chapter 11 #2
“Did he seem to be in love with your mother?”
Charlotte didn’t change “your mother” to “our mother” this time. But Lilly didn’t say anything. She was too busy remembering the six or more men she’d called “father.”
At first, they all seemed to be in love with Sabrina. But their love never lasted. Lilly couldn’t say exactly why. She thought
part of it was how much her mother changed once they moved in together, how much she started to demand and expect and how
little she was willing to give in return. Sabrina would start to complain—always wanting more time, more attention, more money.
And they grew tired of it, some sooner than others.
Lilly could always tell when Sabrina’s latest boyfriend was getting ready to move on. Even if her mother hadn’t died, Lilly
believed her relationship with Luca had been nearing an end. They’d begun to fight, and Luca had often slept on the couch
or stayed with family or friends during the last few weeks.
It was a cycle she’d seen before . . .
Lilly had wanted to tell Sabrina that she shouldn’t be so hard to live with. But how could a daughter say that to a mother?
“I guess he loved her as much as any of the others,” she said.
“The others?” Charlotte lifted her sunglasses.
“Her other boyfriends.”
Charlotte slid around the bench, closing the gap Lilly had purposely put between them, which made Lilly shrink away. She needed
space, couldn’t let anyone get too close. She couldn’t love someone who’d only walk out of her life again. She felt as if
she’d crumble, disintegrate altogether and blow away like dust if it happened one more time.
“Were there a lot of them?” Charlotte asked.
When adults drilled her with a question like that, it was usually to find fault with her mother. But Lilly couldn’t detect
any judgment in Charlotte’s voice. It sounded more like concern, and that helped. She was tired of having to defend Sabrina
from those who labeled her as “bad.” Sabrina had just been trying to be happy. When Sabrina had pulled her out of school to
move to Italy to be with Luca, one of Lilly’s teachers had muttered that she’d never met a more selfish woman. That was probably
true. Sabrina could also lose her temper quickly and lash out. But she forgave just as quickly and provided the love Lilly
hadn’t been able to find anywhere else.
“Enough that I’ve started to forget some of them.” It felt great to finally admit it, to state the truth instead of trying
to think of clever ways to deny it.
“How would she meet the men she dated?”
“Wherever she was bartending. At a club after work. Through a friend or someone she worked with. Online.”
“Did you typically get along with them?”
“Some of them.” All of them except one, Lilly corrected in her mind. Walter had shown a little too much interest in her, which was why her mother had left him. Lilly had always wondered if Sabrina was mad at her for ruining
that relationship—if it was the one that might’ve worked if not for her.
After they moved out of Walter’s house, Sabrina had never mentioned the day they’d found the camera hidden in the bathroom
only Lilly used, but she’d worried ever since that her mother blamed her for being the reason she couldn’t find someone who’d
love her enough to stay. Walter’s house had certainly been the nicest one they’d known.
“And the others?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” The words came out before she could stop them. But Lilly couldn’t address that topic. She was too raw inside, too damaged. That was the only word she could think of to describe how she felt.
Fearing her refusal was all it would take to make her sister mad enough to drop her off somewhere else—Italy’s version of
foster care—she steeled herself for Charlotte’s reaction.
But to her surprise, Charlotte smiled kindly. “Okay. No problem. You don’t have to talk about it.”
Silence fell. Lilly wished she could think of something to fill it. She always felt awkward around strangers, and she was
even more uncomfortable now that she was with a sister who was also a stranger. People typically didn’t have to deal with
that kind of thing.
She pretended to be absorbed in finding a jet that would massage her back, but eventually she had to look up, and when she
did, she found Charlotte watching her with her sunglasses still on top of her head.
“What would you like to talk about?” she asked. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
Lilly shook her head to indicate she didn’t have any questions, but that wasn’t true. There was so much she was dying to learn.
She just didn’t dare speak up for fear she’d say the wrong thing.
“There’s got to be something,” Charlotte coaxed. “Come on, nothing’s off-limits. It’s your turn to put me on the hot seat.”
Lilly weighed the question that was uppermost in her mind and, when the silence began to get uncomfortable again, she finally
caved into the expectation that hung in the air. “Okay. Is it weird for you, knowing you had a different mother than you thought?”
“Very,” Charlotte admitted. “My parents never told me I’d been adopted, so getting Mr. Heidelman’s letter came as a shock.”
“You thought you were theirs all along?”
“I did.”
“Do you look like them?”
“Maybe not, but I don’t look too different from them, either.”
“Finding out you’re adopted—that would suck.”
“It did, but everyone has challenges in life, right? I’m trying to work through mine just like you’re trying to work through
yours. And I think we can both do it.”
Her open and honest response gave Lilly the courage to ask another question. “Do you like your parents—the ones who raised
you?”
“I love them dearly. They’re wonderful people, have been very good to me.”
“You’re not mad at them?”
Charlotte took a moment to think. “I won’t lie to you. At times I feel some resentment, mostly because Sabrina is gone and
I can’t meet her now even if I want to, you know? But they did what they thought was best for me—and maybe they were right.
Maybe it was best for me.”
“Don’t you think they should’ve told you?”
“That’s hard to say. Would I have been any happier if I’d known? It would’ve introduced questions and issues that I probably
would’ve had a hard time dealing with at a younger age. I had a great childhood. Maybe I should just be grateful.”
Charlotte was very different from Sabrina, Lilly decided. She couldn’t imagine her mother ever saying anything like that.
She was pretty sure her mother would’ve been mad, felt ripped off somehow. She always seemed to feel ripped off.
“Did your mother ever mention me?” Charlotte asked.
“Mention you?” Lilly echoed, stalling for time.
“Tell you she’d had another daughter?”
Did Charlotte want to hear that Sabrina thought of her often? Missed her? Regretted giving her up? Wouldn’t any daughter want
to believe that? But Sabrina wasn’t the type to ever look back. There was always too much to forget.
“Not to me,” she admitted. Afraid her sister would be disappointed, Lilly followed that up with another question, hoping to keep Charlotte from dwelling on what her answer might mean. “What’re your parents’ names?”
“Don and Penny. They live in Orange County.”
“Where’s Orange County?”
“You’ve never been there? It’s part of the Los Angeles area. Southern California. Where did you and your mother live before
you came to Italy?”
“We’ve lived everywhere. Denver, Seattle, Portland, Salem, Fort Bragg, a little place called Cherokee. That’s in Iowa,” she
clarified. “That was when my mom was with Steve. He was a farmer. I liked him best.” She smiled as she remembered the blind
dog who’d hung out in the barn. He’d become her dog—until Steve had asked them to move out because he and Sabrina were fighting too much.
“Sounds like you relocated a lot.”
“We did.”
“Your mother was a bartender?”
“Yeah. If she got fired or hated where she was working, we’d just move on. She liked trying different places.” Sabrina had
once made a joke that she was trying to outrun the past. Lilly hadn’t understood what her mother meant at the time, but she
thought she did now. If they didn’t keep moving, it felt like everything bad in their lives would catch up with them.
Charlotte wiped away the moisture collecting on her upper lip. “Did you like moving?”
“Not really.” Over the years, she’d pretended otherwise—to protect her mom. Now that Sabrina was gone, she didn’t have to
do that anymore. But she still felt slightly guilty, as if she was letting her mother down.
“Were you upset when she decided to come to Italy—take you clear across the ocean?”
Guilt caused her to back away from the honesty that’d just felt so freeing. “I didn’t have any choice.”
“Having no choice is different from having no opinion.”
The longing she felt for Sabrina created a physical ache in Lilly’s chest. Almost everything to do with her mother had been
hard and confusing, even when she was alive. Now that she was gone, that hadn’t changed. “She made Italy sound like a pretty
cool place,” she said. “And I like pizza.”
Charlotte laughed. “There’s the silver lining!”
“The . . . what?”
“It means something good coming from something that’s also difficult—a part you can be happy about.”
She no longer had to start over and over again as Sabrina met one man after the other—no longer had to worry about another
“father” spying on her like Walter had done. That had to be a silver lining. But with her mother’s death, her life had gotten
worse, not better. Maybe Sabrina hadn’t been totally reliable, but now Lilly had no one to look out for her.
“Luca said you write books,” Lilly stated.
“I’ve written only one—and I need to write another.”
“But you’re famous?”
“Not really. It’s my soon-to-be ex-husband who’s famous.”
“Clifford Jackson with the Lakers.”
“Luca told you about him, too?”
Lilly was glad Charlotte had brought Clifford into the conversation because she hadn’t dared to, didn’t want to make Charlotte
feel bad since it sounded like it was Clifford who wanted the divorce. “Yeah. Luca said you were rich.” Luca had actually
said that Charlotte could take care of her because she had more money than she knew what to do with. But Lilly didn’t add
that part.
“Cliff is rich,” Charlotte clarified. “But we’re no longer together, and we weren’t married very long, so he’s keeping most of his money. I moved in with my parents before I left the States. Being single again is still very new, and it feels . . . odd.”
Lilly didn’t know what to say. If Cliff was keeping most of his money, that couldn’t be good for her. And she could hear the
sadness in Charlotte’s voice, didn’t want to make it worse. Once her mother had split up with whoever she was seeing she’d
never wanted to speak of him again. Was it the same with Charlotte? “Sorry. You said I could ask anything,” she mumbled.
“I did, and I meant it. You can always talk to me, even about Cliff. The divorce won’t be easy, but grief has a cycle. Did
you know that? You go through stages, and you hang on through those stages hoping that, in the end, things will get better.”
“Will they get better?” Lilly desperately wanted someone to promise her the grief and fear she felt would go away, because everything
in her life just seemed to get worse.
“I believe it will,” Charlotte replied. “But I’m not going to promise you anything. I can’t say something just to make you
feel better. I want you to know that if I say something you can count on it, okay?”
Those words weren’t the promise she’d been hoping for, but they seemed honest, and that made it easier to trust Charlotte.
“Okay.”
Water dripped from Charlotte’s hand as she lifted it to gesture around them. “Why don’t you tell me about this little town?”
“I can see why my mother liked it,” she replied. “She loved being by the ocean.”
“What do you like here?”
“The pizza.”
“Of course,” Charlotte said with a grin. “Sounds like that hasn’t let you down.”
“No. The pasta is good, too,” Lilly added. “So is the lemon sorbetto. They serve it in a giant lemon.”
“I’ve never seen that in the US.”
“I think you can only find it here—but it’s all over the Amalfi Coast.”
“I’ll definitely have to try it. Pizza, pasta and gelato, huh? I’m afraid I’m going to gain quite a bit of weight this month!”
This lighthearted talk made Lilly feel like she could breathe again. She hadn’t even realized she’d been holding her breath,
but the tightness of her chest eased just enough that she no longer felt sick.
Charlotte scooped a dead bug out of the water and tossed it over the side. “What’s your favorite restaurant?”
“I don’t remember the name, but I know where it is,” Lilly told her. “It’s in Positano.”
“From what I’ve heard, Positano isn’t far.”
“It’s not. But it’s a different town. You have to take a taxi, which costs money,” she pointed out. That had always been her
mother’s reason for saying no whenever Lilly wanted to go there, but her mother had never had any money. She’d had to depend
on the men in her life to provide a lot of what they needed, and after a while those men got tired of it. Some resented Lilly
even more than Sabrina because she had nothing to offer.
“Sounds like it’s worth the trip. Should we go there tonight? Do you know if we need a reservation?”
She shook her head, but for the first time since her mother died, she was tempted to smile. Dinner at a fancy restaurant would
feel like a celebration, and it’d been a long time since she’d had anything to celebrate.
“I’ll google it after we get out.” Her sister sat up on the edge of the Jacuzzi. “I understand that you’re in a frightening
and difficult situation, Lilly, and I hope to make that easier on you—in whatever way I can.”
Lilly felt her smile falter. Those words sounded good, but she didn’t know what they meant—not exactly. Maybe Charlotte didn’t
know what they meant yet, either. “Thank you.”