ALSO BY GAIL SCHIMMEL:
The Aftermath
Marriage Vows
Whatever Happened to the Cowley Twins?
The Park
Two Months
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Gail Schimmel
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542028141
ISBN-10: 1542028140
Cover design by Emma Rogers
In loving memory of Melissa Kleinhans, whose life and marriage were nothing like anything portrayed in this book.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Preview: Never Tell a Lie
PROLOGUE
PART 1
MONDAY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter 1
From the moment I receive the invitation I have a bad feeling about the class reunion.
In the first place, who wants to be reminded that they’ve been out of school for twenty years? It’s an obscene amount of time to have officially been a grown-up, and given the rather poor job I’ve made of adulting, I don’t really need any reminders. Plus, it’s always been my feeling that if you want to keep in touch with people, you do. The people from school that I’ve lost touch with – which, I grant you, is most of them – I’ve lost touch with for a reason. Because they’re not my friends. Because I have nothing in common with them. Because, at best, they bore me. Because they could never, ever understand where I find myself now, twenty years later. Why would I want to go out with them in some desperate attempt to recapture our distant youth? Honestly, the whole business of organising school reunions is for those people whose lives peaked at high school and have gone nowhere since. Head girls and rugby captains. Not the likes of me. Not that my life has exactly shot through the stratosphere of human achievement, but I’ve moved on.
I phone Stacey to see what she thinks. Stacey is the only high-school friend I’m in regular contact with. It’s not like we were best friends or anything (my best friend emigrated three weeks after we finished school), but our lives keep criss-crossing – at university, and then at a job for the same company, and then when our sons went to the same nursery school. They’re twelve now, and at different schools, but we’ve become proper friends. She’s my go-to person, the one who keeps my spare keys and bails me out of trouble, and I do the same for her.
‘Are you going to this thing?’ I ask her, with no introduction.
‘Definitely not,’ she says. ‘Ghastly idea. I would rather vomit on myself.’
‘Exactly,’ I say.
We’re both quiet for a moment.
‘It is very close to my house,’ I say. This is probably because my life, like my road, is a cul-de-sac, and I haven’t moved far from the high school that we all went to. The reunion is not at the school, but at a restaurant in the same area.
‘I could stay over at yours after,’ says Stacey, who lives further away. ‘And then we could share the babysitter.’ Stacey and I are both single mothers. For different reasons, but still, it’s another thing in common.
‘It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do,’ I say. ‘It’s not like I have a social life.’
‘And it could be quite interesting to see how everyone’s aged,’ says Stacey. ‘I’m sure they all look haggard.’
‘Well, that’s all very well for you because you still look like you’re seventeen, so you’ll be judging us all.’
‘It’s all I’ve got,’ says Stacey.
‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll be your elderly-looking sidekick.’
‘You’re still hot,’ says Stacey. ‘Hotter than you were at high school, and you were hot then. We’ll be the talk of the reunion.’
We pause again.
‘So, we’re doing this?’ I eventually say.
‘Like you said,’ says Stacey, ‘it’s not like we have anything better to do.’
‘Guess not,’ I say.
And like that, the future is decided.
Chapter 2
The first challenge is finding a babysitter. My son, Django, will only stay with two people – Nelly, my long-suffering domestic helper, and my father. Nelly loves Django, but if she babysits, she has to stay over and leave her own children with her sister. She never says no if I ask, but I’m never sure that she really wants to do it, despite the extra money. I try only to ask her if I have no choice.
So I phone my dad.
‘Daddy, could you look after Django and Aiden next Saturday?’
‘Who’s Aiden?’ says my father. He’s met Aiden approximately 132 times and has babysat the two boys together at least seven times. He calls him ‘Aidy baby’ and they have a complicated handshake that they do when they see each other.
‘Stacey’s son,’ I say. ‘As you well know.’
‘And where are you and Stacey off to this time?’ says my father, as if we are constantly gallivanting around town. Mostly, he babysits because I have parents’ evenings or work functions.
‘We’re going to a school reunion,’ I say. ‘Twenty years.’
I settle down, because I know my father will have thoughts on this. Listening to his thoughts is the price I will pay for the babysitting.
‘Twenty years?’ he says. He sounds genuinely surprised.
‘Yup.’
‘You’re so old,’ he says.
‘Thanks for pointing that out, Daddy,’ I say. ‘But if I’m old then you’re a dinosaur. You should be in a museum. We should have to pay to see you.’
Django, who is sitting nearby, reading, snorts with laughter. ‘You’re so wrinkly, Granpops,’ he yells. ‘You’re so wrinkly that I could get lost in your wrinkles.’ He pauses, and I wait for the inevitable follow-up. ‘Burn,’ he shouts. ‘Dissing you for real.’ Django’s burns are very seldom particularly clever.
I have the satisfaction of hearin
g my father’s deep laugh. He doesn’t laugh often but when he does, it’s contagious. I feel warm hearing it.
‘And why would you want to go to a school reunion?’ says my father once he’s stopped laughing. ‘Everyone knows those things are awful.’
‘You go to all of yours,’ I point out. ‘What was the last one . . . four hundred years?’
Django laughs. ‘Burn,’ he says again. He’s abandoned his book to listen to the conversation. Apparently, my dad and I are funnier than Wimpy Kid.
‘That’s different,’ says my father. ‘I went to boarding school.’
‘How does that make it different?’
He sighs, as if explaining things to me is too great a burden for him. ‘There were no girls,’ he says.
‘So you think the reunion will be awful because there’ll be women there?’ I ask.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, all my reunions have been awful. Bunch of fat bald white men talking about the good old days. I just go to remind myself how superior I am to them.’
‘So then that’s why I’m going. Anyway, it’s not like I have anything else to do.’
‘Maybe you’ll meet someone,’ says my father, and I can hear the hope in his voice.
‘Daddy, I won’t meet anyone—’ I start.
But he bulldozes me. ‘Of course I’ll babysit Django and his little friend,’ he says. ‘You go out and have fun. Maybe I should look after him for the afternoon too, and you can buy yourself something new to wear and have your hair set.’
‘Have my hair set?’ I laugh. ‘In preparation for my voyage on the Ark?’
‘That’s what your mom used to do,’ he says, and I hear the weight in his voice. ‘When we had a big night out, she’d go get her hair set. To be honest, I could never tell the difference, but my God, it used to make her feel good. She’d glow and toss her head, and I’d feel like a million dollars just standing with someone so happy.’
Dad doesn’t speak about my mom much. I don’t know if I should be quiet and hope for more, or if I am expected to respond with my own absent spouse memory, although my father and I both know that I don’t miss Travis like he misses my mom.
‘Travis never got his hair set for a big night out,’ I say, after a pause.
And then, before we know it, my father and I are both wheezing with laughter at the thought of my balding dead husband having his hair set, and I remember why, next to Django, my dad is my favourite person in the world.
‘Don’t forget you promised to help me with the books tomorrow,’ says my father, once we’ve finished laughing. ‘The builder is coming to fix the damp the day after, and I promised I’d have the books out of the shelves.’
‘I still don’t understand why this needs my help,’ I say.
‘Because I can’t give books away,’ says my dad simply.
It’s true. He has every book he has ever bought, in double rows along shelves all down his passage. The damp problem has not affected the books yet, but it needs to be fixed before it does. I was the one who suggested to my dad that this might be a chance to do a clear-out, and he agreed. On condition that I helped him.
I sigh.
‘Sure, Dad,’ I say. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
I guess it’s only fair when he’s agreed to babysit the boys. I just hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew.
Chapter 3
I am surrounded by books, and my father is nowhere in sight.
He started out helping me, but everything that I wanted to send to the charity shop he wanted to keep. After he told me that I couldn’t possibly give away a copy of The Lord of The Rings – even though he has three copies that we have found so far – I sent him to make tea. He took all three copies of the book with him, and hasn’t come back, so I suspect he’s reading it. Again. I wonder how he chose which copy to read.
As well as the challenge of how to decide what should stay and what should go is the challenge of my father’s habit of storing things in books: photos, letters, postcards, receipts, bills, old tickets. If it’s flat, he stores it in a random book. This means that as well as choosing the books to go, I must empty the book, and then decide what to do with whatever drops out of it. Mostly, it’s rubbish, but not all of it.
Between the pages of a water-stained copy of Black Beauty that not even the charity shop is going to want, I found a photo of my mother and me when I was a baby that I had never seen before. My mom died when I was two, so there are not that many photos of the two of us together, and I have looked at the ones in the album so many times that the images are burnt on my brain. This one is different. Mostly, in the photos we have, I am in the centre and my mom is kind of in the background, often out of focus. Which makes sense, because that’s how it is with a new baby – you’re taking photos of the baby, not the grown-ups. And especially then, when they had to use film cameras and couldn’t edit and choose digital images until they were right. But in this picture, my mom is in focus and I am just a blur of face wrapped in a blanket and held in her arms. She looks beautiful – so young – too young to die a mere two years later – and her eyes are focused on something beyond me or even the camera, like she’s looking into her future and isn’t sure about what she sees, because there is a small frown on her otherwise smooth forehead. She looks, to my distress, unhappy.
I look to the back of the photo to see if anything is written there, but it’s blank, except for the dark remnants of paper, like it was glued in a photo album and removed. There is a space in my baby album where a picture was missing, and when I asked, my dad always said that he had no idea what it could have been. And now I seem to have found it. I feel pleased; triumphant even. I’ve solved one of the great mysteries of my childhood. I can’t wait to show my dad, and I put it carefully aside. I’m more motivated to check the books now; maybe I’ll find more pictures.
But mostly, it’s nothing. Receipts often, for groceries and things for his workshop. I mean, even these can distract me – reading the lists of what he bought, and thinking what must have been for me, and what age I must have been at the time. I think of my young father, recently widowed, buying food for his child. It’s no wonder all the church ladies came flocking to rescue him, despite the fact that he had no eyes for anyone except me. And recipes, written in my mother’s handwriting. Those stop me too, as I try to somehow intuit more about her, hidden in the loops of her y’s and g’s and her choice to write down that particular recipe.
I’m about to stop working and take the photo to show my dad when a postcard flutters out of the book that I’m holding. It’s not the first one; my father and his friend Greg seem to have a long history of exchanging postcards. At least, I presume they exchanged them – the ones that waft from these books have all been from Greg as he travelled around the world having adventures. Thinking about it, I realise that it may well have been one-sided – what adventures was my father having? ‘Mary slept through the night,’ he might have reported; or ‘Mary’s first day at school today!’ Hardly a match for Greg’s globetrotting fun.
I look at the postcard that has landed on the floor, picture side up. It’s a picture of Big Ben, I think, and a bit tame for Greg, who usually sends either artworks or something obscure. The last one, which came out of a Terry Pratchett, was an advertisement for the Sex Museum in Amsterdam.
I flip over the picture, wondering if Greg will explain his unexpectedly pedestrian choice, like he has explained the more exotic ones.
But the handwriting is not Greg’s. It’s the unmistakable loops and curls of my mother’s script. This must be something from before they were married, I think fleetingly before I read it.
‘Dear Sean. I hope one day you will forgive me. I did what I had to do. I think of you and Mary every day. Love L.’
I read it twice, because it doesn’t make sense. I have made my father tell me everything that he can remember about the two years of my mother’s life with me. And he’s never mentioned them being apart. But
she must’ve been away from us to send this postcard. They must have had a fight, and she must have been gone for a bit. I suppose I can see why my dad wouldn’t tell me about something like that. You don’t want to speak ill of the dead, especially to their child.
I’m about to put the card down on the small pile of things that I plan to show my dad, and keep for myself, when I have an idea. I look at the card and see that, as I’d hoped, there is a clear date stamp: 24-11-1988. Only that’s impossible, because my mom died in 1984 of an aneurysm. One minute she was making pancakes, said my dad, and the next she was dead on the floor.
So she couldn’t have sent a postcard to my father in 1988, when she’d died making pancakes in 1984.
Could she?
Chapter 4
I don’t buy a new dress or get my hair set, but Stacey and I do get ready for the school reunion together, like the teenagers we were when we met.
I haven’t told Stacey what I found yet.
I also haven’t even told my dad. I’ve tried. I’ve started the conversation about a hundred times. In my head, I urge myself to just ask my father about the postcard. There is sure to be a reasonable explanation. Like . . . Well, that’s where I come unstuck. Like what? So every time I start, I back out. I change the topic or ask him about his health. He’s given me a few funny looks but hasn’t asked me if anything is wrong. Maybe I need him to ask me, and then I’ll be able to talk about the postcard.
I’ve tried to tell Stacey too. But I feel like if I speak it, it will become real. Until I say otherwise, my mother is dead, like she’s supposed to be, and my world can turn on its axis with no bumps. Until I say otherwise. So I don’t. But I think about it the whole time; it sizzles and smokes beneath the veneer of my day, as I try to make sense of it in a way that won’t break me.
I’m hoping that the reunion will be a distraction.
Aiden and Django find the whole idea of Stacey and me ever having been at school, having been out of school for so long and wanting to look nice for the reunion funny and confusing in equal measure. They are both perched on my bed, watching us get ready. My bedroom is small, so between the boys, Stacey and all the furniture, it’s squashed. It’s also my least favourite room in the house, which I know seems counterintuitive, but it’s because of the furniture. Travis’s mother gave us a ‘bedroom set’ when we got married. It has a huge turquoise sateen padded headboard and a dressing table with a three-way mirror and a matching sateen stool. The dressing table is made out of some dreadful man-made substance, and the mirror has bevelled edges that afforded Django hours of amusement when he was smaller. Even now, he’s pulling faces at his distorted image. It’s all too big for the small room, on top of being hideous; but somehow, it’s never seemed like a priority to change it, even though I tell myself I should almost weekly. At least I got rid of the matching sateen bedspread as soon as we received it, and the white duvet and funky scatter cushions go some way to making the whole thing a bit better.
Never Tell A Lie Page 1