All That's True

by Jackie Lee Miles

  After we finish riding horses, my mother and I are in her cabin and get into a major battle. It starts when she tells me she is disappointed in my behavior and has decided no matter what my father’s decision is that I am to be grounded for the rest of the summer. This flips me out. There are some really cool things I planned on doing. Like taking a canoe trip down the Chattahoochee with Bridget and her church group and maybe hanging out at this new teen center that just opened.

  But my mother insists I will not see the light of day. There are to be no exceptions. This gets me upset. Can’t a teenager make a mistake?

  “It’s not fair!” I say. “We were wrong, and we drank stuff we shouldn’t have, but we got sick and we’ve been punished enough and you should understand. You were young once too, right?” I think I am making a great deal of sense. Does my mother think so? Absolutely not. She says, “Andi, this hurts me more than it does you.”

  That is absolutely it. I’ve heard that before and it is a bunch of crap. I tell her that she is a total loser.

  “A loser!” I yell. My voice cracks when I want more than anything to sound fearless.

  “Andréa, you are to go to your room right now,” my mother says and her eyes are darts and I am the bull’s-eye.

  “No!” I say. “I know I’ve disappointed you. I was stupid, but grounding me for the rest of the summer isn’t the answer!”

  “Andi, I know what’s best for you,” she says.

  “You do not!” I say. “You don’t even know what’s best for yourself.” I’m in very deep water here, but I can’t seem to get out of the boat.

  “Excuse me?” my mother says and puts one hand on her hip.

  I keep blubbering on. “You don’t know anything. You’re stupid.” I’ve lost all control. “You won’t even face the fact that your husband is screwing Donna!”

  I can’t believe I just said that. My mother drops on the bed like a torpedo hit her in the heart.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  We spend the next day at the pool on the ship. The sun and sand and wind have done their job. My body’s limp as a rubber band. My head hits the pillow and I’m about to drift off when I hear my mother on the telephone. At first I’m thinking she’s calling room service and then I hear by the tone of her voice it’s not an ordinary call. “Andréa,” she calls over her shoulder. “It’s your father.”

  My mother has probably called my father and told him that I’ve told her about Donna and my stomach detaches itself from my intestines. My mother is standing in the door way between our rooms and holding the phone out to me.

  “He needs to talk to you,” she says. I walk over and take the handset out of her hands and swing my hair away from my face.

  “Hi,” I say weakly, then, decide I better tell him what I’ve done, so he doesn’t think I’d try to keep it from him. “I’m sorry,” I say, “I told mom about Donna, when I was all upset and now I can’t take it back.” There is dead silence on the line. “But I want to!” I add.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” my father says. “I thought we had an agreement.”

  “Well, we did, but then—”

  “Listen to me Andi,” he says, interrupting me. I’m going to get the lecture of my life. “I’m not concerned about that right now.” I’m thinking how can he not be?

  “Something’s happened and you and your mother need to fly home. The ship will be in Labadee by morning. I’ve made your travel arrangements. A jeep will meet you at the dock. From there you’ll take a helicopter to Santo Domingo. You’ll fly back to the States from there.”

  “What?” I don’t understand. Why are we cutting our trip short? That’s when I notice my mother is crying and I’m freaking out thinking something’s happened to Beth and sure I’ve never always liked her, but lately she’s been turning into a regular person you can do things with and it’d be just my luck that I never get a chance to make up for all my bad thoughts about her.

  “Is it Beth?” I say, and my voice breaks down completely.

  “No, no, no,” my father says. “Beth is fine. She’s here with me now.”

  “Then what—” I’m trying to imagine why he’d be phoning ship-to-shore and insisting we have to leave our cruise and fly home.

  “It’s Henry,” my father says. “He’s had a heart attack.”

  “But he’s okay, right?” I say. There is a long silence that gives me the answer. “Daddy?” I say, feeling like I’m five years old again. I love Henry like you’d love a grandfather. “He’s okay and he’s just asking for us, right?”

  “I’m sorry, Andi,” my father says. “Rosa found him in the garden. He’s gone.”

  I drop the phone and look over at my mother. She reaches for me, but my knees collapse and I plop onto the floor before she can grab me. Henry, dear sweet Henry, who always does something nice before you even ask him to, is gone.

  ***

  Vivian and I are having a heart to heart. She’s convinced I need one and I just love her so much that whatever she says is okay with me. She’s sitting next to me on the long narrow couch they put in all of the suites and has her arm around me.

  “Andi,” she says, “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

  She kisses the top of my head. I start blubbering. I tell her I’ve destroyed my mother’s entire world.

  “I told her what my father is doing with Donna.”

  “I know,” she says, which doesn’t surprise me. She and my mother are closer than lint on a sweater.

  “Andi,” she says, “you haven’t spilled any beans. Your mother knew all along what your father was up to with Donna.”

  “Of course she did. She found my notes!” I bury my face in my hands. I’m so ashamed that Vivian will now know I was destroying my mother’s world when all I really wanted to do was help her hit her bottom, like the AA book said was necessary in order for a person to recover.

  “Silly girl,” Vivian says. “Your mother knew you wrote those notes. You used Beth’s stationery that I give her every year for her birthday. Your mother recognized it immediately.”

  “She did?”

  Vivian squeezes my shoulder and nods.

  “But she had to know what I was writing was true.”

  “She already knew, Andi. She was just very concerned that you knew and wondering how that could be. How did you know?”

  Vivian peers into my eyes like the answers are resting in my pupils. I look away. I’m not going there. I shrug my shoulders and shake my head. Maybe she’ll think I just had a hunch.

  “Why didn’t she say something to me? And why didn’t she confront my father if she already knew? She never said anything to him that I know of.” I stop and sniff and wait for her answer.

  Vivian takes her hands and smoothes the sides of my hair. “If your mother had confronted your father he would have had to make a choice.”

  “So?”

  “Your mother was afraid he wouldn’t choose her. She still is. That’s why she doesn’t want him to know that she knows.”

  I’m getting dragged into some very grown-up stuff here. Now I really start sobbing. In addition to Henry being dead, I’ve already told my father I told my mother. So he knows that my mother knows, but my mother just doesn’t know that he knows. What a mess. I need to tell Vivian. Somehow I know she’ll make this all better; about Henry, too. There’s just something about Vivian. When you’re feeling down she can just smile at you and lift you up. It must have something to do with her spirit; it’s so gentle and honest.

  “I told my dad!” I say. “He knows I told my mother!” Now I’m wailing. Half of it’s still about Henry. I feel awful, like my body’s been hit by a baseball bat and is black and blue all over.

  “Oh Andi,” she says. She turns me around and wipes my tears with a tissue. “You poor little darlin’—what a weight to carry.”

  “And now what can I do?” I say, choking on my hiccups. “I’ve already told him.”

  “You do nothing,” she says. “Now it�
��s your mother’s turn to step up to bat. It’s as simple as that.”

  It doesn’t sound so simple to me. Our lives are at stake.

  “All games eventually need to be played to the end, Andi.” She sits me up straight on the sofa and tucks her hand under my chin. “Winner take all.”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  I don’t know what’s going on with my mother and father. They’re being very kind to each other. We’re on our way to Henry’s funeral. Beth is wearing her little black dress that she used to say everyone should have. Now I know why. I don’t have a black dress. My mother says I should wear my navy blue one that has little squares on it. I hate that dress, but I’m too sad to argue.

  My father drives us over to the funeral home, Evans and Matthews. It’s an enormous older house that has many sections to it. It’s quite beautiful and looks like a house that an old couple might still live in. The house has black shutters on all the windows and little flower boxes below each one. It doesn’t look like the kind of place that would have dead bodies in every room. Whenever I see this house, I picture an old woman pouring iced tea on the front porch and saying, “More, my dear?”

  But this is the house where they have Henry and he’s not having any tea, that’s for sure. They have him in the third room on the left with a little sign with his name out front. Henry Lewis. I run my hands over his name, wishing I could erase it. I don’t want it posted here. I’d rather see it someplace else, like maybe in the newspaper for doing some kind deed, which would be just like him, or maybe in a garden book showing off his herb garden with Rosa standing right by his side smiling. I think of all the things Henry could still be doing and something grabs hold of my chest and won’t let me breathe. I swallow hard and take my father’s hand. He pats my shoulder and says it will be alright. Henry’s in a better place, he says. That’s a stupid thing to say. He’s in a box. I just nod my head and squeeze my eyes shut and try to stop the tears.

  It’s a pretty nice box they have him in—I’ll give Evans and Matthews that. It’s lined in satin the color of cotton and Henry is dressed in the gray suit he always wore on Sunday when he drove us to church. He’d park the car and then come sit beside us. He’s not Catholic but he never let that stop him. He’d lean down on the kneeler and wink at me. My mother loved having Henry join us. She thought she’d converted him. But in truth Henry was a Baptist. He said he stopped going to that church when he found out a bunch of them were hypocrites.

  “How did you know?” I asked him.

  He said it was written on their other face.

  “Their other face?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The ones I ran into had two of them, one for church and one for the world.”

  I guess he thought the Catholics don’t—have two faces that is—but if you ask me, they have too many opinions.

  So now I’m staring at Henry and his face is frozen in place and I’m wondering why they call this a wake. Then I remember reading that centuries ago people were often buried alive and no one knew except when the graves were unearthed for some reason and they saw the claw marks, so the English—I believe it was the English—starting having viewings where they stayed up all night long and viewed the body to see if it would wake. And I’m standing here and picturing Henry sitting up and saying, “Hi Andi, why did they embalm me?” And I burst out laughing and I cannot stop laughing. I keep hearing Henry saying, “Andi? Andi? What’s going on here?” My mother is about to faint. She has her hand on her neck and is taking deep breaths and my father has his arm around me and is saying, “Andi, stop it! What’s wrong?”

  Everything’s wrong. Henry’s dead. My father’s having an affair with Donna. My mother knows. I lost the love of my life before I had a chance to have him as the love of my life, and I’m just feeling all-around miserable. And he asks what’s wrong.

  ***

  My father is moving out. His suitcases are already packed. They’re in the front hallway. I’d love to go and just dump everything that’s in them out on the floor. Throw a tantrum. Instead, I sit in the library, doing nothing. When I peek around the corner I notice my father is coming my way. I go back and sit down. He enters the room and scratches the back of his head, like maybe he’s more at a loss as to what to say than I am.

  “Andi,” he says. He takes a seat next to me on the leather sofa. I’ve always loved this room. Now it will never be one of my favorite places again. I’ll always remember it as the room my father sat in before he left us. That makes me cry. He puts his arm around me.

  “Andi,” he says again. “Your mother and I have decided this is for the best.”

  “Best for who?” I ask. My father hands me his handkerchief. Of course it smells of Herrera for Men which makes me cry all the harder.

  “It’s complicated, Andi,” my father explains. “Your mother and I need some time away from each other to think things through. But I’m not leaving you. I’ll be available whenever you want to see me.”

  “So, you’re leaving Mom,” I say. “Just like that, after all these years. Just break up our family. Throw everything away.” I blow my nose into his handkerchief and hand it back to him. My father takes it and looks at it and then looks at me, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s usually never speechless, but he is right now. He must really be upset, too. He stuffs the handkerchief into his back pocket, which isn’t something he would normally do. He’d drop it on the floor and let Rosa tend to it. Already he’s acting like he doesn’t live here.

  “You’re getting a divorce,” I say. I want it to be a question but it comes out like a statement.

  “That’s—that’s one of the things we’ll need to discuss, your mother and I.” He puts his arm around my shoulder. “When you’re older, Andi, you’ll understand that these things happen. People grow apart.”

  He takes hold of both my shoulders and turns me around to face him. “Right now, I’m more worried about you. Your mother told me you stayed out all night on the ship. Andi, do you have any idea what could have happened to you?”

  “But nothing did,” I say. “We just drank all this stuff and got sick and then just passed out and when we woke up we got out of there. They didn’t even know we were gone. They were worse off than we were.”

  “I want you to make better choices in the future,” he says. “We can’t be there for you every waking moment. We can’t lock you in your room. We want to have faith in you, to know that you’ll be okay.”

  I’d like him to make better choices, too. I’d like him to stop seeing Donna and stay home where he belongs. But I nod my head like a good daughter and tell him I will make better choices. I’ve learned my lesson.

  “Are you ever coming back, Daddy?”

  “I don’t know, Andi. That’s why I’m going away—to find out.”

  My father leans over and kisses me on the cheek and pats my head. “Take care of your mother, okay? She’s going to need you right now. She’s not feeling well at all.”

  Right, like he could care.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Bridget’s back. She and Vivian weren’t happy to see us leave the cruise ship, but they managed to have a pretty good time regardless.

  “The Parade of Chefs the last night was so cool,” Bridget says. “They marched around the dining room waving hankies and the music was loud enough to blow the roof off.”

  She also got to feed the stingrays and windsurf in Labadee. And there was a beach party they went to on the north coast of Haiti.

  “It was at Dragon’s Breath Point,” Bridget explains, “where all the pirates used to hide out. These guys cooked our food right in a pit on the beach.”

  We’re in my bedroom playing Clue. I move my token into the library and then move Mr. Green and the rope in with me. “I say the crime was committed in the library by Mr. Green with the rope,” I say, convinced I’m right. Bridget immediately produces Mr. Green’s card and disproves my theory. She’s won the last three times. It takes a good memory to win this game an
d the only thing my memory is good for lately is remembering my father has left my mother and I’m miserable.

  Tonight we’re going over to visit Amy and Jeffrey and baby Joshua. I’m really looking forward to that. The only thing is—my father won’t be going with us. He’s leased a furnished condominium near Lenox Mall. It’s on the twentieth floor and has a view of the Atlanta skyline. All of the furniture is sleek and modern. It looks exactly like what a rich bachelor would have. It’s really beautiful and I hate it. The furniture is stainless steel and black with chocolate-brown and white throw pillows. And there’s large vases of fresh flowers in the entryway, which has an enormous mirror over a credenza with a sculpture of a horse resting on top. Double doors lead to the corridor outside his unit, where there are two elevators side-by-side that remind me of the ones they have in fancy hotels. And there’s an elaborate sign outside the building that says, The Landing at Peachtree.

  My father’s three thousand square foot unit has three bedrooms. If he’s just going away for a while to think, why did he take such a big place? Exactly. He’s going to divorce my mother and is too much of a coward to tell me. Sometimes when I look at him now I want to stick pins in his face, but mostly I just want to throw my arms around his neck and beg him to come home for good.

  Bridget taps my knee. I stop daydreaming and go back to the game. “I say Colonel Mustard did it in the kitchen with the knife,” she says. I have nothing in my hand to prove otherwise. Bridget checks the envelope and sure enough it’s Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the knife. I don’t know how she does it.

  “You win,” I say. “I’ve had enough. How about you? Want to get something to snack on?”

  She nods her head and collects the game board pieces. I gather the cards and the board and put them back in the box and slide it under my bed. We head to the kitchen. Rosa is there making chicken enchiladas. My mouth starts to water. If it were possible I’d eat the air. It smells that good.