by Wendy Wax
I don’t know whether I can handle staying at Bree’s. I’m not sure I can handle anything at the moment, including the tears that are seeping out of the corners of my eyes.
Spencer steps over and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Thanks for checking around for us, Dee. And for calling Brianna.” He turns his gaze on my ex–best friend. “I know I speak for both of us when I say how much we appreciate your invitation. We’d love to stay with you.”
Twenty
Bree
With Lauren in the house it sheds twenty years. And in some ways so do I. I try to hold myself apart, or at least at arm’s length, just to be on the safe side, but it’s almost impossible not to think about all the hours Lauren and I spent together here playing and making up stories under my grandmother’s watchful eye, the holiday meals we shared with Lauren and Kendra, and binge-watching Pretty Woman (before binge-watching was a thing) in the terrible months after my grandmother died.
When Clay and I got married we considered moving in to one of the rental houses his family owned up in Kill Devil Hills or Southern Shores, but this house my grandmother left me was the last bit of her I had. I couldn’t bring myself to let go of it or rent it out to strangers.
“Where do you want me to put these?” Spencer holds up their suitcases and I lead him toward the stairs.
“It’s the second room on your left. If you hit the one with the unmade bed that looks like a tornado swept through, you’ve stopped too soon.”
* * *
Back in the kitchen Lauren is studying the space with genuine interest that seems to have elbowed her misery aside. “This looks like something off of Extreme Makeover. It’s really beautiful, but still homey, too.”
“Thanks. We tried to keep as much of the original Victorian farmhouse as we could. I didn’t want to scare my grandmother and grandfather out of their graves.” I gesture toward the cemetery across the street. “We started upstairs and worked our way down so it’s been an ongoing project. I don’t plan to live through construction ever again, but I’m really glad we did it.”
“It’s great. Your grandmother’s table looks perfect at the center of the banquette and I always loved this sideboard. Especially when it was groaning under a holiday ham or turkey.” Her voice breaks and she trails a shaky finger over the oak top of the cabinet that some long-ago ancestor brought over from England, then looks up at the arrangement of black-and-white photos on the wall above it. I see her zero in on the shot of her and Clay and me standing near the bleachers after a Friday-night football game. Clay’s in his team jersey with Lauren and me bookended on either side of him. There’s a more recent shot of Rafe wearing a Manteo High jersey with the same number 22 his father wore. Nearby is a current shot of Lily in her cheerleading uniform mid-cheer with pompoms raised.
As a child I hid inside books, wrapped in loneliness and self-doubt, wondering why my parents didn’t love me enough to keep me. My greatest achievement is that my daughter is the opposite, and that she’s secure enough to get snippy or show her anger; things I never felt secure enough to do with my parents. For a brief moment I wonder if Lauren regrets not having children.
Lauren turns and looks at me, really looks, for the first time. “You’ve changed.”
“Over the last twenty years?” I snort. “Of course I have. We all change. If we’re lucky we grow and get better. You just weren’t around to notice.”
Her eyes tear up and I feel like a jerk for chiding her, given everything that’s just happened. I have no idea how she isn’t sobbing hysterically. “Come sit down.”
I wait while she slides onto the banquette that we built in beneath the bay window. Then I pull three wineglasses from the cupboard and retrieve a bottle of Chenin Blanc from the wine refrigerator.
Spencer comes back and sits beside her and I pour us each a glass then set the bottle and a bowl of mixed nuts in the center of the table. For a few moments we sip wine and look at one another. Spencer doesn’t attempt to hide his concern over Lauren’s emotional state and I’m impressed with his ability not to rush in and attempt to “fix” what’s gone so horribly wrong.
I’m not doing so well with this, because while I still can’t reconcile Kendra’s behavior with the generous, caring woman I’ve always known, and I am beyond curious about Jake Warner and what he’ll do next, I want more than anything to fix the damage that’s been done. Or at least try to patch it. Because while I have managed to live without my best friend for the last twenty years, I know in my heart that Kendra will never be able to survive a life that doesn’t include her daughter.
* * *
Lauren
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Spencer has asked me this at least five times since Jake—I’m just not ready to start throwing the word father around—called fifteen minutes ago to ask if I’d come over to the Dogwood to “talk.”
I don’t want to go alone but I don’t want anyone to come with me, either. Not even Spencer. As I get up from the banquette, leaving him and Bree to finish the Chenin Blanc, there’s a tiny part of me that imagines Bree coming and holding my hand—after all, she listened all those years while I tried to piece together a father from a photograph of a man in a powder-blue tuxedo.
I leave her house to walk the few blocks to the inn, my knees wobbly. I try my hardest not to even think about my mother and what she’s done, but as I’ve learned while trying to clear my mind and to meditate, trying not to think about something is actually thinking about it. She might as well be walking right beside me.
As I near the Dogwood I see him sitting on the front porch swing. He’s moving languidly, one long jean-clad leg bending and flexing as he swings back and forth. He appears deep in thought and as I watch him, it’s clear some of those thoughts are troubling. I take in details I missed during our turbulent introduction earlier today. I notice that his nose is slightly hooked at the bridge. That his mouth is wide and expressive while his chin is square and determined. He’s attractive in a subtle way, average until you really look at him. Or he really looks at you.
“Hi.” His face lights up when he sees me. He halts the movement of the swing with his foot then motions to the empty space next to him. I take a seat, intensely aware of how momentous a moment this is. I feel shy and a little frightened. Yet I have an urgent need to know . . . everything.
“So.”
He smiles. “So indeed.”
“I don’t know where to start or even what to ask. I mean, I’ve been imagining this in some shape or form virtually forever—having a father, I mean—but I never really imagined you . . .”
“Coming back from the dead?” His tone is wry but wrapped in a layer of hurt.
“I just don’t understand how she could have done this to me . . . to us . . .” It takes everything I have not to cry.
“I know.” He hesitates, as if searching for the right words or maybe he’s trying not to cry, too. “When I first found out—it wasn’t long after my wife died that I discovered she knew about you and had never told me—I was so angry I could hardly see straight. I was furious. With my wife, with your mother, with the world.” There’s a beat of silence and then I feel him dial it back a notch. “It’s possible steam came out of my ears.”
“Like Yosemite Sam?” I surprise myself by asking.
“Exactly like Yosemite Sam.”
I turn and look up at him. He looks back. I still can’t believe he’s here. Real. In the flesh. Sitting right beside me. No longer the fresh-faced bridegroom in the powder-blue tuxedo who was stolen from me, but a grown man who’s clearly weathered more than a few storms and known his share of heartache. “I can’t quite . . . I don’t know . . . I’m just so stunned. And I can’t stop thinking if you hadn’t shown up today she might never have told me about you.”
He nods. “I understand. I’ve had a little longer than you to take it in, but I hope .
. . For right now at least I’d like to try to set the anger aside so that we can start getting to know each other.”
I don’t answer at first, but as much as I don’t want to ruin this time with him, I don’t have the strength to pretend, and I definitely don’t want to lie. There’ve been enough lies already. “I’m not sure I can do that,” I say finally. “I mean, I want to know you more than almost anything. I’m happy to tell you about myself. But the anger? The hurt of betrayal? I don’t see those going anywhere anytime soon.”
He pushes off with one foot and the chains creak companionably. I tell myself this is really happening. I am not imagining it or making it up. This is real.
“Okay,” he says. “You first. Tell me about yourself.”
We swing in silence for a time as I try to think where to begin. How do you adequately summarize your hopes and dreams, your regrets, your favorite color, how you like your steak cooked, in one telling?
Because I actually want to know all of those things about this man whose DNA I carry and more. I need all those details, the kind I’d use to flesh out a character. Because those are the things that make us who we are, that set us apart, that make us real.
“I suck at synopses. I’d rather write a whole book than try to summarize it.” I watch his face as I make this confession, but I see no judgment on it. He does not recoil in horror. “What if we just take turns asking questions?”
“I’m good with that,” he says. “Ask away.”
“Okay.” I ask the first thing that pops into my head. “How long did it take you to get over being left at the altar?”
There’s a long silence and it occurs to me that even after forty years he might still not be over it.
He’s staring out at the Dogwood when he finally says, “Being left at the altar is a lot worse than it looks in the movies. I mean, there’s the humiliation and all that, but when you truly love that person and know in your heart that you were meant to spend the rest of your life with them?” He shrugs. “It’s pretty close to unbearable.”
“But you married somebody else.”
“I did.” There’s a world of emotion behind those two words. One of those emotions is regret.
For the briefest moment I imagine what it would feel like to marry someone who wasn’t over the person who jilted them. “Was what my mother said about your wife true?”
“Yes.” He looks me in the eye and his gaze doesn’t waver. “There was a lot of . . . turbulence . . . in our marriage and in our family.”
“So you did, I mean, you do have . . . other . . . children?”
“Yes. I have two sons.” He pulls out a photo of two guys somewhere in their mid to late thirties standing in front of a colonial-style house. Both of them have his dark hair and a similar look about them.
I have brothers. I am not the only child of a man who died too soon as I’ve always believed, but one of three.
“This is Kevin.” He points to the taller of the two. “And this is Drew. The picture was taken in front of our house in Bethesda.” He tells me where his sons went to college, where they live now, what they do for a living, but I don’t really absorb much beyond the obvious love and pride in his voice and the fact that I have two brothers who may or may not have led the kind of family life I dreamed about.
“I didn’t want to do or say anything before I knew you were okay with it, but I’d like you to know each other.”
I feel a rush of excitement that’s followed by another fire arrow of anger at all I’ve missed. I turned Bree into the sibling I never had, missed her all these years as if she really were my sister. Would we have been that close if I’d known I had flesh-and-blood siblings in the world?
He takes out another photo. “These are your grandparents. They lived in Richmond until they died two years ago. They were married for sixty-five years and they died within hours of each other.”
Two years ago. I’ve been at Fountain Bookstore on book tour numerous times and never even knew that Richmond was anything except the place where my mother was born. The rage bubbles up briefly again. It’s dampened only slightly by the regret that follows.
I look at the old photo of a white-haired man who looks like an older version of Jake, standing with his arm around the same rawboned woman Jake showed me earlier, only older and with white hair. “She looks a lot like me. Or I guess I mean I look like her.”
He hesitates again. His smile is pained. “Yes. It was that resemblance that my wife first noticed.”
“Did they . . .” I swallow around the lump in my throat. “Did your parents . . .” I can’t quite bring myself to call them my grandparents any more than I’m ready to call Jake my father. “Did they know about me?”
“No. There’s no way they could have known and not told me,” he says with certainty. “They were good friends with the Munroes right up until the day your mother stopped our wedding. Munroe is Kendra’s last name. Jameson was her mother’s maiden name. To my knowledge our parents never spoke after that day even though our mothers had known each other since childhood. If what Kendra says is true and her parents expected her to give you up, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have told my parents. It could be why they severed ties with them.”
We sit and swing, lost in thoughts of what was versus what might have been. Two half brothers and two sets of grandparents. How could my mother have deprived me of so much?
“Okay. My turn.” His voice pulls me back from the path my thoughts have taken. “What was it like growing up here?” His voice softens. “Did you have the things you needed?”
I’m so angry with my mother that I want to tell him that it was horrible. That having no family ruined my life. But even now and despite my rage I know that’s not true.
“She had to cobble together jobs to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. I always knew that, but I don’t really remember ever feeling any worse off than anyone else. Jobs were harder to get in the off-season but my mother always worked and she had lots of friends. People who lived on the beach here full-time—we all knew each other. And we were there for each other. We weren’t original families like the Creefs and Daniels and Austins and Midgetts and such here in Manteo. Or even like the first families that owned the original beach houses the guidebooks call the Unpainted Aristocracy.” Tears prick at my eyes again. “The only thing I didn’t have that I really wanted was a father.”
He draws a sharp breath, as if he’s just taken a punch, but I’m not going to apologize for answering his question.
A few moments pass before he asks, “When did you start writing?”
I let a swing or two go by while I consider the question. “I almost can’t remember a time when I didn’t. Even when my mother was reading me fairy tales I was rewriting the endings in my head. Not too long after Bree and I learned to read we wrote our first story together.” I actually smile when I remember us sitting at her grandmother’s kitchen table with our fingers wrapped around No. 2 pencils, our tongues clenched between our teeth, trying to sound out the words we’d need to tell the story of a sea sprite that couldn’t find its way back to the ocean.
He listens and nods. Then we skim along the surface for a while. I discover that his favorite color is blue while mine is red. That he likes his steak and burgers medium rare while I’m still feeling slightly guilty for eating meat at all. He has favorite football, baseball, and basketball teams while I haven’t spent more than thirty seconds thinking about football since I graduated from college.
The sun slips in the sky and the breeze grows cooler. We’re still tossing questions and answers at each other when the front door opens and Dee steps out.
“Sorry to interrupt.” She hands us each a bottled water. “But I come bearing messages.”
We screw off the caps and tilt the water to our lips and I notice how long and almost elegant Jake’s hands are. The way his Adam�
��s apple moves as he downs his first few gulps. Everything about him is new and fascinating.
I pat my pockets and remember that I left my cell phone at Brianna’s because I didn’t want to be interrupted and because I didn’t want to know when or if my mother called. We wait for Dee to continue.
“Okay, first of all, Bree said she’s making dinner and she’s expecting you both by seven. It’s six thirty right now.”
“Thank you.” I’m about to lob another question at Jake when I notice that Dee’s still standing there.
“And your mother has called three times. She just wants a quick word with you.”
My jaw tightens and I’m careful not to look at the father she kept from me. When I finally answer I keep my voice as neutral as I can because my father has asked me to let go of the anger. “I’m afraid she’ll have to wait.” It takes everything I have not to add the until hell freezes over.
Twenty-one
Kendra
I spend the rest of Saturday in my bathrobe, slumped in the old cane rocking chair on the back deck, staring out at the ocean. The wind is strong. Clouds scud across the low gray sky. Waves pound the sand in a relentless rhythm that drums itself into my head. I’m vaguely aware that I should go inside but I just sit there. Rocking.
When it gets too dark to distinguish sky from sea I go inside, but I don’t even consider getting into bed. It’s nightmarish enough replaying what happened in the daylight. I cannot risk reliving it alone in the dark.
The thing I’ve feared above all else for forty years has happened and I now know that anyone who says that the truth will set you free has never been forced to listen as someone else revealed it. If only I could have come up with a way to tell Jake and Lauren about each other without doing harm to either, none of us would be hurting right now.