Chapter 8 #2
“And I sat in his office, Aurora, with my apron on, and I thought about Mother Comfort dying on that ward at Ben Taub, about you not going back to school in the fall, and I thought about your daddy with his head in his hands in the kitchen, and I said yes. I said yes, Aurora. I signed it. And then I came home and I told your father the money was an inheritance from Aunt Pearl. There is no Aunt Pearl. Aurora. There never was.”
Ayanna set her head down on the kitchen table on top of her arms and she sobbed.
Aurora did not move.
She sat at the kitchen table across from her mother for a long, long time, and she did not know what to feel.
She did not feel her own face. She felt, faintly, that her left hand had closed around the gold ring on her finger, and was twisting it, and that her thumb was running over and over again across the worn smooth gold band.
After a long time, Ayanna lifted her head.
She did not wipe her face.
She looked at Aurora.
"Halston did not know," she whispered. "He never knew it was me, baby.
To this day he does not know my name was ever on that letter.
I took the money and I asked that man no questions.
God forgive me, Aurora — I did not let myself ask what he was going to tell his son.
I know now. He told Halston it was you. That you had gone to him yourself and asked him for it.
That you took it to send yourself off to school and left him standing.
Halston has spent fifteen years believing it was you.
He believes it still. He told you about the contract last night because he is certain, to this day, that it was you. "
The back door of the kitchen opened.
Errol walked in with a cup of iced water in his hand for his wife.
He took one long look at his weeping wife at the table and his stone-still daughter across from her and the Iverson letterhead between them on the wood, set the glass of water down very slowly on the counter, and said, “What is that?”
Ayanna did not lift her head.
Aurora, without looking away from her mother's face, slid the letter across the table to her father.
Errol picked it up, read it, then read it again. He read it a third time. His face did not, the entire length of his reading it, change at all.
He set the letter down on the kitchen table and looked at his wife.
“Ayanna?”
“Errol.”
“You told me,” Errol said very, very quietly, “that money came from your Aunt Pearl.”
Ayanna lifted her head, her face was streaked and her headwrap had come askew on her temple. She did not try to fix it.
“There is no Aunt Pearl,” she whispered. “Errol. There never was.”
The kitchen was so still Aurora could hear the second hand of the clock in the hallway ticking.
Errol turned around, walked out the back door of his own kitchen, across the small back yard and into his workshop. He shut the workshop door very gently behind him.
Aurora got up from the table.
She did not say anything to her mother. She did not have anything to say to her mother. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.
She walked out the back door to her father’s workshop.
Errol was sitting on his work bench; his head was in his hands. He was not crying. He was somewhere else inside himself.
Aurora closed the door behind her and sat down beside her father.
She did not touch him, she did not, yet, dare.
He spoke without lifting his head.
“I never believed that boy left you on his own, Aurora.
Nineteen-year-old boys in love do not turn cold like that overnight.
I told your mother, I told her that summer.
I told her I was going to drive up to that estate and put my fist through Theodore face.
She talked me out of it, baby. She told me I had no proof, and I would lose every commission I had in this town if I went after a man like that.
She said it like she was looking out for the family.
She was so calm about it, baby. So calm.
And I thought, all this time, that she was wiser than I was.
I thought, my Ayanna sees what I don't see.”
He lifted his head.
He looked at the wall of his own workshop.
He said it in a voice that was small and old not the big father she had always known.
“I always wondered why she was so calm, baby. I always wondered.”
Then he said, “Now I know.”
Aurora put her hand on her father's forearm.
Errol did not move.
She sat with him in the workshop in silence until the sun came in slantwise through the small high windows and lit the sawdust in the air like falling gold. After a long time, her father turned his arm over very slowly under her hand and held her fingers.
*****
She drove the coast road back to Pinewood Hollow alone in the afternoon. She pulled off the road halfway home, onto the gravel shoulder under a stand of live oaks, and she sat in the front seat of her ten-year-old Honda with the engine off and the bay glittering through the trees.
She sat there for forty-five minutes.
The grief she was carrying was older than crying. It was a grief that had been waiting years to find a shape. It had found one now. It was the shape of a cream linen letter on a wooden kitchen table.
Halston had not left her. He had been lied to. He had spent years believing Aurora had taken his father's money to walk away from him, in the same way Aurora had spent fifteen years believing he had walked away from her for a girl in Palo Alto who did not exist.
They had been broken by the same man on the same day and had not known.
She pulled back onto the coast road and drove the last twenty minutes to the estate trying desperately to clear her head.
*****
The bronze doors of the Iverson estate were standing open when she pulled up the drive. Yvette was on the front steps with a basket of herbs cut from the herb garden.
Imari was on the lawn with the goldens, throwing a tennis ball Tilly was returning with single-minded determination, her braided buns slightly loosened from the morning and her Squishmallow set on the bottom step where it could not get muddy. The sun was on her face. Imari was laughing.
Aurora parked the Honda and got out. Imari saw her, dropped the tennis ball, and came pelting across the lawn.
Aurora caught her and pressed her face into Imari's braids for a moment to make sure her own breath was steady before she set the child back down on the grass and asked her, normally, what she had been up to that morning.
“Mr. Halston read me three chapters.”
“Three chapters of what?”
“The elephant book. We started a new one. He did the voices. He's bad at the voices.”
“Oh, I bet he is.”
Imari looked up at her with Maeve's hazel eyes.
“Aunt Rory,” she said softly. “Are you sad?”
Aurora crouched down on the gravel. She put both her hands on Imari's small shoulders.
“I am a little sad today, sweet pea. But not because of you. Never because of you. All right.”
“All right.”
“You go play. Where is Mr. Halston.”
“He's upstairs.”
Imari ran back to the goldens.
Aurora climbed the front steps. Yvette laid one hand, very briefly, against the side of her face as she passed, without saying anything. Aurora closed her hand over Yvette's wrist for half a second and let go.
She walked up the marble staircase. The whole house was quiet. She walked down the long second-floor hallway and stopped at the open door of Imari's bedroom.
Halston was sitting in the small slipper chair beside the bed in jeans and a soft gray T-shirt, a copy of An Elephant and Piggie book in his lap. He was reading the book aloud, very quietly, to the empty bed.
He was practicing the voices.
Aurora stood in the doorway and watched her billionaire husband sit rehearsing the voice of a cartoon piggie, alone because he wanted to be better at it next time.
Halston looked up.
“Aurora.”
“Halston.”
“You went to your mother's?”
“Yes.”
“Aurora.”
She closed the door behind her, walked across the bedroom, set her hands on the arms of the slipper chair and leaned down to him.
“I have to tell you something tonight,” she said quietly. “Not now. Tonight. Tonight, in your father's library. You and me. Alone.”
Halston looked up at her. He saw, in her face, that he may have been wrong about something for years.
He had not known yet, exactly, what.
He set the elephant book down on his knee.
“Tonight,” he said. “Aurora. Tell me one thing.”
“What?”
“Is your mother all right?”
That was when Aurora knew, with absolute final certainty, that her husband had never chosen to leave her.
Because his first question — before his own shock, before what the lie had cost him, before anything — had not been about himself at all.
It had been about her mother. About whether Ayanna was all right.
She set her hand very briefly on his face.
“She will be,” Aurora whispered. “She will be, Halston. We will all be.”
She walked out of Imari's bedroom to her own and closed the door.
Aurora sat down on the edge of her own bed in the house she now lived in and finally let herself, fully, weep.