Chapter 5 Cassidy
Chapter 5
Cassidy
“Are you sure you don’t want to switch rooms?” Cassidy asks when she checks to see how Rosalie’s doing. “I know you relish your bath. Belledonne has a French tub that looks out onto the pond.”
“I like Le Beau .” She’s perched beside the window, staring out. When Cassidy nears, she sees Jean-Paul and Renée lugging buckets of flowers from a delivery truck. Jean-Paul pulls out a pale-pink flower and sticks it behind Renée’s ear. Then he kisses her.
“They seem to really like each other,” Rosalie says.
Cassidy chalks up her daughter’s hasty assessment to idealistic longings. “Appearances can be misleading. You know that.”
Her daughter sighs, playing with a strand of hair with her black fingernails. She licks her dark lips, reminding Cassidy of the day she was born. She had fallen in love with those heart-shaped lips. When they’d rolled Cassidy into the delivery room, the first question they asked was if her husband would be joining. “A friend? Family member?”
Cassidy’s mother pops into her mind. “Parenting won’t be easy, Cassidy,” Ann Banks had said. “You’ll always have me, but it’s hard to raise a baby on your own.” Which was exactly what ended up happening when Rosalie turned two months old and Ann, Cassidy’s only living relative, died.
Now Rosalie mostly hated her mother, making it her life’s mission to prove how much. Granted, the dislike wasn’t entirely unfounded. Cassidy had forgotten permission slips over the years, leaving Rosalie to miss out on school field trips, and there was the time she showed up to Rosalie’s class with cupcakes laced with alcohol meant for her spin instructor’s birthday. The teacher wasn’t very happy about the mix-up. And maybe she had once fallen asleep with a cigarette burning in her fingers and almost torched the house. Rosalie had screamed, accusing her of acting like a child. A child! Begging her to “grow up.”
Fortunately, Ann Banks had left them a tidy sum of money and her house. Rosalie was never without food and clothing, and the home was big enough to entertain guests, though Rosalie never brought anyone home. This baffled Cassidy—she knew the kids in the neighborhood called her the “fun” mom.
In between the arguments and hostility, Rosalie periodically asked about her father. And as she grew, so did her curiosity. Cassidy wasn’t forthcoming. The pregnancy had been a triumph, but it also symbolized her greatest failure—an inability to find a life partner, to love and be loved.
Rosalie kept asking about her father, the question that could never be answered. The years passed, and as her classmates brought their fathers to school and Rosalie met her friends’ dads at sleepovers, her quest for understanding deepened. And she was relentless.
At one point Cassidy, with little guidance and a serious case of impostor syndrome, sat her ten-year-old daughter down, prepared to tell her the truth, but upon staring into Rosalie’s clear, blue eyes, she abruptly changed her mind. “Your father died, Rosalie. Right after you were born.” It was simple, a finite resolution to put an end to the questions. But this was Rosalie. She wanted evidence. She wanted details—what he was like, how they had met. “Don’t I have grandparents? Where are the wedding pictures?” She had questions upon questions.
Cassidy remembered feeling a little sick inside when she made something up about a flood in the basement. “All the pictures were ruined.” But not sicker than when she told Rosalie that her father’s parents were dead too.
“Oh” was all the young girl could muster. “You don’t have a single photo?”
“Rosie, it’s just so painful.” Cassidy did have a flair for the dramatic. But once, when Rosalie had managed to wear her thin, she’d pulled a picture from her high school album, which happened to be in the attic with all Cassidy’s presumably ruined pictures. She told Rosalie that Gene was her father. It was true that Gene had been Cassidy’s boyfriend at one time. Heck, he was the young love of her life—the only love—and she had enough pictures to satisfy any level of curiosity. The two of them, big-toothed and big-haired, smiling at the prom. Swimming in Lake Michigan. And suddenly, Rosalie had a dad.
Blinking away the memory of that lie, Cassidy sits in front of the mirror and applies another coat of lipstick. “Let’s try to have a good week.” She smacks her lips together, and Rosalie turns from the window. The girl has globs of mascara on her lashes. “What was that about earlier? You said you made a mistake.”
“It’s nothing. I’m about to get my period.”
“Phew.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“For one, you’re not pregnant.”
“Funny.”
“You know there’s nothing funny about me, right?”
Rosalie picks up the welcome packet left on the end table beside a modest vase of cream-color roses. She skims the pages detailing their stay. “There’s a schedule. Please try to follow it.”
Cassidy glares. “Excuse me?”
“You know exactly what I mean.” She throws on a light jacket. “I’m going for a walk—”
“Great idea!” Cassidy stands up. “Let me get my sneakers.”
If a gaze had bullets, that would describe Rosalie’s stare.
“No worries.” Cassidy sits back down. “I’ll just finish unpacking and ...” She’s really not sure what she’ll do.
“We have to be downstairs at six. We’re going to meet the other guests then.” Cassidy starts to say something, but Rosalie continues. “Please try not to embarrass me.”
Cassidy wants to make a face, but she stops herself, simply nodding.
“They want everyone there for a welcome picture, and then that Jean-Paul guy cooks dinner for us. Three courses, plus dessert.”
Rosalie looks triumphant, knowing how it will kill Cassidy to eat more than a piece of lettuce. “Too bad there’s no young people for you, Rosie ... But that Simone seems lovely ... Maybe you’ll make a new friend.”
“Maybe.” But she doesn’t sound entirely optimistic.