Chapter 128 Home sweet home

Chapter 128 Home sweet home
Alexa’s POV 

The drive took two hours. I sat in the back watching the city that had been mine for two weeks fall away behind the car becoming the motorway, then the familiar landscape of roads I had been on before, roads that had shape history in them, that connected to things I knew. I kept my eyes on the window.

The driver was good at his job, he wasn’t intrusive which I was grateful for, the radio was on at a volume that was just enough to fill the silence without asking anything of me. I was grateful for that. I was not in a state that required conversation.

I thought about Nora at the window, how I looked up on instinct…some pull that made me stop with my hand on the car door, looking back at the building before I got in. Her hand flat on the glass. I made sure to hold it for as long as I could before getting into the car. I had made a decision and decisions required the follow-through or they end up becoming mere thoughts.

When the car moved, I didn’t bother looking back at her. I was not going to think about whether she was still at the window when we turned or not.

The familiar streets started arriving gradually. The wide road that narrowed, the roundabout with the old oak on the island that had been there longer than any of the roads around it, and the turn onto the quieter residential street, they all assembled themselves around the car, carrying some nostalgic memories with them without effort.

I pulled up at my Mom’s house. Catherine Howthorn’s house. The window boxes that she maintained with more dedication than she gave most things looked polished and clean, and the front path with the slightly uneven third stone that had been slightly uneven since I was approximately eight years old.

The driver pulled in. Got my suitcase from the boot.

I thanked him, he nodded and left. I stood on the front path with my suitcase with the mid-morning quiet of the street and looked at the house.

The kitchen light was on. Of course it was.

My mom spent a significant portion of her life in that kitchen. It was where she thought, process and where she produced things that fed people physically while she worked out how to feed them in other ways. The kitchen light being on meant she was home and functional and this was a normal Tuesday morning for her in all the ways it was not a normal Tuesday morning for me.

I walked up the path and knocked. Then tried the handle because she never locked it during the day and it opened, so I went in.

The familiar smell of the house wrapped around me before anything else. That’s one thing with this house… the smell reaches you in the entrance hall before you find anyone or say anything. Something that was a combination of the cleaning product she had used for years and whatever was currently happening in the kitchen, and underneath both of those something that was just the house itself. The accumulated smell of a place that held the same person for a long time.

Home.

Though not my home anymore, but had been for years. But the word still applied in the way it applied to places that had formed you.

“Hello?” I called.

There was a beat before….

“In here.”

The kitchen.

I left my suitcase in the entrance hall and followed the smell and the voice down the short corridor and pushed the kitchen door open. Catherine Howthorn was at the counter.

She was doing something with vegetables. To her, food is not only about enjoyment, but about the production of nourishment with minimum wasted effort. She had her back to me when I came in and she turned at the sound of the door looking at me.

I looked back at my mom. And Godddd…. I missed her so much.

She looked surprised for the first two seconds. Then she ran me a thorough look, checking the state of me, and my face that probably had shown more than I was intending to, then the landing on whatever conclusion the inventory produced.She put down what was in her hands and opened her arms.

I crossed the kitchen and walked into them as she put both arms around me. I pressed my face into her shoulder and just stayed there for a moment. I needed that hug, more than I thought. She didn’t say anything.

She just held on, feeling the presence of her only daughter.

I pulled back after a moment and she looked at my face with the same assessing eyes that had never once missed anything they were looking for.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sat at the kitchen table.

She put the kettle on…automatic, without asking, the same first response to everything that Samantha Ashford also deployed and that I had always privately found comforting in both of them came to sit across from me.

“You look better than the last time I saw you,” she said.

“The last time you saw me, I was crying on your sofa.” I said smiling softly.

“Yes,” she said simply. “You look better than that.”

I smiled again.

“I came to stay for a bit,” I said. “I need somewhere to be for some time .”

She looked at me across the table.

“Home,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

Something moved in her expression. Not surprise exactly, more like something that had been waiting in a slightly elevated position for a while and had just been given permission to lower.

“Of course,” she said. “Your room is as it always is.”

The kettle boiled, and she made tea.

She set mine in front of me like someone who had made tea for this specific person for long enough to do it without thinking. Everything was perfect and in right amount. I wrapped both hands around it.

“The last time you were here,” she said, returning to her own chair. Picking up her cup. Looking at me over the rim with the patient directness that was just how she looked at things. “You left with Leon and his mother.” A pause. “I let you go thinking you were going to fix things.”

“I know,” I said.

“And then I didn’t hear from you for…” She paused. “A while.”

“I know,” I said again. “I’m sorry for that.”

She looked at me steadily.

“How did it go?” she said. “What happened after you left here?”

The question was simple, but the answer was not and we both knew it.

I looked at my tea.

“A lot happened,” I said carefully. “More than I can go through right now.” I looked up at her. “But I’m going to fix what can be fixed and accept what can’t.” I paused. “That’s what I can tell you right now. The rest…” I stopped. “The rest I’ll tell you when I have more words for it.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she nodded.

Clean and accepting. Catherine Howthorn did not push past the information you had chosen to give when she could see you had chosen it deliberately. It was one of the things about her that I had not always appreciated when I was younger. But now, I was enormously grateful for right now.

“Everything is fine,” I said. Answering the question she hadn’t pushed on. “I’m okay. I’m here. I’m going back.”

“Good,” she said.

My room was exactly as it always was. She had said so and she was right. The bed in its position under the window, the curtains I had chosen at seventeen and that she had never replaced because they still worked perfectly well and Catherine Howthorn did not change things that worked perfectly well. The shelf with the books from various periods of my life living in no particular order. I put my suitcase down and sat on the edge of the bed.

The mattress had the familiar give of something that had held me through various versions of being alive… the teenager, the young woman, and the person who had come home between chapters of a life that kept being more complicated than expected. I sat in the quiet of it thinking about what will tomorrow hold.

When should I go back home?

The word home kept arriving with some new weight each time. I pressed my hand flat against my sternum.

Maybe I should leave the thought for tomorrow.

I stood up and went to the bathroom. It was still stocked with the things my mother kept for when I visited…the soap and towels in the color she had always kept in the guest bathroom. I turned the shower on and stood under it, letting the water be what it was and thought about nothing specific for a while. One thing at a time.

When I came out, I dried off and changed into fresh clothes from the suitcase and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. Better than the last time. She was right. I went back downstairs.

The kitchen was warm and the smell of whatever she was making for lunch was beginning to develop into something more delicious. My mom was at the counter again and she looked up when I came in and said…

“Sit. It’s nearly ready.”

I sat at the kitchen table.

The same chair I had always sat in.

And for the first time since I left my family…something in me exhaled.

Not the complicated parts or the unresolved parts or the conversation with Leon that was coming and that was going to require a lof of seriousness. But this is enough. Enough to sit in a kitchen chair with a cup of tea, with my mother making lunch, and for the first time in a long time, the ground was there.