After another moment, Judith promised and hung up.
Bonnie rubbed her forehead. Judith had agreed to try to broker an agreement between the sisters. That was good. Now, Carol would have to agree to a negotiation.
And that might take a miracle.
Chapter 14
Carol couldn’t recall ever having been in this neighborhood of Yorktide. It had a run-down feel that was so markedly at variance with the area surrounding Ferndean, Carol almost felt as if she must have taken a wrong turn and wound up in another county entirely.
But there was the sign for Gilbert Way, the street on which Nicola currently made her home. Carol slowed down and began to look for number 35.
Not a day of the last ten years had gone by that Carol had not thought of her daughter with longing. But Nicola probably wouldn’t believe that. Carol couldn’t blame her if she didn’t. By the time Carol had broken the habit of abusing opioids, Nicola was already in college and Carol had felt—she had believed—that it was too late to ask her daughter to return home. Nicola had her own life. Why would she suddenly want to leave it behind to reconcile with the woman who had rejected her?
It had been a mistake; Carol knew that now. She should have tried. Why hadn’t she? Fear of rejection. She knew that now, too.
Number 35. Carol parked and got out of her car. The building was poorly kept. It bothered Carol that her child was living in such an ugly and possibly unsafe place.
The front door opened. Nicola stepped out of the building. Carol felt her heart begin to race; it was an uncomfortable feeling.
Nicola was plainly dressed in chinos and a T-shirt, and her hair was pulled into a neat ponytail. It suddenly occurred to Carol that her daughter might be on her way to work and that this surprise visit might be a big inconvenience. Why hadn’t she thought of that before now?
As Nicola came down the front stairs, Carol thought she saw the image of Nicola’s father superimposed on his daughter. Alex Peters. Not Anonymous Donor. She felt almost faint.
“Nicola,” she called when her daughter had reached the sidewalk.
Nicola looked up, saw her mother, and came to a halt. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“I wanted to see you,” Carol said, walking closer. “You haven’t been answering my calls. Can we go up to your apartment?”
“No,” Nicola said firmly. “If you have to talk, we’ll go to the diner down the block. I don’t have much time. I’m due at work at ten.”
Nicola walked quickly. Carol hurried alongside. They were soon at the diner.
Inside, they were shown to a booth. They took a seat across from each other.
“You know it’s wrong to ambush someone who doesn’t want to see you,” Nicola said angrily.
Carol smiled nervously. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“It’s rude.”
“You’re right,” Carol said. “I won’t do it again.”
“Please don’t.”
The waitress, dressed in a uniform almost identical to the one Carol had worn in her waitressing days back in the 1970s, arrived to take their orders.
“A cup of coffee,” Carol said.
“A cup of decaf.”
“When did we last see one another?” Carol asked when the waitress had gone off.
Nicola shook her head. “Don’t you remember?”
“Of course, I do. Asking was a conversation opener.” And not a very good one, Carol thought. She cast around for something else to say and found that her mind was suddenly blank.
And Nicola, it was clear, was not going to make this any easier.
Finally, Carol cleared her throat. “I know you must be wondering why I came back to Yorktide,” she began. “The truth is I came back for you. And for Bonnie.”
“Don’t you mean you came back for Ferndean?” Nicola snapped.
“Well, that too, but primarily for my family. I miss you.”
Nicola leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. “If you expect me to believe that, you must think I’m pretty stupid.”
“No,” Carol protested. “I don’t think anything of the kind. I—”
“That summer I refused to visit you in New York,” Nicola said, “you didn’t even try to argue with me. Why?”
Carol folded her hands in her lap. “You were eighteen,” she said. “Legally an adult. You had the right to make your own decisions.” She lowered her voice. “Look, why are you suddenly so angry with me? What have I done to deserve this . . . this mood of aggressive dislike.”
“It’s not sudden,” Nicola snapped. “And it’s not aggressive. It’s . . . Never mind.”
“Is it to do with my not coming back for Ken’s funeral?” Carol asked.
“I said, never mind.” Nicola shook her head. “No, wait. I do have something to say. I am angry with you. You showed no respect for me, for your sister, or for my uncle, the only father figure I’d ever known. You could have come to Yorktide when you got back from India, but you didn’t even do that. You left us to mourn on our own.”
Carol took a breath. “I thought that was what you needed,” she said carefully, “to be left on your own, you and Bonnie, with your grief.”
That was not strictly true.
“Well, it wasn’t what we needed,” Nicola snapped. “But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
Nicola slid out of the booth. Carol reached for her wallet, but Nicola tossed two dollar bills onto the table. “I can pay for my own coffee,” she said. “I’ve got to get to work. Don’t come to my home again.”
Nicola stalked off.
Shaken, Carol made her way back to Ferndean.
* * *
Marcus and Rosemary Ascher’s wedding portrait hung where it had for as long as Carol could remember. She stood looking at it now, for the thousandth time in her life.
The wedding had taken place in 1848, just eight years after Queen Victoria had married Albert, and Rosemary had followed the fashion set by Victoria for wearing a white wedding dress. On her head was a half crown of flowers—Carol wondered if they were orange blossoms, like the ones Victoria had worn—and a long lace veil. The bride’s waist was impossibly tiny.
Ferndean House had been built as a gesture of love, a gift from husband to wife. A grand gesture, if not exactly a perfect one.
Carol turned from the portrait and sank onto one of the ancient couches. A spring poked into her behind. She moved a few inches to the right. There was a strange depression in the cushion. Carol didn’t bother to move again.
Love. She had been in love only once in her life and it had not ended well.
In her late thirties, Carol had met a man named Martin Gehrig. She had fallen hard. It was magical. But after almost a year together Martin left her. It had come as a shock to Carol. He said she was too self-centered to love him in the way he needed to be loved. He was right.
Carol had always known she was a person for whom intimate attachment wasn’t a high priority. She had always been the one to end her casual affairs before the man could get needy and annoying. Even as a child she had been more concerned with being admired than liked, envied than appreciated. Still, Carol had been crushed. Her ego was shaken, her heart was broken, her entire sense of who she was in the world was rattled.
Martin married less than six months after the breakup.
Mourning the loss of her relationship, Carol hit upon the idea of having a baby. It would be the perfect way to show Martin that she was not an entirely self-centered person. And it was perfectly normal for a woman to want a child. Her biological clock was ticking. No one would question her motives. There was, however, the problem of a father.
The answer to that sticky question was Alex Peters.
Carol and Alex had met several years before when he hired her to design and furnish his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Before long, it was clear that Alex was in love with Carol. But Alex was content to be what Carol wanted him to be—a friend and nothing
more. He was chivalrous, a gentleman. He was handsome, intelligent, kind, and cultured. He tolerated Carol’s selfish desires. He was happy to be in her life.
Yes, Alex Peters would make the perfect father. As long as he agreed to create the child via IVF and to absent himself from that point on. Carol did not want to marry Alex, nor did she want to raise the child with him. She did not understand the enormity of what she was asking from her friend. But she asked anyway.
Alex agreed. He did, however, request that he be sent regular updates on the child’s progress. He would soon be gone from New York. He had just been chosen to head up his company’s Buenos Aires headquarters.
Lawyers hammered out the agreement. About a year later, a baby was born.
Carol was not a terribly sentimental person, but she did have enough of a sense of gratitude to name the child after two members of Alex’s family, his grandfather Nikolas and his grandmother Kateryna. Hence Nicola Kathryn Ascher.
Over the years, Carol had occasionally felt a pang of guilt when she thought of how she had used Alex’s devotion against him. But what was done was done. It was too late to change course. She convinced herself of this.
Suddenly, Carol got up from the couch and walked over to the wedding portrait of her ancestors. It was time for a change. It was time the photograph came down. Carol reached up to lift the frame from its hook, but the look in Rosemary’s eyes stopped her cold. She had not known Rosemary Ascher, of course, but family legend had it that she was as formidable in character as she was lovely in appearance.
All right. The photograph of the lovers would stay. And no matter what, Carol would not leave Yorktide without winning back her daughter, if not her sister.
Rosemary seemed to approve.
Chapter 15
Carol Ascher claimed to have come back to Yorktide for her family. What a joke!
Nicola kicked off her sneakers and let her hair out of its elastic. She was tired. Work had been more challenging than usual. And all day her mother’s surprise visit had preyed on her mind. How dare her mother ambush her!
Still, Nicola was glad she had had the opportunity to tell her mother how angry she was that Carol hadn’t moved heaven and earth to be at Ken’s funeral. Carol’s failure to support her family at that traumatic moment was one more bit of evidence to prove her fundamentally self-centered character.
Unlike Bonnie and Ken. They were the two most unselfish and loving people Nicola had ever known. Not that coming to live with them ten years ago had been smooth sailing right away.
At first, Nicola had kept in frantic contact with her friends from school; she called them friends because that was easier than trying to figure out just what they really meant to her. But after only two weeks, they told her they were bored with her complaints about how deadly dull life was in Yorktide. Allie said, “So just leave. Come back to New York. You’re not a prisoner.” Ben said, “If it’s so boring, make trouble.” After another few weeks Caitlyn stopped replying and the other two blocked her texts. By the time Nicola’s birthday rolled around that November, Ben, Allie, and Caitlyn were entirely absent.
By then, Nicola had realized that a few kids at her new school were okay. She was enjoying most of her classes. Christmas in Yorktide and the neighboring towns was like something out of a picture book, even better than Christmas in Manhattan, and that was saying something. By the turn of the new year, Nicola was being greeted in town as if she had been born in Yorktide. She knew most of the people she met by sight if not by name.
Time passed. Aunt Bonnie was kind. Uncle Ken was funny. She got along with her cousin, Julie, and Julie’s husband, Scott. Sophie, five, was cute. Nicola made friends, loved living near the beach, and was finally able to have a dog, something her mother had never allowed. Uncle Ken took her to the local animal shelter, where Nicola had picked out a three-year-old mixed breed with a damaged ear. No one knew his name; Nicola called him Lucky. Like her, he had accidentally found a home in which he was happy.
Nicola graduated high school with better grades than she had ever gotten back in New York, and went on to the University of Southern Maine. After that she earned a master’s in gerontological social work and took a position at the local nursing home. Lucky eventually died and Nicola had yet to adopt another dog. For a long time, she felt the pain of his loss too greatly. One day, when she had a real home of her own, she would adopt another neglected pup, maybe two.
Carol had come to visit a few times that first year. Visit number one was a disaster; Nicola was still furious with her mother for abandoning her.
The second visit was marginally less fraught.
By her mother’s third visit, Nicola felt perfectly in charge of her emotions. But she was not sorry to see her mother drive away after two days.
Nicola padded into the miniscule kitchen and opened the fridge. There wasn’t much to eat; there never was. She closed the door. She wasn’t hungry anyway. Her mother had taken away her appetite.
Suddenly, alone in her awful little apartment, Nicola began to sob. Carol Ascher should have been at the funeral of the only father figure Nicola had ever known.
Nicola had needed her.
Chapter 16
Julie sighed and rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. She had sworn to herself that she would work on the mess that was her office that morning. But she had failed to keep that promise. She had failed even to attempt to keep that promise. If a person could be so disloyal to her own self, how could she possibly be of service to anyone else?
It was almost noon. Another morning down, another afternoon to go. And after that, she could go back to bed without guilt. Without too much guilt.
Now she stood in the kitchen, unsure of what to do next. Assuming she had the energy to do anything. Vaguely, Julie noted that the pan in which she had roasted a chicken two days earlier was still soaking in the sink. Maybe she would get to it later. Along with the watering of the three small plants on the windowsill. One was almost dead. But maybe it could be revived. If she got around to watering it. There was always so much to accomplish. Sometimes lately Julie wondered how she had ever managed to do all that she had done and to do it so well before . . . Before Scott had had the affair.
But she had been different then.
Suddenly, Sophie came loping into the room and stopped short when she saw her mother. “Oh,” she said. “You’re here.”
Where else would I be, Julie thought. This is my home. At least, it had been her home. Now, it felt alien. Or maybe she was the alien. The one who had been denied the respect she had been promised so solemnly before God and man.
Sophie went to the fridge, opened the door, and stared into its depths. Julie wondered when the fridge had last been cleaned. Did it matter?
“Have you spoken to your father today?” she asked.
“No.”
“Sophie—”
Her daughter slammed shut the door of the fridge and whirled around to face Julie. “What?” she demanded. “I hate what he did to me. What am I supposed to say to him? Am I supposed to pretend nothing happened when my entire life has been ruined because he acted like a jerk?”
My entire life has been ruined. Julie didn’t want pity from her child, but she did want at least an acknowledgment that she had been hurt and betrayed. But maybe Sophie was just reacting like a normal self-centered teen to an event that had rattled the status quo. Or maybe she was proving to be more like her father than otherwise. A self-centered person from start to finish. Julie literally shivered at the unworthy thought.
“You need to forgive your father,” she said firmly.
Sophie shrugged. “Why? You don’t forgive him.”
“I do.” Julie was aware that she was lying.
Sophie laughed bitterly. “That’s what you say, but you don’t mean it. You don’t even talk to him. You just . . . Why don’t you just scream at him or something?”
Julie flinched. Why was she incapable of hiding her despair? Why did she have to be ob
served, judged, despised for her weakness? Was she in fact courting the observation, hoping for pity? These were questions the answers to which she was not prepared to explore.
“Forgiveness,” she said woodenly, “is the key to healing.”
Sophie rolled her eyes. “Where did you read that? In a fortune cookie?”
“Has your father tried to talk to you about what happened?” Julie asked, ignoring her daughter’s smart remark. “Has he told you his side of the story?”
“Why do you want to know?” Sophie asked with a frown. “You’re trying to turn me against Dad, aren’t you?”
“He’s the guilty one,” Julie snapped, “not me! He’s the one you said ruined your life.”
“I know what Dad did was wrong! You don’t have to keep reminding me.”
“Sorry.” Was she sorry? “I just meant that maybe he . . .”
“I’m out of here.”
There was no point in trying to stop Sophie from leaving. Julie realized that nothing she could say or do would help her daughter at that moment.
The front door slammed. Julie jumped.
How had it come to pass that her life seemed all about people walking away?
The memory of a slamming door.
Days had gone by after Julie had told her mother about Scott’s affair and still she hadn’t said a word to Sophie.
Then, one afternoon when Julie was alone in the kitchen, the front door had slammed.
A moment later Sophie had come stomping into the kitchen and tossed her backpack onto the table. Her face was flushed.
“I know what’s been going on,” she declared loudly. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to hear about my father’s affair at school?”
Julie felt herself blush. “Nothing is—I mean, there’s nothing—”
“Don’t lie to me, Mom. Dad’s been sleeping on the couch.”
“I didn’t ask him to.” It was a stupid response.
“It doesn’t matter. And there have been other signs. Like you two are hardly talking, and you didn’t watch This Is Us together the other night. Did you really think I didn’t know something was wrong?” Sophie put her hands to her head and groaned. “I was so stupid not to have figured out what it was! I thought you had just had a fight. But an affair? I can’t believe bitchy Cora Brunner had to tell me my own father was sleeping with the town whore!”
All Our Summers Page 6