Chapter 9
The day Rob and I found out is seared into my brain in one of those memories that’s so clear it’s like you could take snapshots of it and lay them out in sequential order. This is the moment Rob was on the phone with his mom when she told him. This is the moment Rob started laughing in disbelief, because he thought she was playing some kind of sick joke on him. This is the moment he put the phone down and looked at me, and told me. This is the moment his face transformed from shock to horror. This is the moment the resentment boiled up in his eyes and I could feel him judging me for what my mom did to his parents’ marriage—like a piece of rotten fruit that fell from a bad tree.
His mom had called him around nine o’clock in the evening, distraught. I could hear her voice through the phone. Hysterical babbling that I couldn’t quite make out. I’d thought someone had died. That there’d been a horrific accident, and I was bracing myself for tragedy. Already thinking about my project at work, explaining to Donna that I needed emergency time off, considering the cost of plane tickets to get out to Maryland, where his family lived.
But when Rob put the phone down, no news of a family member dying in a car wreck materialized, and instead he tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment, before he started to chuckle, and then laugh. Hysterical, manic laughter, like the sound you imagine a psychiatric patient makes when he’s been in the room with the padded walls for too long. Rob laughed, and I sat next to him, saying what? What happened? I knew something was terribly off. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t possibly fathom what it might be.
I jostled his shoulder to get him to stop laughing and look at me and tell me what the fuck was going on. Then Rob had stopped laughing, and he’d straightened, his lip curling like he had a mouthful of spoiled milk.
He looked me square in the face. “Your mom’s been fucking my dad.”
The way he said it itself felt like an insult. Your mom, my dad . Like my mom was definitely the one squarely at fault in all this. Like she was the perpetrator, the seductress, who had lured his innocent father in. Like it didn’t take two people to carry on an affair.
I’d like to say I didn’t believe him. That I laughed too, at the absurdity of what must be a joke. But I did believe him. I knew the moment he said it that he was telling the truth. It wasn’t just his reaction that made me know it. Images came pouring back to me from the time Rob and I had been dating. How our parents—his parents and my mom—had hit it off so quickly. Rob and I had flown out to the East Coast, and my mom had come down from New York on the train to Maryland, and everyone had been introduced.
That weekend had been fun. Idyllic, almost. Rob and I had been over the moon about how natural it felt. Our parents hit it off from the first moment. My mom has this easy, charming way about her with new people. She’s funny and quick to laugh, and she helps out at a dinner party—offering to clean up and help the host cook, always bringing a bottle of wine. She’d shown up to meet them with wine and flowers and a little Tiffany box with a crystal figurine inside.
By the end of dinner on Friday night, Rob’s mom was insisting that she go get her luggage from her hotel and stay in their second spare room, and we’d all spent the weekend dining out, the women shopping together, Rob and his dad getting in a game of golf at the Congressional Country Club where Michael is a member. When Rob and I flew back to Denver on Sunday night, my mom had agreed to stay through the end of Monday so that she and Pam—Rob’s mom—could go to the National Art Gallery before she left.
After that, it was like the three of them no longer even wanted Rob and me around. Not that we weren’t welcome—they would have loved to have us. But they had formed their own friendship, and they were so thrilled to like each other. That their potential in-laws would be people they could enjoy spending time with, and that holidays wouldn’t have to be split. Holidays, naturally, would be shared, they had all agreed. Soon they were vacationing together—at Rob’s parents’ house in Maine, and at my mom’s place on Block Island.
The next time Rob and I came out to Maryland, my mom came too, and it was just as fun and easy as before. For the first time in my life, I felt what real home life was like. Rob is an only child, like me, and everyone seemed to be enjoying the company of a larger gathering. His parents embraced me with so much enthusiasm and affection that I thought I might just float off on a cloud of love.
But I noticed something. I’d never said a word about it, but my mom and Michael had inside jokes. A lot of inside jokes. Pam was in on them too, but they always seemed to be born of something my mom and Michael had done together. And a little flicker of fear had passed through my body like a frisson of static. I’d brushed it off.
The notion that they might be flirting was ridiculous. Michael doted on Pam like she’d hung the moon. He was always touching her. He put his hand on her arm as he passed in the kitchen when she was chopping onions. He rubbed her shoulders, standing behind her chair, after she set breakfast on the table. Their affection was almost too much for someone like me, who grew up without two parents.
One evening, back in Denver, Rob and I had gotten a FaceTime from my mom. I accepted the call to see three heads squished into the screen. My mom, Michael, and Pam, all together on the deck of my mom’s summer house, wine glasses in hand, red-cheeked from drinking and suntanning. They were laughing and shouting over each other to tell us that they loved us, and they missed us, and then Michael had said something that made my mom break into hysterics and we couldn’t understand a word of what was being said as they got distracted and delved back into their own conversation, and the call ended.
“So, I guess they’re friends now,” Rob had chuckled when he hung up the phone.
“It’s nice, right? That they get along so well.”
“It is.” He nodded, and his eyes were bright and pleased, and I’d snuggled into the couch with him to finish watching our movie.
Not long after that, Rob proposed at the edge of a lookout point that displayed the Rocky Mountains in all their majestic glory, and after he slid the round, blinking diamond onto my left ring finger, I’d leapt into his arms. We called his parents, who cheered, and I called my mom, who squealed with delight that her daughter was marrying just the right sort of man from just the sort of family she approved of. “Congratulations, Buttercup,” she’d said. “You did really well.” My heart had felt so full, like there was nothing else in the world that I needed, and my future suddenly seemed so secure, so safe, in a way I’m not sure I’d ever experienced before. I felt like I’d been gifted something I didn’t even know I was missing.
I’ve been staring off into space, and Charlie says my name with a note of concern. “Daisy? Are you okay?”
I give my head a shake. “Yeah, I’m fine.” I release my knees and tuck them underneath me and turn the palms of my hands up in my lap, like I’m letting go of something. “So, now you know all my dirty laundry.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it your dirty laundry,” he says. “But I have to admit, that is truly one of the most insane things I think I’ve ever heard.”
I nod, “I know. It’s like… Jerry Springer level. Like, I think Jerry would probably have paid us to come on his show. Although”—I tilt my head—“maybe he already did pay people. Maybe that’s how he got them. I don’t know.” A strange little bubble of laughter comes up from where my stomach is still knotted together. “But, if Rob and I had stayed together, we would have been stepsiblings in addition to husband and wife.”
“God yeah, I didn’t even think about that.” Charlie rubs a hand down his face and then looks at me again. “Jesus. No wonder you’re so freaked out by this whole thing.”
Charlie isn’t giving me the look of judgement I was expecting. He doesn’t look weirded out, or like I’m not the girl I’ve been pretending to be—an imposter, playing at a normal life. A normal family. Instead, there’s empathy written all over his face.
“I cannot imagine what you’re going through,” he says sincerely. “I mean, the ex-fiancé thing was a lot, but it was… I don’t know, something a lot of people have to deal with, you know? Like, there’s a playbook for that. And you were doing it. You were muscling up and facing the new girlfriend and being there for your mom. But this…” He trails off. “I don’t really know what to say.”
He’s scooted closer to me on the sofa, so that his arm stretched out on the back rest nearly reaches my shoulder.
“You don’t have to say anything.” I shake my head. “It’s just been a really tough year. My engagement ended because of the thing with my mom, and then I just lost that campaign to have that land put into conservation, and now I’m here at this wedding…”
Charlie nods and then looks down, thinking. He sucks his very good bottom lip between his teeth and worries it for a minute. Then he looks back at me, his eyes meeting mine with an open expression.
“I really don’t want to pry, Daisy. So please tell me if I’m overstepping, or tell me to piss off or whatever, but why are you here?”
I don’t really have an answer to that question, except that it’s my mom, and she needs me.
“I’m not really sure. I thought about not coming.” I shrug a shoulder. “But I just felt like I had to, you know?”
He shakes his head slowly. “Actually, I don’t really know. I can’t imagine a family member doing that to me. I don’t even know what that would feel like.”
I snort a cynical sort of laugh. “I don’t think I would have been able to imagine it either, until it happened.”
“And you’re going through all this alone.” He doesn’t say it as a question.
I feel suddenly shy, like I should perhaps be embarrassed about this fact. I give a small nod and pick at my bare pinky toe, polished in pink from the pedicure I got in preparation for this trip. More armor.
“My best friend Cara was supposed to come with me, but her grandmother got sick.”
Charlie nods quietly, seeming to need a moment to take all this in. I don’t blame him. It took me weeks to really absorb the fact that Michael and my mom had started carrying on an affair. He scratches at a spot on his dark slacks, where a thread has come up out of the weave. It’s the first sign of any sort of dishevelment I’ve seen on him.
“I couldn’t do this if I were in your shoes, Daisy. You should be proud of yourself.”
“Proud of myself?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “For being the bigger person. The biggest person.”
“There’s nothing big about me.” I don’t mean literally, but he takes up the invitation anyway. It’s like teasing each other is becoming a language.
“Yes, you are thimble-sized,” he agrees, “but I mean your heart. You’ve got a big heart. You spend your time saving the bears, and when you’re not doing that, you’re propping up your mom, even when she might not deserve it, and taking all this on your shoulders.”
I flush at the compliment and continue picking at my toenail, which cannot be an appealing sight for a guy as polished as Charlie is.
“So, what are you going to do with the rest of your night?” he asks.
I look at him askance. “Go to bed?”
He shakes his head. “Nah, not like this. You’ll end up sitting on the floor of your shower.”
How did he know?
“I was headed out to meet a friend. Why don’t you come along? You can give yourself another story to mark this day, instead of that awful dinner.”
My lips turn up into a smile. The first real one since we shared a cab back to the hotel. “Why not?”
He glances down at my high heels discarded on the floor in front of us. “You may want to change your shoes, though.” He grins.