Ivy in Stills

Thirty-Two—Ivy

T

he posse was gathered in Adam Pembroke’s small group room, and everyone had shared but me. I had to admit that I hadn’t really been listening to the woes of my group, but I nodded and looked sorrowful when everyone else did, so I didn’t think anyone had really noticed. The truth was, I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be anywhere. I’d missed Tuesday because that’s when I read the letter, and the only reason I was here today was because Mia had threatened to call my dad if I didn’t get out of bed. She’d said she wouldn’t have a choice; Bo was going bonkers with worry. So, I was here going through the motions, and now my life skills community was waiting for me to say something scintillating.

I sighed, looked mournful, which wasn’t much of a stretch. “It’s just Mama,” I said, speaking a half-truth. Then I took my group of fellow wounded weepers on a little trip through my weekend to Carmel. I gave them a blow by blow of the argument we’d had and made it sound like the time I’d spent with Mama was the primary source of my current ennui. I satisfied everyone but Adam. But then, I guess that’s to be expected since he is the paraprofessional.

A few minutes later, everyone was saying their goodbyes when he eyeballed me, and I knew I was caught. “Could I have a moment, Ivy?” he asked, and I wanted to cry.

“Sure,” I said, lowering my eyes.

We sat next to each other on folding chairs. Adam Pembroke smiled. I tried to, but it came out tears .

“Talk to me…if you want,” he said. “I know there’s more to the story.”

Adam Pembroke, AP, was a fortyish, lanky, balding, Black man who had an open face that said, I’m interested and I have the time , which is what made him such a good life coach, in my opinion. And as I was making this assessment, he leaned onto his elbows, “Ivy, are you all right? I’m worried about you.” And I thought that was another excellent reason to like him so much.

I sniffed. “I thought my mom had given me some money,” I finally said. “She gave me an envelope just before she left to go home, and I thought she was making up with me for our little tiff. But instead, it was a note with some news from home. Some devastating news.” I pulled the envelope from my pocket and unfolded a sheet of fancy hotel stationery. I didn’t really need to read it to know what it said, I’d read it so many times and crushed it so many times that I saw every word even in my sleep. But I cleared my throat anyway and shared what Mama had written with my kind, interested, open-faced, paraprofessional therapist.

Ivy,

Let me just start by saying I think it’s time you got over Tim. All you’re really doing now is hiding, and both your dad and I agree it’s time you just came home. Besides, you’ve imposed on your father long enough, and lord knows I could use some help in the shop. The thing is: Tim is not worth it, and it’s not the end of the world that he loves Angela and not you. It hurts, but it’s not the end of the world. Now, I found out something last week that I didn’t plan to tell you in a note. But after you picked that fight with me in Carmel and things kind of fell apart, well, you really left me no choice. So, anyway here goes…Tim and Angela got married on the 4 th of July. They had a baby boy sometime in June, and now they’re married. I know this will make you cry, and I’m sorry. But honestly, Ivy, it looks to me like you dodged a bullet, so please don’t waste too many more tears on him. You’ve cried enough. You’ll find someone better. I know you will. If you’re lucky, he’ll be someone wonderful who will cherish you the way your dad cherishes me. I love him, Ivy, and I will not apologize to you for that. Love is a funny thing, a fickle thing. It can break your heart or someone else’s. Sometimes it costs everything we have. But there’s no shame in that. So, I’d appreciate it if you would mind your own business where my love-life is concerned.

Call me if you want to talk. But seriously, put all of this behind you now and come home.

Mama

I looked up from my letter and met the sad eyes of my life coach—the man my father had hired to patch me up after I’d fallen off my wedding. He didn’t say anything. Not for a minute. Then he reached over and squeezed my hand.

“That’s some letter.”

“Yep.”

“No wonder you’re hurt.”

“I’m so hurt,” I cried, my voice a thin flat line. I felt run over, and I knew I was hard to look at. But I didn’t care. I had managed to shower and brush my teeth, and that seemed monumental after three days. My new hair just sort of did its own thing, which unless they were just being nice, my group had said they liked. I didn’t care about that either. The floor was still mine, so I said, “I guess I only thought I’d been destroyed by Tim when he ran away from me as we were about to pledge our lives to each other. But turns out, he’s the gift that keeps on giving.” I laughed sadly. “And I just keep falling and falling down this never-ending sinkhole of mad and sad and not wanted and what the hell. And I sound so pitiful that I can’t stand myself, and I can’t stand that I can’t stand myself because I can’t stand being my own enemy.” I swallowed a sob. “I need me too bad! Not sure you’ve noticed, but I don’t have much in the way of excess emotional support—I have me! That’s it. And Geneva, who is conveniently not here—so just me!” I sniffed. “I have got to get a grip on this sad little life of mine, or I will drown in snot and tears, and that will make for a very woeful obituary.”

“It will indeed,” AP nodded in agreement. He crossed his legs and folded his arms, then looked hard at me. “Ivy, I’m going to give you this moment of self-pity because you’ve earned it and you’re having a rough time. But then I’m going to remind you that you have me, and you have this group, you have new friends who are worried about you, and I know you, so I know you have old friends. But for now, you sing it, sister.” He nodded again. “Sing it loud and proud. Get it out of your system. And when you’re done, we’ll do a little work.”

I was confused but suddenly overcome, so I did; I sang it. I let the tears spill. I doubled over, and AP patted my back while emotion gushed out of me. At one point, he handed me a box of tissues, and I blew my nose. I carried on and on about the paper dolls my parents were in this situation—completely and utterly useless to me and how Mama’s letter was just a big saltshaker with a loose lid that dumped harshness directly into my barely healing cuts—figuratively speaking, of course. When I came up for breath, AP gave me a bottle of water. When I finally stopped shuddering, he asked me if I felt better, and I told him I thought I did. A smidge.

He eyeballed me. “Good. Let’s get to work, then.”

“What you mean?”

“How about we dissect that letter?” he said, holding out his hand.

I don’t know why I hesitated, but I did—it’s not like I hadn’t just read the whole darn thing to him. I handed it over, the demon correspondence from my mama bent and messy, mightily abused, very well-read, and much wept over. Sitting there in his big palm, it didn’t look near powerful enough to produce all the drama that it had, but somehow it was and did. As I stared at it, my eyes started stinging and my nose started running…again .

We spent the next few minutes dissecting my reaction to my mother’s news, and Adam dragged me kicking and bawling up close to the uncomfortable truth of my life. Tim and Angela had made a baby. This I had to face, which I thought I had—but it was deeper than just the baby. Tim, Angela, and I had been in a very strange triangle for many years. I had known this, too, for many years—it was a truth I was familiar with, had lived with for a long time. But at Christmastime, when Tim had chosen me and sealed the deal with a ring and date, I’d pretended there was no more Angela. This had been very foolish of me, AP pointed out in a kind but firm tone. He also pointed out that it was very much like Mama pretending there was no one else in Daniel’s life. When he said that, my stomach turned, and I wanted to throw up. “No, it’s not!” I insisted.

Adam just looked at me with a big ol’ Yes all over his face, and it burned my eyes.

Then he went on to tell me that as harsh as it seemed, with a baby on board, it was not inconceivable—pun intended he said—that a relationship would follow—Tim’s and Angela’s, not Tim’s and mine. “Another difficult truth, my friend,” he said.

I felt defeated. It had felt like falling, just like I’d told him. Falling and knowing I would hit concrete, because concrete was coming up fast, but pushing the idea away, denying it was happening because I didn’t want to deal with it. Kinda like running away to Monterey so whatever was going on with Tim and Angela in Georgia wasn’t really real—until splat, I hit the concrete. I hit the concrete when I read Mama’s letter. That’s what I told AP.

“Was that really it?” he asked. “Was that really when you hit concrete?”

“What?” I said through the fog.

“Be honest, Ivy,” my life coach said, looking hard at me. “Are you sure there isn’t a part of you that was not surprised by this Angela and Tim thing—I mean, given your history? ”

I didn’t answer him, but I think he probably saw the stupidity shining in my eyes. He handed me another tissue, and I blew my nose. Again. “ But he chose me ,” I said pitifully.

Adam Pembroke bent his head, and his eyes got soft. “Sometimes, Ivy, the hardest truth to bear is the one we always knew and chose not to see. We can blame everything and everyone…but this one is on us. Right?”

I swallowed, unable to look away.

“The good news,” he said, still soft, still kind. “I don’t think you will ever let it happen again.”

I sniffed, let a tear roll out of my eye. “I hope you’re right. I don’t think I could survive myself a second time.”

He smiled. “You would. But you won’t have to. You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for, Ivy.”

I wiped my nose, thinking I was being therapized by a big fat liar.

He shifted in his chair, draped his long arm over the back and looked at me. “So, that’s the content of the letter,” he said. “Now let’s talk about the delivery.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He cleared his throat and looked down at Mama’s note. Reading from it, he said: “Ivy—not Dear Ivy . Not: Hey, sweetie , no particular kindness to prepare you for what she was about to tell you. I think that’s… interesting . Just Ivy. Is that typical?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. She was still mad at me…so, yeah, I guess.”

Adam eyed me as he sucked on his lower lip, then went back to the letter. “It’s time you got over Tim. All you’re doing now is hiding…you’ve imposed—imposed.” He shook his head at the word—“on your father for long enough. And I need help in the shop. We’ve been patient.” He dropped the letter to his lap with a sigh. “Can you hear the unkindness, Ivy? The patronizing tone in these words?”

“I can now,” I said, a bit whimpery.

AP nodded. “How old are you? ”

“Twenty-one.”

“How does it feel, as a grown woman, to be told it’s time to get over the man who turned your world upside down?”

“Not good.”

“Or that you’re just hiding here in Monterey and imposing on your dad while you do it? Or that everyone has been so patient with you, but you really need to go home now and get back to work?”

I swallowed—or tried to.

Adam looked at me, then back at the letter, and read from it again: “Tim’s not worth it? It’s not the end of the world that the man you love, the man you were minutes from marrying, loves someone else? Ivy, these are cruel words.”

I looked at the floor and let the tears come. Again. “I know. They’re terrible.”

“And the kicker,” he said. “I had something terrible to tell you—something I knew would hurt you, but after you picked that fight with me…” He shook his head. “…I decided you deserved no compassion from me so I put it all in a note and used a snotty tone and to make it extra painful, I added a ridiculous reference to the way your father adores me as a measuring stick for the kind of relationship you could only hope to aspire to.” When he looked up from the letter, his expression was part disgust, part disbelief. “That’s mighty rich, my friend.”

All I could do was look at my shoes.

“Ivy,” AP said. “What would motivate your mother to write this letter? This letter?”

For a long time, I didn’t say anything.

“This is important, Ivy,” he said. “What message do you think is behind this letter?”

I looked up at this man to whom I had clearly not given enough credit. “I don’t know. We had a fight, and I guess she wanted to get back at me a little. I made her mad when I…I said something snotty about cross-country booty calls. Like I told the group, she’d been to Carmel before—without me, to meet up with my dad, and I didn’t kn ow that. It made me mad, and that made her mad.” To AP’s questioning brow, I nut-shelled my rather unseemly paternity and the twenty-two year on-again, off-again love affair that defined my parents’ relationship.

He nodded, then looked back at the letter. “So, is it possible she thought she was justified in hurting you? I mean, you called her on her behavior, right? And she obviously didn’t handle that well. Maybe she was hurt, or maybe she was embarrassed, or maybe she just got a glimpse of a woman she was not proud of—a woman who left her child at Christmastime and crossed the country for a booty call, and it suddenly felt as cheap and wrong to her as it did to her grown daughter.” My lanky therapist blew out a breath as he stared at me. “I don’t know your mom, Ivy,” Adam said. “But based on what little I do know, it kind of fits, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t really find my voice, but I managed a tiny nod.

AP nodded too. “Yeah. But the thing is, that spotlight is hard to stand in for long—especially when it’s your life on display. So it seems your mom shifted that spotlight onto you— Stop crying and come home, Tim got married, he has a baby now, get over it, you’ll find someone better if you’re lucky like me…And this painful information is brought to you with all the gentleness of a dagger to the heart because you crossed me. Let that be a lesson to you, Missy… ” He folded the letter, handed it back to me. “Ivy, I want you to get very clear on the actual source of your pain. You received some harsh news, some painful news. News that would have hurt anyone. And in the moment when it counted most—when your mom could have softened that for you—she chose to take care of herself over you. Can you see that?”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe.” AP said.

I swallowed. “I love my Mama.”

“I know you do. Of course, you do.”

“I love her, but she’s…” What was she? How could I answer my own question when I knew Bree was even better at this than AP? He thought she was being all self-serving and manipulative to hurt me. But it was so much deeper than that. She was being self-serving and manipulative out of sheer desperation. I was just the sacrifice. I knew as long as I was here, in Daniel’s backyard—close enough to his real family to turn him into a human ulcer—he would never leave. No more quick trips to Savannah for a steamy weekend with Mama, no meeting up in New York, or Dallas, or Phoenix or Denver. It was safe to assume that aside from Carmel last weekend, my mother’s appetite for my father’s affections had gone severely unfulfilled—apparently because of me.

I shook my head and finally answered AP’s question. “I love my Mama,” I said again. “But her loving my dad has made her…not a great mother, and only part of the woman she might have been if she’d never met him.”

AP lowered his chin and lifted his brow. “So, it would seem. And that must be a very hard truth to live with, Ivy.”

“It is,” I said, feeling seen in my entirety for the first time in… ever . It was overwhelming, and the feeling brought new tears. “It truly is,” I whispered. “But I actually think it’s a harder truth—a crueler truth—for my mama.”

My very gifted therapist nodded like I had finally figured out the winning combination to life’s biggest mystery. He looked sadly pleased with me. Or maybe himself. “Bingo,” he said.

I smiled half-heartedly; I had such a headache, and it was all I could manage.

“Now, the big question,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

I looked past him and shook my head. “I’m not sure,” I said, mulling. “I don’t know for sure if I’m staying here in Monterey. But I do know that I’m not going home.”