her mother. So he wasn’t entirely blameless either.

Ella had to accept this as the order of things from now on. Mom disliking Dylan. Jim tiptoeing around Mom’s unhappiness because of her heart condition. And Ella, heartsore and missing Dylan with every breath she took.

Without the engagement party to plan, she had no reason to call him anymore, and she missed the sound of his voice. And since they’d ended their spring fling, she missed his kisses and his touches and the sound of his breathing at night while she watched him sleep.

If only she could convince her heart (and maybe a few other parts) that she was better off keeping him at a distance. But what else could she do? She couldn’t run the battle lines between her mother and Dylan without getting seriously wounded by both of them.

She needed to face the facts about her life. She needed to get on with it, and working part time at Howland House and picking up the occasional wedding gig was never going to get her where she wanted to be.

She was on her own, and if she wanted to buy herself a little house somewhere, she’d have to earn the money the hard way…by going back on the road or heading off to Nashville to try to get a gig as a studio musician, which was incredibly hard