Chapter 20
“Goodness, it’s been a while.”
Jenna didn’t reply, watching silently as her mother stepped gingerly into the kitchen, looking around the shabby space with something like wonder. They had already stuttered their greetings out in the parking lot, and Jack had tactfully taken his leave, promising Jenna he’d call her in the morning.
When, Jenna wondered, was the last time she and her mother had seen each other?
Maybe eighteen months ago, two years? Her mother had invited her and Zach to come down to Florida awhile back, and Zach had coaxed her into road tripping it.
That part had been fun, but the five days sharing the guest bedroom of her parents’ condo with her brother had not been.
Her father had pretty much played golf the whole time, and her mother had flitted around, more or less waiting for him to come home.
Jenna and Zach had ended up going to the beach by themselves, although Jenna was not a fan of it because no matter how much she slathered herself in factor fifty, she always got sunburned.
“It has been a while,” she agreed in a guarded tone.
“Five years, almost, since you’ve been back here.
” Her parents had not returned to Starr’s Fall once since their retirement, which had been yet another piece of the puzzle that was her parents that Jenna didn’t understand.
They’d made this town their home for forty years.
How could they have turned their backs on it so completely?
Her mother was standing in the center of the kitchen, her fingers pleated together, her expression both abject and pleading in a way Jenna didn’t think she’d ever seen before. What on earth was going on?
Jenna opened her mouth to ask just that and instead heard herself ask, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
A look of gratitude came over her mother’s face and she gulped and nodded. “Yes, please. Thank you.”
Jenna moved to fill up the kettle. “So what brought this visit on?” she asked once she’d filled it and put it on the stove. “I mean, it’s nice to see you, and this is, of course, your house still, but…” She shook her head slowly. “I feel like something is going on.”
Her mother nodded and then gulped again. “Yes,” she agreed, tucking her hair behind her ears—the same auburn hair that Jenna had, except her mother’s was in a neat bob and starting to silver. “Something is going on.”
Jenna waited for more and her mother started speaking in staccato bursts, like the words hurt coming out. “I came back… because… I think… I might have… left your father.”
For a second, the words, spoken in such jagged spurts, did not compute. They were phrases Jenna could not put into a comprehensible whole, even as she recognized them in their discrete parts. She opened her mouth and then closed it again as the kettle began to whistle.
Neither of them spoke as Jenna set about making tea. Her mind was whirling, and it wasn’t until she’d handed her mother a cup of tea and taken a sip of her own that she managed to say cautiously, “You left Dad?” It still didn’t make sense.
Her mother nodded, her gaze lowered toward her mug. “Yes. I think so. I packed a bag and booked a flight and came here, anyway.”
“For a visit.”
“I… I don’t know.”
Jenna shook her head slowly. “Mom… you and Dad… you and Dad are…”
“No,” her mother said quietly. “We’re not. Not anymore. And really, we never have been. I wish… I wish we had. Maybe more than I should have.”
Okay, this was her mind officially blown.
Her parents’ marriage had always been the gold standard.
How many times had her dad blown into the house with a bouquet of roses and a smacking kiss for his mother?
How many times had her mother laughingly let herself get swept up in his arms?
And when they’d all been together as a family?
Well, Jenna had never been able to shake the feeling that she and Zach were interlopers in the greatest romance in the world, one she’d wanted for herself with Ryan.
Her parents had always been a unit, solid, too solid.
And now her mother was basically saying that wasn’t the case at all?
“I… I don’t know what to say,” Jenna said at last. “Maybe I should just ask… what do you want to tell me?” And what did she really want to know?
Her mother didn’t answer right away, just took a sip of tea. All around them the house creaked and settled, and the snow continued softly down, blurring the view from the kitchen window.
“Well…” her mother finally began, her tone hesitant, her gaze faraway. “The truth is, I probably should have left him a long time ago.”
What? Jenna found she needed to sit down.
She lowered herself into a kitchen chair, landing with a thud so a drop of tea splashed out onto her wrist, burning her, but she barely noticed.
“I always thought you guys had an amazing marriage,” Jenna said faintly.
“Too amazing, even. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started wondering if maybe there was something…
unhealthy… about it.” She winced in apology, but her mother was already nodding.
“Yes, there was something unhealthy about it, Jenna, right from the beginning. I loved your father madly, and he—he loved me back, but…” She took a gulping sip of tea, her gaze lowered. “He loved a lot of other people, too.”
“Are you saying Dad had affairs ?” Jenna demanded hoarsely. Was this what Henrietta Starr had been intimating, by saying how her father was charming, and how her mother had certainly loved him? It all made sense, and yet it totally didn’t.
Her mother lifted her gaze from her mug to face Jenna squarely.
“Yes,” she stated quietly. “That’s what I am saying.
I don’t know how many, or how far it went each time.
Sometimes not far at all, according to your father, but…
I couldn’t live with the uncertainty anymore. With never feeling like I was first?—”
“But he always put you first,” Jenna burst out.
It was what had hurt so much, as a child.
How extraneous she had felt, along with Zach, to her parents’ grand romance, like bit players who were resented when they were onstage.
Her parents had never seemed all that interested in anything about her—her accomplishments, her interests, her hopes, her fears.
Water off a duck’s back, every time. She could still picture her father’s faint eyebrow raise as he glanced at her across the kitchen table. Oh, you again?
“He made gestures,” her mother corrected. “Grand, sweeping gestures to say sorry, and I accepted them and told myself it was enough. That it was love. But I don’t think it ever was.”
“Mom, Dad loves you,” Jenna objected, feeling it from the depths of her being. “Zach and I never doubted that. It was always you two, and so then we felt… extra.”
Her mother sighed. “I know, and that is, at least partly, my fault. Maybe a lot my fault. It took me a long time to realize it but, Jenna… your father is a narcissist. A wonderful, charming, handsome, lovely narcissist.” She sighed.
“He could walk into any room, and everyone would love him… if he wanted them to. If he didn’t care, then you basically ceased to exist in his eyes.
And I went from one to the other for far too long…
existing on the highs and dreading the lows.
When I got cancer, the year you were in San Francisco…
I was almost glad .” Her voice trembled.
“Because I thought maybe then he would pay attention to me more. Not just sweeping in with the flowers but holding my hand in the dark. And for a little while, it felt like it worked. He was so attentive during my chemo appointments, but then I realized he was more intent on charming the nurses. He loved playing the devoted husband, but it was all just an act. An act everyone bought except me.”
Jenna shook her head slowly. It felt like too much to take in. “And the affairs?” she asked hollowly. Starr’s Fall was a small town. Who had her father had an affair with? She shuddered to think.
“I don’t know,” her mother admitted quietly.
“He was discreet, at any rate, and it wasn’t all the time, but…
I always knew when he came in with flowers or took me to the Litchfield Inn for dinner…
it was an apology of sorts. And I accepted it every time.
” For the first time, Jenna heard bitterness spike her mother’s voice as her face crumpled.
“I was so in love with him, Jenna,” she said brokenly as she wiped her eyes.
“I would have done anything for him. When he had this dream of setting up this store and living off the land, when he decided to move into antiques or collect wine or do whatever it was he wanted to… I acted like it was my dream, too. I became a shadow of myself, bending myself to whatever shape he wanted. And in the process…” She drew a ragged breath.
“I alienated and neglected my two children.”
A silence descended upon them then that felt like too heavy a weight to bear.
How, Jenna wondered, had she not seen all this?
How had she been so blinded, thinking her parents had the greatest romance ever, and then, she realized with a lurch, doing the exact same thing her mother had done, and twisting herself into every possible shape to make a man love her?
She’d repeated her mother’s mistakes, Jenna realized hollowly, without even knowing her mother had made them.
“I had no idea,” she finally said in little more than a whisper. “Really.”
“I know.” Her mother wiped her eyes again. “I’m sorry.”