Chapter 37 Middle of a Beehive #2
I glance up to see Eric watching me, concern in his eyes. “No. I’ll be right down.”
After hanging up, I grab my purse. Sticking my head into Sharp’s office, I tell him I have to duck out, and I ask if he wants me to pick up lunch on the way back.
“Nah, I’d rather go out. Can you get me a last-minute rez at Nobu for three people?” he says. “One thirty would be great. Make sure you’re back in time to cover the phones.”
“We’ll see,” I snap. “I’m not even supposed to work today.”
“Yet, here you are. Actually, I thought of something you could pick up on your way back.”
“What?”
“A stiff drink. For yourself. I don’t know what’s wrong with you this summer, but I fucking hope things improve for you soon. Between you and the hormonal puppies at devo camp, I’ve had about all I can take.”
“Respectfully, sir, bite me.”
I turn to leave, but Sharp follows me to the door. “Don’t forget my reservation!”
“Don’t forget to say please and thank you, motherfucker.”
Eric looks alarmed when I breeze past him and head for the escalators.
“Please and thank you, motherfucker!” Sharp calls after me.
My mother is, in fact, standing in the lobby when I arrive there five minutes later. She looks half hopeful and half worried.
As she should. There’s a reason I’ve been avoiding her. I’m still wrestling with the idea that I have a trust fund and educational resources that I never knew about.
“Hi,” I say stiffly.
“Hi,” she says softly. “I didn’t know what else to do, honey. You won’t talk to me. At least tell me what I did wrong.”
“Let’s walk,” I say, because I can’t have this conversation in the building. I don’t like people overhearing my private business.
She follows me outside, where the weather is hot and cloudy.
Twenty-First Street near the river is always windy, so the effect is kind of like walking toward a giant hairdryer.
We head toward Ninth Avenue and my favorite bakery.
If my mother is going to bomb into my life, she can buy me a cupcake from Billy’s.
I choose the Bourbon Salted Caramel because I’m feeling extra needy. Mom chooses the coconut, and we install ourselves on one of the benches outside. I take a very delicious bite and screw up my courage to begin the real conversation. “Did you look for me at my apartment first?”
“Yes,” she says, wiping a bit of icing off her lip. “I know your schedule is hectic this month, but Darcy, I’m worried about you. Ever since that wedding, you won’t talk to me. Did something terrible happen?”
I sigh and shake my head. “I’m conflicted, that’s all. Dad told me about some trust account he set up for me. And that you’ve known about it this whole time?”
She winces. “I wondered if that was it.”
“You wondered,” I spit. “Was it just a matter of time until it came up? Do you actually get a statement every month? That you’ve been hiding from me for half my life?”
Her chin drops. “I didn’t mean it to be a big secret, Darcy. Not at first. Hiding it made sense when you were a girl. It wasn’t even legally your money at that point. You were barely a teenager, and I didn’t want his child support. I knew I could take care of you just fine.”
“And you did,” I admit. We weren’t wealthy, but I didn’t go without. “But it shouldn’t have been a secret forever.”
“There was no right time,” my mother insists.
“Really?” My voice rises. “I can think of a few. Like the moment I dropped out of college because I couldn’t afford it!”
“You didn’t drop out,” she returns. “You changed your track.”
“Mom! Don’t revise history. That’s what he does.”
She gasps like she’s been slapped. “Don’t compare me to your father. I’m nothing like him. And neither are you! I gave you a gift, Darcy. Self-reliance is the most important thing a woman can have. You grew up knowing down to your bones that you didn’t need to rely on a man.”
It’s true, up to a point. I know how to install a dishwasher, and how to change a flat, and how to manage my money.
“But it wasn’t my choice. You made that choice for me.
” And it turns out I’m angrier about that than I realized.
“And the worst part—the thing you really ought to realize—is that the dishonesty of it is the real sin.”
Her eyes flare. “It was your choice. You knew your father was paying for the twins’ college educations. You must have known he’d pay for yours. Even when you made the difficult decision to leave NYU, you never mentioned your father.”
“At the wise old age of nineteen?” I felt like an adult making my own decisions. I know I did. But it all looks very different seven years later. I open my mouth to say that, but something else pops out instead. “Did you ever miss him? After he was gone?”
Which only goes to show where my brain has been this month.
My mother blinks. Then she takes a sip of her iced coffee, playing for time.
“No, not exactly,” she says quietly. “His treachery made that impossible. Every time it was tempting to miss him, I thought about how big a fool I was. All those times he didn’t make it home for dinner—or to one of your choir concerts.
I’d thought he was just too busy providing for his family. ”
“He was,” I say darkly. “His other one.”
She gives me a little smile. “That’s exactly it. I was too angry to mourn him properly. If I missed anything, I guess it was my own ignorance.”
I think back to that time, and I know just what she means. When I was a child, my father used to call me at bedtime when he was away on one of his business trips. But after I inadvertently blew up his double life, I realized that sometimes he’d been calling me from Marblehead, not LA.
It hurt. A lot. It still does.
“Like I’ve always said—I trusted him too much. I trusted my heart, not my brain,” my mother says softly. “Even though I knew better. Your grandfather was just the same kind of husband, did you know that? A man who made his own rules and made his poor wife suffer.”
“Really?” This is not a story I’ve heard before. “Which grandfather?”
“Which one do you think?” Her eyes narrow.
“Your father’s father. They had the same marriage—a rich man who married a woman of lesser means.
That’s how they keep control. Your grandmother warned me right before I married your father.
She showed me a diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist. She said it was the gift she’d demanded after his second affair.
She told me to choose a more expensive gift each time, so he learns to think twice. ”
I stare at her in disbelief. My grandfather was a gentle, loving man who’d died when I was ten. Grandma died a year later of a broken heart, I’d always believed. They’d seemed like a lifelong team. “Jesus.”
“I brushed off the lesson she tried to teach me,” my mother says quietly. “And it bit me in the ass. I wasn’t about to let the same thing happen to you, honey. I wanted you to be prepared for whatever life throws at you.”
“Like… working twice as hard for my college degree as everyone else?”
She sighs. “Everything you have is something you did yourself. Nobody can ever take credit. Nobody can dull your shine. Struggle is noble, Darcy. It’s the same for those athletes you work with. Nobody succeeds without sweat.”
Noble, huh? My blood fizzes with anger, and it’s a struggle to swallow my bite of cake. “Do you know what happens when a teenage athlete gets drafted? The first thing they do is thank their parents for all that expensive hockey gear, and those brutal road trips.”
Her shoulders droop. “You can stay mad at me if you want to. It’s your call.” She takes an envelope out of her purse and hands it to me. “Here’s the latest statement. I never open them. Do whatever you want with this.”
“Thank you,” I say, taking it.
Then her eyes get red. “But please ask yourself if you really think I should have just demanded a diamond necklace and accepted your father’s behavior. There’s no diamond big enough to make me eat my pride like that. It’s something I hope you never actually understand.”
Then she gets up and walks away.