Chapter 37
NOW: MAGGIE
“So is Maya flying back to you before school? Sorry, I can’t remember what she said last week when we talked.” Damien’s voice, even through the tininess of a phone, always put Maggie at ease. He, after Diana and then Maya, was one of the few people who did.
“Oh yes, that’s right. So looks like you’re dodging another bullet, huh?
” Damien chuckled and Maggie scoffed. She had started texting Damien and then they’d begun speaking again on the phone sometime in March.
It was something she’d worked on with Lauren, and while she still wasn’t entirely over her complicated feelings about their situation, she decided to focus on the knowns, like Lauren had taught her.
Damien was her best friend. He was the father of her child. She loved him. She missed him.
Even when he was being his usual self and keeping her on the hook.
She had told him about Diana. Not the whole story, because Damien already knew the whole story, had always known the whole story, and every bonus chapter since.
In the end, when he had asked her for the divorce and had urged her to try and find her happiness, he had encouraged her to call Diana, and that is how Maggie had come to drunkenly texting her way back when.
No, what he was keeping her on the hook for was the fact that she hadn’t told Maya yet. “Dame—”
“I’m just saying I don’t think it will go as poorly as you think it will.
Like I get that it’s scary, okay? I do. I haven’t told her about me yet, though I think she heard David’s voice over the phone once or twice.
” David was Damien’s new beau, someone who also had been an old flame, though not as old as Diana.
Just another “could have been” who had popped back into his life.
Maggie was happy for him, mainly because he sounded genuinely happy, light even.
She thought she understood the lightness; she felt it too.
“You haven’t told her about you because I haven’t said anything,” Maggie said, feeling her familiar guilt percolate.
“We agreed we would tell her around the same time,” Damien said reassuringly, as if this was as much of his choice as it was hers, and she appreciated his solidarity.
They had agreed to share their stories separately, but around the same time as one involved the other.
The last thing Maggie wanted was for her daughter to think either parent’s sexuality had driven the other away, on top of everything else.
“I think I am going to when she is home for the summer maybe, I don’t know, I don’t want Diana to feel like she’s lying to Lily.
” It was a conundrum she’d spoken to both Diana and Damien at length about, but they both supported her on what Lauren told her continuously; she’d been holding on for so long that it felt scary to let go, and it was okay to work herself up to it.
“Yeah well, our girl is smart, okay? Don’t underestimate her ability to figure out that you’re seeing someone.”
“Yeah well, I just think it being Diana would be the furthest thing from what she’d guess.”
Damien agreed with a soft chuckle. “So how’s farming life otherwise?”
“Dame, this isn’t a farm, it’s an orchard,” Maggie said, laughing. Damien was from the South, came from actual farmers, but she knew he loved to tease her.
“Well you wear flannel and work outdoors, sounds like some folks I know.”
“Yeah well, only really apples and some squashes here. And let’s just say I don’t think I have a future as Diana’s righthand woman. I had one little corner of the orchard to maintain, and didn’t do a good enough job, and now there is a slight fireblight issue.”
“Fireblight?”
“It’s some kind of sickness the orchard gets and perhaps could be pretty detrimental to all the plants here, but I think they’ve got it under control.
I don’t know—I snooped, but it's clear Diana doesn’t want me to know and I feel bad letting her know because she’s working so hard for me not to know, you know? ”
“What in the white woman?” Damien said, laughing harder into the phone and Maggie felt herself laugh too.
In truth, she was mortified about the blight, but was touched that Diana was trying to spare her feelings.
For now. It would certainly come up if she made another bid to take over part of the orchard.
“So, what do you think you’re going to do, Maggie?
” Damien asked. It wasn’t like Maggie hadn’t given it much thought.
When she and Damien had decided to get married and then they had Maya, she’d decided to stay home and be a full-time mother and homemaker.
She loved the work, as unforgiving and grueling as it was sometimes to put your entire emotional well-being on the back burner for everyone else, but she supposed she had been doing that all her life.
When Maya went to school, Maggie had thought about teaching or helping with an after-school program. But the walls she’d built up around herself by then had made her a fortress, impenetrable by anyone who wasn’t Damien or Maya. Or Diana.
Damien was happy to provide the financial contributions to the family, and Maggie had busied herself with hobbies and the few organizations she was happy to volunteer for.
But truthfully her whole life had felt like one big held breath.
The only time she actually felt like she was breathing was when she was with Maya, and the few blips of moments stolen with Diana.
The truth was, she would have loved to have worked to get certified to teach or worked at a summer camp. Damien had always encouraged and supported her, which is likely where he was attempting to steer the conversation now.
“Well, aside from blighting your girlfriend’s entire orchard-not-farm,” Damien said jokingly, and she knew it was his way of trying to take off any pressure.
So she filled him on the community center and eventual school.
How Jay and her wife, along with Julia, were working together to navigate red tape, paperwork, and the fact that Diana and Julia were using their family name to bolster the project amongst relevant parties.
“I think it is the perfect project for you to get involved in, Mags,” Damien said when she had finished. Maggie wanted to get involved, but the whole Jay part seemed to complicate things, and she didn’t want to overstep and be brought on because she was Diana’s girlfriend.
“You think I should ask Diana or Julia to work with them on everything?”
“I mean, I do. It sounds perfect for you and aren’t they planning on eventually making it a school?
I mean, education has been under attack because it gives people the power to think and understand.
Understanding leads to tolerance and peace.
I mean, imagine if Maya had gone to a school like that when she was little, and she didn’t have to be one of the only Black kids with interracial parents?
Think of how much more comfortable you and I would have been at some of the school events?
And when she came out to us, I kept imagining what it would have been like for us to have had the same level of understanding and assurance at her age.
Frankly, the project sounds amazing, and if I had anything applicable to give, I would! ”
Maggie smiled. “It’s just the last time I kinda made an ass of myself in front of Jay and her wife and—”
“Yeah well, we are all adults and know we don’t always have perfect days. Besides, if she’s one of Diana’s people, from what I know, she has to be cool peoples. Wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Maggie said, and she was nodding.
Because the truth was, the idea lit something dormant inside of Maggie.
It felt like an exhale every time she thought about getting involved.
Sure it was idealistic, but it also seemed possible because of her very rich girlfriend.
And besides, she and Jay were overdue for a conversation.
“I’ll talk to Diana and Julia and see what they think,” Maggie said finally.
The thing was, she and Diana had never really discussed what Maggie had studied in college.
It wasn’t for lack of interest or effort on Diana’s part either, Maggie could tell.
It just seemed to be the rule between them that they took what each of them offered.
And Maggie’s major had taken her some time to really nail down.
She spent her freshman and most of her sophomore years having an idea, but also experimenting.
Once she had decided, it had never come up again.
Sure, college majors were a large part of one’s identity in the world around them, but they didn’t matter in the virtual space she and Diana had carved out for one another.
Maggie had talked about her classes from time to time in her emails to Diana, and Maggie supposed if Diana had really pieced everything together she could have guessed.
But Diana’s future was known, fixed; she would take over her family’s business, it’s why she’d gone to Berkeley in the first place.
Once Maggie’s future became more of a concept, she had refrained from talking about it because the only known, or at least so they thought at the time, was that it didn’t include Diana.
After hanging up with Damien, she stretched and then decided that she was in fact going to ask Diana.
She was going to take another step forward.
She still didn’t know how to tackle telling Maya everything, especially with her graduation in less than two months and her coming back to Maplewood for the summer.
But this was a conversation she could start and another wall she could learn to tear down.