Page 44 of The Fadeaway
They walk in silence for a moment, and the months that they’ve spent apart sit between them.
“I’m glad you came,” Ruby says, tugging on his hand for emphasis.
“It’s your mom’s memorial. I wouldn’t have missed it, Rubes.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Should we wait until after the event to talk about us? I’m still willing to wait if the timing is off,” Dexter says. He glances down at her, and she looks up at him. Their eyes connect meaningfully and Ruby shakes her head.
“No, I want to talk now,” she says. “I feel like we’ve been waiting for a long time, and I’m ready.”
“Well, so am I.” They keep walking as Dexter gathers his words. “I’m ready for us to be clear about what we want from one another. Actually, you’ve been clear, Ruby, and I’m grateful for that. So it’s time formeto be clear.”
Her heart pounds uncontrollably in her chest as she waits for him to say what it is he wants from her—from their relationship. The waiting is almost too much, and it takes all of her willpower to just keep walking and not to say anything.
“I need you to hear me when I say this, Ruby,” Dexter says. He stops walking, but he holds her hand tightly. Ruby turns to face him. “I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve done all the soul-searching I’m going to do on this. I know myself, and I know my own heart. It’s you that I want, Ruby. I don’t feel that by not becoming a father in this lifetime I’ll be cheating myself out of anything. However, if I left you and tried to find my happiness elsewhere, I would definitely be cheating myself out of a huge, passionate love affair. I feel…” He pauses, looking out at the water wistfully. “I feel so many things for you. I see a long and happy future ahead of us, and like you said in your email a couple of months ago, it can be a traditional future with rings and vows, or it can just be a commitment between the two of us to always show up for one another. I honestly feel like the only thing I can’t live without, Ruby, is you.”
Dexter stops talking. There are tears flowing down Ruby’s cheeks. She’s grabbed his other hand without even realizing it, and when he stops talking, an audible sob escapes from her lips.
“I want you too. I’ve missed you so much, Dex. I don’t want you to leave again.”
He pulls her to him, tucking her head neatly under his chin as he holds her close. “I can’t promise that work won’t ever take me away from you for a few days here and there, but I can promise that it won’t be some open-ended thing. That we’ll always be able to decide if we travel together or spend a few days apart.Our future is ours to decide,” Dexter says. “From this point on, we decide everything together. If you want.”
“I want!” Ruby says, pulling her head from his chest and looking up at his face. “That’s definitely what I want!”
Her pleading tone makes Dexter laugh. “Then we’ve settled this,” he says, his eyes and face softening. “I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. Being without you these past couple of months has been rough.”
“For me too,” Ruby says. She takes a deep breath, holds it, lets it out. In her heart, she’s always imagined that Dexter would come back, that he would want her as much as she wants him, that he would stay. These have been tumultuous months without him, but even though they were apart, she never felt like he was truly gone, which has been yet another reassuring thing about loving Dexter North.
They stand there for several more minutes, just holding one another by the light of the moon. Finally, Ruby steps away and takes his hand. “I think we should go back,” she says gently. “And say goodnight to everyone. I’m exhausted, and tomorrow morning Carmela and the kids get here.”
“Tomorrow is a big day,” Dexter agrees.
They start to walk across the sand together, and Ruby feels a chill run up her arms as she remembers stepping outside her house in early September to call her mother in from this very beach so that they could eat dinner together; it was the night Patty told her she was sick.
The house is brightly lit as they approach, and Ruby can hear the sounds of Ellen and her girls talking and laughing, but there’s a heaviness inside of her despite the fact that Dexter has given her exactly what she wanted to hear. Tomorrow Ruby has to wake up and say goodbye to her mother. Not literally, and not in her heart, but for all intents and purposes. She’s done thetraveling and the discovering, and now it’s time to acknowledge that her mother’s life is truly over.
It’s time to let Patty go.
Harlow and Athena have created a beautiful sitting area near the water by Ruby’s house. As she gathered Carmela and her three kids from the dock, Harlow and Athena had spent the morning setting out white wooden chairs with bows made of netting tied on the backs of each seat. They’d set up a huge display of tropical flowers, and just for fun, they’d spent the past two weeks gathering every shell they could find, which sat now in a bucket near the chairs.
“Girls,” Ruby calls out, walking across the sand with Ellen, Dexter, Carmela, and her children in tow. “I want you to meet your grandmother’s other family.”
There are tears and hugs as Carmela and Marcos, Felix, and Valeria meet Harlow and Athena, and as Athena points out the chairs for everyone to sit in, Harlow leads the three small children over to the bucket of shells and tells them that they can use the shells to build things, spell out their names, or to play games with while the adults are giving Patty the memorial she deserves.
Before long, Marcos has his younger siblings engaged in a creation made of the shells, and Ruby is standing in front of everyone else, her hands clasped together in front of her.
“I’m so happy we could all be here together,” Ruby says over the sound of the ocean crashing onto the shore. “It means the world to me to see you all here, and to know that the people my mother held closest to her heart could all be together in a place she loved.”
Valeria squeals happily as she kicks off her sandals and lays on the sand. Marcos is carefully placing shells up and down her arms and legs, and Carmela looks as if she might stand and put a stop to the merrymaking during such a serious event.
“Please,” Ruby says to her, holding out a hand. “You knew Patty—she would have loved having them play and be happy right now. I promise you.”
Carmela has risen only a few inches and she sits down again, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “You’re so right,” she agrees, a small laugh bubbling out of her as she wipes away her tears. “She would have.”
“My mother lived a long, rich, and full life,” Ruby says. The wind lifts the netting on the back of the chairs and tosses the women’s hair around as the sun warms their skin. “She was a successful lawyer, an amazing mother, grandmother, wife, and friend—to so many. I had the pleasure of getting to travel around and meet some of the people who touched her life, and whose lives she touched in return.”
Everyone’s eyes well up as they look around at one another; Ellen is sitting next to Athena, holding one of her hands, and Carmela is on her other side. She reaches over to touch the woman she’s just met, and as Ruby watches, she feels her chest constrict with pride. All of these bits and pieces of Patty’s life are sitting here, on her beach, together as they honor the friend, mother, and grandmother they’ve lost.
“I did not know until setting off on this journey that my mother had a lifelong friend in Ellen,” she pauses, smiling at the older woman, who blinks back her tears as she throws Ruby an air kiss, “and I had no idea what I would find when I set foot on Jekyll Island or landed in New York City or Austin. But what I found in each of these places was that my mother had left a piece of her heart there, and it was my good fortune to stumble into these worlds and, ultimately, to find out that shewas so much more than what I’d known her to be. In short, she was a surrogate mother and grandmother,” Ruby says, looking at Carmela and then at the kids, who are still playing happily in the sand, “and she was a friend to Lyle, who unfortunately could not join us because his health isn’t good enough. Perhaps most impactful to me was finding out through my time on Jekyll Island that Patty was also—unbeknownst to me—the mother to a little girl who died over fifty years ago. I never knew about my sister Trixie, and I firmly believe that had my mother lived another decade or two, she still might not have talked about that time of her life. And I’m okay with that. I have to be. Each person gets to hold their own secrets close, and to decide which bits of their heart to share with others, and while my mother loved big and shared big, that bit of her heart—Trixie’s portion—was hers to keep tucked away. I respect that.” Ruby goes quiet for a long moment, and all they hear around them is the ocean.
“So today, I have all of the pieces of her puzzle that I could gather here with me to bid her farewell, and I’m so grateful for that. In each of us, she lives on. In each of the things she did, the people she loved and touched, she lives on. And here in the Gulf of Mexico, she’ll live on.” With that, Athena stands and reaches beneath her own chair, lifting up a small glass bottle that’s corked and tied with a tiny piece of netting. “I’d love to ask each of you to take the bottle that’s beneath your chair and join me in setting Patty free today to float in the ocean, which was always one of her favorite things to do. I hope it’s not too forward of me to ask you to take part in such a sacred and personal ritual, but I’ve realized that my mom doesn’t just belong to me—and she never did. She belonged to all of us.”
There isn’t a dry eye amongst them—even Dexter’s—as they all take their bottles and walk to the edge of the water. Ruby looks down the small row of people holding glass containers of her mother’s ashes, and without any sort of verbal cue, sheuncorks her bottle and holds it out over the water. Carmela follows suit, as do Dexter, Ellen, and Athena and Harlow, who are shoulder to shoulder and crying openly.
Each person tips their bottle at approximately the same time, and Patty’s ashes drop onto the wind, which carries them out over the sea. Ruby watches as the ashes drift and settle on the water, then she closes her eyes and holds them that way, feeling warm tears on her lashes.
“This isn’t goodbye, Mom,” she whispers to herself. “It’s just me setting you free. I know we’ll see each other again someday.”
The tide rolls in with one big wave as if in response, and the cold water grabs Ruby and the others around the ankles. There are squeals of surprise and Ruby’s eyes fly open as the freezing water shocks her; she laughs out loud. “Okay, Mom,” she says, still laughing. “You’ve got my attention. I’m still listening.”