Monday's Lie (7 page)

Whatever final terms my mother put on the table when she learned of their relationship, Paul chose them over Marie, who, of course, never forgave my mother. Marie remarried within a year after a whirlwind romance, then relocated to the West Coast with her new husband, who was little more than a stranger to her, and died with him at her side behind the wheel in a drunken confrontation with a hundred-year-old oak tree without ever reconciling with her sister or her son.

With Paul, after Marie left, my mother's methods became both harder and more gentle. She teased him less, but thanked him more. The field had leveled in some way that made them more colleagues than what they had been before—more allies afterward than the conductor with his first-chair musician. For the rest of her life, Paul asked instead of ordered, and my mother briefed him in lieu of what had always been dutiful reporting.

When the call came in of Marie's accident, my mother laid her head on her crossed arms atop her desk. She was there, motionless and silent, for so long that Simon and I, knowing somehow not to ask her yet what had happened, slipped from the room in perplexed unease.

She was still there more than an hour later when I peeked in. I felt her awake in the room and tested the air for an invitation to talk, but there was none.

I busied myself in the kitchen, thawing out leftover soup and making grilled cheese for our supper. Simon and I were done eating when she finally came in. She had showered and dressed in pajamas. We never saw her that way except on the occasional lazy Sunday morning and Christmas.

She opened a bottle of wine and poured a half glass and, much to my teenaged surprise, set it front of me. Then she poured another, smaller serving for Simon, and another glass that she drank deeply from and topped off immediately.

I will tell you this, my darlings, the very worst regrets are the things you couldn't have handled any other way.

A
fter
graduation and our wedding, we had a quick year's lease in an argument-size apartment. Then Patrick and I bought a sweet whitewash-over-brick bungalow in a transitional tract of houses at the cheaper end of the trendy part of town. In that stretch of road you could get away with being anything you cared to be. American dream as-you-like-it, custom-tailored and eclectic. And all judgments were kept on the down-low, behind closed doors. We were all friendly on the street side of our thresholds.

Our neighbors on the left, one yard closer to the artsy West End bustle, were a middle-aged couple too gorgeous and sophisticated not to have been invented by a screenwriter. He drove an electric car. She bicycled everywhere she couldn't walk. They harvested rain in an artisanal-crafted barrel with a tree-of-life motif carved into its side. They watered their lawn from its bounty, and if we'd had enough weather and the barrel was full, they washed, too, their oversize roller skate with air bags and bucket seats. With sulfate-free soap, of course.

On the right we had a harried young couple with a cocker spaniel, a fat, smiling, squealing toddler, and another baby on the way. Down the street, one of the houses was painted purple. Across from the purple house was a gay couple, who played the best music. They ran it through their elaborate patio speakers loud enough that they might have drawn complaints if they hadn't been so talented with their mixes. Every sunny day was brighter for their ear, and rain was scored with the perfect melancholy.

Patrick and I set about being average until we decided which way to play it. We got settled in, assigned our sides of the bed, and got used to the background noise of the other. We were home. Patrick worked long hours, angling for a quick rise to account manager in the country's third-largest peddler of GPS technology. He pulled in nice bonuses and we spent them. Fun funds, we called it. I put bits of my good education to use in a midlevel position with a burgeoning firm that developed diet and fitness-management software. The bills were paid and we spent as we liked, sparing little thought to, and less action on, staking down what we already had.

“Want to go play house?” Patrick had said to me just after nudging the wedding band over my finger, smiling down at me. The minister had laughed. Everyone did. It sounded like a sitcom. The black lapels of his tuxedo lay smooth and crisp on his chest. He looked good. Very good. He'd rehearsed the line in the mirror. I could just imagine him doing it. He looked that day exactly as he'd decided a groom should look. The canned line was inorganic and scripted, but it was sweet, too. And it stuck.

Want to go play house?
worked on many levels. It could be mumbled into the other's ear with an
ugh
plugged in up front as the signal to start making our way toward the door of an event that had lost its shine. On the phone, matter-of-factly, it was Friday afternoon's sign-off to the workweek. If it was said sadly with a sigh, we'd pack our swimsuits and shorts back into our suitcases and leave the beach for the real world.

Purred into the ear, it was surprising how sexy
W
anna go play house?
could sound. A silvery feather, warm breath and warm intent, would swirl a contrasting chill down my neck when Patrick would put the question on my skin. How could I say no? I always wanted to play house. I wanted that feather to tickle my mind quiet, only the sound of lips and sighs in the half-light, and murmurs of concentration completely divorced from thought.

But one day, it was a Saturday and raining, Patrick leaned in with a soft, intentioned mouth to give us something to do while we waited out the storm. He put his lips on the sweet spot at the turn of my jaw said, “Want to play house? I'll be the daddy, you be the mommy.” I smirked into his kiss and found the tip of his tongue with mine. I didn't answer him but my pulse banged in my ears.

Afterward, I pretended to doze while Patrick actually did.

The next day, we were at my mother's. Patrick was cleaning her gutters. I was with her in the kitchen, layering berries over sponge cake in a trifle bowl.

“Hey.” I waited until she was turned away, busied at the far counter. “Did you always want to have kids?”

I heard her turn toward me, knowing that I looked too intent on getting the berries stacked in at just the right depth. “Is that where the talk is going these days?”

A quick, one-shouldered shrug let me keep working.

“Well, I don't exactly know how to answer that. I wanted to have you, if that's what you mean. You were planned down to the last detail. I had even decided that I'd be swinging with you, whoever you were, in the hammock in July.”

My birthday is July 19th.

My mother laughed. “I think I practically willed you into existence. Honestly, I don't even know how much Jonas had to do with it. You were made of pure design and insistence. Simon, on the other hand, was a complete surprise. And with absolutely terrible timing. But what an adventure he turned out to be, yeah?”

“But you always knew you would have kids,” I said, instead of asking.

“I wouldn't say that, no. What's bothering you, Pluck?”

“Nothing.”

“Dee, are you and Patrick thinking about having a baby?”

“Of course.”

“I'll tell you this, baby girl.
Of course
is the worst reason ever to have a baby. Better it be an accident then
of course
.”

•  •  •

For the longest time, nothing unusual or subtly sinister happened, and I found it much easier to enjoy my mother's mysterious aura when I was well beyond its everyday reach. We grew close, she hemmed in as always by intrigue, and I in begonias and boxwood hedges, but we talked easily over our self-imposed fences.

A late-summer morning (it was a Sunday) in the month before Patrick's and my sixth wedding anniversary, the phone rang as I was settling in with a crossword puzzle and a plate of fruit and sweet rolls. Patrick had left at dawn, much more serious about god-awful plaid pants and eighteen holes in the ground than he was about sleeping in late on the weekends.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Plucky. Do you have some time for me this morning?”

“Absolutely. When were you thinking of coming over?” Most of our visits went down on my turf, which was just the way I liked it.

“As it just happens, I'm in your driveway right now.”

I laughed and let her in. I didn't laugh again for a long time. My mother had cancer chewing through her bones and drawing black scrawls over her lungs and liver. The doctors had set the line at a year, at the most. My mother had reset the line at whenever she felt her dignity slipping. She wanted me to be sure of her intent along with the news.

I begged instantly, and somewhat to my own surprise (and she relented far more easily than I expected), for her to sell her house and move in with us. We tended each other on the way to the end. I made sure she had no chores, no to-do lists. She retold me every story she'd ever shared. We redid the life we'd already had, with the same parameters except that I brought her food instead of the other way around. Once more, for old times' sake, we traced over our steps, to put the memory of us closer to the front of the file. We rewound and fast-forwarded—mother and daughter, tale-teller and audience, teacher and student. And we included Patrick, almost always, brokenhearted and brave in the face of it as he tried to be.

She lasted eight months, four days. I held her dry, three-fingered hand in both of mine as she slipped away.

Friday

I
'm
watching the road, but I'm driving on autopilot. It's a bit crowded in my head just now. But it's not as if Patrick and my mother have never been juxtaposed in my thoughts before. They've sprung to mind at crossed purposes from the beginning, and in no small part by my own design. I loved my mother and I loved Patrick and both of them the better because they were as unalike as two people could be.

It turns out, though, that the joke is on me. The only thing they had in common was cause to hide in plain sight. It's been quite a lesson. Now I realize that everything you need for measuring a person can be found in the nature of what he chooses to hide from everyone else. That's all you need to know to gauge his goodness.

My mother's secrets were a professional necessity, kept close and tightly so, to let her work with any hope of success. But the secrets were also to safeguard our life together as separate and protected from her work.

My husband's secrets, or the biggest one anyway, is still ahead of me, just a few miles down the road.

•  •  •

Patrick had courted us both, my mother and me. It sounds awful—even perhaps perverse. But it was neither of those things, because I would only ever have had the choice between two kinds of people: those who wouldn't understand my mother and would be fine with that, and those who wouldn't understand her but would be helpless to resist trying. Patrick and I snuggled together in second category. All my favorite people were there.

She was a wonderful barometer. You could test the climate of a stranger just by his or her reaction to Annette Vess. She knew this, but somehow didn't mind being a tool for us to use. If her essential solitude was a curse, it didn't look like one. That was the hurdle I never managed to vault—it made me sad that her isolation didn't make
her
sad. That bit of tail-chasing irritated my brother, but Patrick alone seemed to understand the fragility of the anchor line that kept her from drifting away from me, from all of us. I loved him for loving her, and it certainly felt safer to adore my mother by proxy.

He chased the attention of those flashing black eyes and the reward of her laughter, the inherent approval of her casual conversation. I could hardly pretend I didn't understand that. She always checked my reaction to his incandescent performances with a steady, piercing look over a closed-lip smile, to see if I was okay with it. I always was. I didn't feel jealous of his efforts. His wit and charm bloomed in his bids to impress her. It was sweet, if a little manic, and Patrick was never better than when he was playing sweet. He was the very picture of all it should look like. I was proud that I drew out his calm, his
normal
, despite my upbringing. Without her, our regular days were long, but pleasant, a bustle of manageable to-do that faded into a routine of cuddle, drowse, and then deep, undisturbed sleep.

And if there was ever lightning and thunder in the dark, I'd pull his arm over me to pin me to my place and remind me that I need not venture out into it.

•  •  •

As much as he admired my mother, Patrick never understood what she'd done for Simon and me by all that she'd done
to
us with her games and with her outlook on life. He resented our oddness without the rest of the equation. He felt left out even though he knew the stories of origin. By the transitive property, he shouldn't have liked her since he didn't like her handiwork, but somehow he stubbornly never did that math. He wanted what he wanted of it, and to hell with the rest.

The first Tuesday of each month, Patrick had a standing work meeting downtown, which we'd steered into the habit of meeting for a monthly date night on restaurant row. One Tuesday I remember, I didn't recognize Patrick as I walked toward him. He sat at the table under the awning, two-thirds turned away from me, watching the course of people and traffic on Derby Street. I saw that it was him, of course. There were no surprises left in the way we looked to each other. I knew his face from every angle, the tilt of his shoulders, the certain blend of browns that made it only Patrick's hair. But I didn't recognize him.

Every now and again, I'd turn a corner—in my office, in my neighborhood, in the grocery store, or even sometimes in the mirror—and find myself pitched into the exact opposite of déjà vu. For a disorienting set of seconds, nothing rang true. Nothing looked right. None of it felt in any way mine.