Love Me for Me by Jenny Hale Page A

known her all my life. We lived next door to each other growing up, and we went all the way through school together.” She moved around in her chair, her face showing discomfort as if her sitting position were giving her pain. “We didn’t go away to a fancy college like you, Miss Libby,” she smiled.
    Libby broke eye contact and looked down at her lap, but she could feel that her mother and Mabel were both still looking at her. She didn’t want to make things uncomfortable so she pretended to notice something on the napkin in her lap. Heat rose up her neck and onto her face. She hoped they couldn’t see it. Did Mabel think she thought herself high and mighty like Pete had? Did she think Libby was just like her mother, too? Libby offered a counterfeit smile and then took a sip of her water to alleviate her drying mouth.
    “I’m glad we stayed here, got married here, and lived out our years here… It gave me more time with my best friend,” Mabel said, her expression thoughtful. “I remember when Anne and Hugh bought that cottage of yours.”
    “You do?”
    Mabel nodded.
    As a kid, Libby hadn’t ever considered the lives of Pop and Nana as young people; she’d only seen the end result of their young choices. From her perspective, they seemed happy, settled. They enjoyed their family and each other. What must it have been like for Nana when she’d decided to spend her life with Pop and move into a home they’d bought together?
    “She’d spent the whole first month decorating,” Mabel smiled. “I wasn’t married yet, but I longed to be as happy as she was. I helped her sew the curtains for every one of the rooms. She and Hugh barely had enough money to scrape by, but Anne hadn’t let that discourage her. She wanted to make the little cottage into a home, and she certainly did,” Mabel chuckled. “Anne had wanted an oriental rug in the living room, I remember—that was the only thing she couldn’t make herself—but she never complained that she didn’t have it. Never once. We’d look at them at the furniture store in town. Whenever she’d admit that she wanted it, she’d always follow with, ‘Ah, it’s just a thing. Things don’t make us happy; people do.’ She and I made table cloths, draperies, and linens… everything we could. Hugh built a lot of the furniture himself.
    “Then Hugh’s sales picked up and he started making a good living. A great living, actually. Anne and I had gone out to lunch one day, and when we returned, sitting under her living room furniture was the oriental rug that she’d always wanted.”
    Libby knew that rug. She’d played card games on that rug. She’d watched movies as a girl, on her belly, her head propped up with her hands as she leaned on her elbows on that rug. She’d sat on that rug with Pete as she opened a birthday present that Pop had given her, a birthday present that she still had. Her memory box. The recollection of it caused her fondness for Pop to bubble up.
    Mabel’s story was a perfect description of Pop. He always tried to make everything better, make it all okay. Nobody wanted for anything when he was around, if he could help it. He’d made Libby the memory box after he’d found out that her parents hadn’t been getting along and her dad hadn’t been staying at home much anymore. Libby escaped with Pete to Pop and Nana’s cottage a lot. She’d spent her birthday that year amidst a broken home, her mother crying, her father absent. With red-rimmed eyes, her mother had baked her a cake, given her a present, and together—just the two of them—they’d sung the birthday song. Celia had tried to keep it together, but it was clear to Libby that their life wasn’t together at all.
    She looked at her mother across the table now, the lines in her face like battle scars from those trying years, and she felt guilty suddenly for not asking her to lunch. For not trying harder in adulthood to make her happy. Libby had done everything her mother