17. Marnie
Marnie
April comes on a Sunday, nine days after they get back from Ireland, with a bag of scones from the place on Lake and a laptop under her arm.
She's been texting me twice a day since Chanhassen. Not about it. About the rain in Kerry, about Drew getting food poisoning in Dingle, about a sheep that followed them for a mile.
She stops in the doorway and looks at my apartment the same way her father did.
"There's a bicycle on the wall," she says.
"There's a bicycle on the wall."
"Why."
"I've stopped asking."
She puts the scones on the counter and turns around and hugs me for a very long time, and neither of us says anything, and I put my hand on the back of her head the way I have since she was four.
Then she sits at the little round table and opens the laptop and says, "I want to show you something before we talk, because if I don't do it first I'm going to cry too hard to work a mouse."
The photographer's gallery. Nine hundred images.
She scrolls to one and turns the screen.
It's shot from behind. The back of the tent, the mown aisle, two hundred people standing and April in the satin with her arm through her father's, half turned. Her left hand is reaching back.
My hand is in it.
You can't see my face. You can see my arm and my hand and about a third of my shoulder in the green dress, and my daughter's whole body angled backward toward me at the moment before she walked away.
"He shot four hundred frames of the aisle," April says. "This is the one. I've looked at it maybe sixty times."
I have to get up and stand at the sink for a second.
"Mom."
"Give me a minute."
"Take a year."
I come back and sit down and she closes the laptop halfway so the light goes down, and my daughter takes both my hands across the table.
"I need to say some things and I've written them down because I know I'll lose it," she says. "Can you just let me."
"Okay."
She takes out an actual piece of paper. Twenty-six years old and she's got notes, like her father, like me, like every person in this family.
"One. I did not know what was happening to you.
You have to hear that first, because I need you to believe the rest. I thought you were tired and stressed and I thought Dad was being weird about money, and I did not see it, and I've been going back over the whole summer since Nathan called me and I'm sick about it. "
"You were planning a wedding. Nobody's supposed to see anything."
"Let me do the paper."
"Sorry."
"Two." She has to stop and breathe. "Sherry gave birth to me.
That's real, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't, and I don't regret meeting her, and I got some questions answered.
But Mom. You raised me. I have never in my entire life been confused about who my mother is.
Not once. Not for one second, not when I was fifteen and awful to you, not in August, not on my wedding day. "
I'm crying. Fully, the ugly kind, in a rented kitchen with a paper napkin.
"Three." Her voice is going too. "I liked it.
That's what I have to say to you and it's the worst one.
I liked having two women fussing over me.
Her wanting me, I liked that too. I wanted her to look at my life and understand what she gave up, I wanted her to see the dress and the flowers and the whole thing and know she wasn't there for any of it, and that made me feel powerful, and it made me sloppy, and you paid for it. "
"Honey."
"Every time I asked you if it was okay, you said yes, and you never once said what it cost, and I let you say yes because I wanted the answer to be yes."
"April, look at me."
She looks up, saddened.
"You had every right to go find her," I say.
"Every single right. If you'd wanted her at the front of that church holding both your hands you'd have had the right, and I would have found a way to be fine, and that is what I signed up for in an urgent care waiting room in 2001 when you told me your eyes were just wet. "
"That's not fair, you can't use that."
"I'll use it whenever I want, it's mine." I wipe my face with the napkin. "Listen to me. You are not the person who hurt me. I want that in the room and I want it to stay in the room, because if you carry this I'm going to be furious."
"Then who is?"
"Your father."
She nods. She already knew. She's known since the phone call on the hotel balcony.
We sit for a while.
Then she says, "I told Sherry I need space."
"April."
"She called me the day after she asked Dad about the house.
She wanted to talk to me about, and I quote, what I'm entitled to.
" April's mouth twists. "She had a whole thing about how Dad's estate would work and how there's stuff called a trust and how she doesn't want me to be naive. Forty minutes."
"What did you say?"
"I said I'd call her back and then I sat in my car in the Cub parking lot for an hour.
" She turns her water glass. "And then I called her and I said I needed some time, and she cried, and then she said something about how she knew I'd end up choosing you, and that's when I understood it was never really about me at all. "
"Don't do this for me."
"I know you're going to say that."
"I mean it. Honey, if you cut her off because of what she did to me, in five years you'll be sitting somewhere and you'll think, I gave up my mother for a fight my parents had. And I will not have that."
"Mom." She smiles, a little, and she looks so much like her father that it stops my heart.
"I'm not doing it for you. I sat in that car and I thought about the message she sent in August, the long one.
She wrote eleven paragraphs and she never once asked me a question.
Not one. Not what I do for work, not what I look like, not whether I was happy. "
She wipes her nose on her sleeve, twenty-six years old, married.
"I'm doing it for me," she says.
She stays until four. We eat scones for lunch, which is not lunch, and she tells me about the sheep.
At the door she gets her coat on and then doesn't leave.
"Can I ask a thing?"
"You can ask a thing."
"Are you coming home?"
"I don't know."
"Okay." She nods fast, twice, and her chin goes, and she gets it under control. "That's a real answer, at least. He keeps saying it's temporary."
"Your father would put a Gantt chart on a hurricane."
That gets a wet laugh out of her.
"He's different," she says. "I'm not, I'm not making a case, Mom. I'm just telling you. He cancelled the Zurich trip. He took Erin to look at colleges last weekend and he drove and didn't take a single call."
"Good."
"Are you going to be okay in here? By yourself?"
I look past her at the gray couch and the bicycle and the one plate in the drainer.
"Deb's dragging me to something on Tuesday," I say. "The land trust out by the river. They lost their treasurer and she's decided that's my problem."
"Are you going to do it?"
"I'm going to go look."
April smiles at me, and there's something in it I can't read, and she says, "You did the books for a company that's worth eighty-six million dollars out of a bedroom, Mom," and then she leaves before I can say anything back.