Souvenir by Therese Fowler

Twenty—no, twenty-one. And then she realized Kara was calculating the age difference between Carson and his fiancée. No wonder they were calling him a cradle robber; his bride-to-be was probably just learning to walk when he’d made his safari promise.
    “Whatever makes him happy,” Meg said, wanting to be done with the topic. “Now tell me, how go your plans for the plant nursery?”
    “Do I detect a change-of-subject attempt here? I mean, c’mon Meggie, you had your shot and you let him go.”
    “True,” Meg said. Neither she nor her parents had ever told Kara or Beth or the youngest, Julianne, the whole truth about why she and Carson broke up.
    Kara sighed. “Jesus, if I’d known he was going to get famous,
I
would have snagged him, for God’s sake. Nothing against Todd.”
    “Of course.”
    “Well, I guess we both fucked up where old Car’s concerned—gotta live with it. But life is good, right? I mean, I have Todd and the boys, you have Brian and Savannah—you wouldn’t trade her for the world, even to have a kid of Carson’s.”
    “Nope,” Meg agreed, though of course it was fully possible that the two children Kara was referencing—Savannah and a theoretical child of Carson’s—were in fact one in the same. But Kara had no clue that Savannah might not be Brian’s. No clue that Meg had seen Carson the day of her wedding and that she had not been nearly as successful at closing the door behind her as she thought she’d be.
    “Are you doing okay? You sound cranky. Maybe get a nap in. God, I wish I could steal time for a nap! You should see my kitchen counters—do you think Keiffer and Evan could get their lunch plates past the clay mockup of Mt. Doom and into the
sink
? Anyhow, I better go; I hear Tony screaming about something, and Todd’s out in the garage.”
    Meg smiled at the happy disorder of her sister’s home. “I’m glad you called.”
    “Tell Dad to call me. Kisses to all,” Kara said, and they hung up.
    Meg simply stood there holding her phone for a minute afterward, wistfulness and loss washing over her. She missed Kara and Beth and Julianne, but they, at least, were still walking the Earth. They, at least, were accessible by a half-day’s airplane journey. But their mother, snatched away so suddenly that Meg still sometimes picked up the phone to call her before remembering, was lost to her, to them, forever. How was a girl—all right, a woman—supposed to manage without her mother? The notebook diaries gave her windows through which to view her mother in their past, but what of today, when she needed a supportive arm around her shoulders?
    “Oh, Mom,” she sighed. “Is this as good as it gets?”

    T HE DARK QUIET OF THE SCREENED PORCH, LATE THAT NIGHT, SOOTHED Meg only a little as she sat on a chaise and sipped gin, straight. Brian and Savannah both had been asleep for hours, but she had yet to even feel like closing her eyes. She
was
tired—so tired she couldn’t even calculate how many hours it had been since she’d slept. But her thoughts swirled and tumbled like river rapids, making sleep impossible.
    Her mother, she knew, had lived with turmoil most of her life—she was the youngest of eight kids whose father died in Normandy. Then she married into it; Meg’s father was always launching some half-planned scheme that inevitably failed. The first was a citrus farm like the McKays’, with thousands of young trees that were killed in the second year by some blight he hadn’t known to look for. Next he bought the land that would later become their horse farm and built a huge greenhouse, for the supposedly easier job of growing rare orchids to sell to collectors. Yet neither he nor her mother, who by then was also tending
her
, could master the expensive, sensitive plants, which died off steadily while the debt blossomed.
    Just after Kara’s birth, when Meg was five, he gave up that particular dream; they sold off all the orchid paraphernalia at a loss and