Chapter 6 #2
“You loved Nash,” she repeats, “and you got scared because he was unpredictable, and now you’re marrying the wrong man, and I don’t want you to end up like me.”
“What’s wrong with ending up like you?”
“Every mother wants their child to be better than them.”
“I’m happy the way I am. I was happy with Dad. I’m happy.”
“You aren’t.”
“Mom. You—”
“Have spent forty-two years with my heart beating to the wrong rhythm,” she finishes for me. “I let you girls think that was okay and I won’t do it anymore. I take the blame, and now I’m going to fix it.”
This trips me up.
“Mom.” I force my voice to be softer than I feel.
“I’m fine. Or I will be. I don’t think I fully understand right now in the thick of everything else that I have a biological father who wanted nothing to do with me turning into you marrying someone you didn’t love like a lover.
” I give her a grim look. “But Reese, Remy, and I? We’re okay. You were a great mom.”
“And maybe one day you might like to meet him.”
“Meet him?” I am gobsmacked. “What the hell for? This man didn’t care that I even existed. He sent you away. Pregnant.”
She frowns. “He didn’t send me away. I made a choice.”
I’m not arguing semantics. “I had a dad—a good one—one who didn’t avoid responsibilities because he was hunting treasure.
I don’t want to meet this”—I eye the article—“drunk digger. I’m fine.
This is weird, but I’m fine. Freaked out.
Concerned with how easily you lie about everything.
” I give her a pointed look. “But we have other issues to deal with. Like no money. And the growth on your besotted brain. I do not care about knowing this man. I’m forty-two, I don’t need a new dad unless he has a boatload of money.
What I need is . . .” I look around the room, reminders of everything that’s going wrong and we’re about to lose screaming at me. “An actual treasure.”
“What if I told you that I never told him about you?”
My head jerks so fast I might have whiplash. “You what?”
“Well . . .” She dances her fingers along the desk, dodging my gaze. “If he wasn’t going to choose us, maybe he didn’t deserve to know.”
A trapdoor opens beneath me, and I fall right through it. “Mom, no.”
“I know it wasn’t the right thing to do now, but back then—”
I let out a loud groan.
“—I didn’t care about right and wrong. He didn’t pick me, and the only thing I could think to do was never tell him. Served him right.”
“Served him right?” It’s a struggle not to scream. “You withheld the fact I existed out of spite? Who doesn’t tell someone they have a kid?”
Her look does not need translation.
I drop my face in my hands. I don’t have the mental capacity for this. To defend myself. To slap her.
This isn’t the same thing. It isn’t. I told everyone Bennie’s dad was dead because I panicked. Because he wanted a life that didn’t involve kids. Because it was manageable. Dead is so much cleaner than doesn’t know about you or, God forbid, didn’t want you.
“Rueben still lives in Charleston,” she says, like I asked or care. “Colleen called me this morning. She’s still in Charleston and her husband sees your dad from time to time. His health isn’t great, and I thought you should know.”
“Okay, well, Mom, now I know. And, just a reminder, your health isn’t great, and we are going to lose the business. I’m sorry you have an unfinished love story or whatever this”—I wave the paper—“is. But we have more pressing issues than some man who was obsessed with a childhood fantasy.”
“There’s more.”
“More?” I let out an exasperated breath. “What the hell does that mean?”
From the box, she pulls out a rubber-banded stack of postcards and passes them to me.
“What are these?” I mindlessly riffle their edges. “Love notes with a treasure hunter?”
It sounds like she says, “They’re from Nash,” but that can’t be right.
“Who?”
“Nash,” she repeats. “He’s been sending them.”
“What?” Eyes wide, heart stopped, I yank the rubber band off and read the back of one.
Two.
Three.
More.
His handwriting, his brand of humor and preferred method of communication.
Eight years ago, he refused to have a cellphone.
Preferred letters and in-person conversations and loved how postcards were evidence of history in time and place.
It was part of his charm. Part of what sucked me into him and made me blind to his many, many flaws.
To his inability to consider the future or take anything seriously. This can’t be right. It can’t.
“Mom?”
I expect her to say psych! or explain how a stack of postcards from the man I loved then hated then told everyone is dead isn’t really what this is.
Instead, she says. “They’ve been coming for years. I was waiting for the right time to tell you, but I was worried you’d be mad and—”
“Mad?” I cannot wrap my brain around any of this. “Why would I be mad at you? He’s the one who—” I pick up the postcard on top—a skyline of Philadelphia—and scoff at the note on the back:
Come and get me, Rue Conway.
What an ass. “Was reminding me how right I was to divorce him.”
“Because . . .” Once again, she reaches into the box and pulls out an envelope, this one in my handwriting, addressed to a Washington, DC address, Nash Fletcher written above it.
I rip it open. The papers look exactly like they did the day I sealed them up nearly eight years ago.
Sheer terror wraps around my neck like a hungry boa constrictor as she says, “I never sent the divorce papers.”
“You what?” My whole body seizes as I fumble through the papers. At the line requiring Nash’s signature, it’s blank.
Oh, God.
“At first I was waiting for the right time to tell you, then you got engaged to what’s his name an—”
“Oh, don’t what’s his name this, Mom. You know damn well it’s Jonathan.”
“I have a brain tumor,” she deadpans.
I could kill her. “Can you take one damn thing seriously?”
“You take everything seriously enough for both of us, what do you need me for?” She has the nerve to look annoyed. “Anyway, you seemed happy, and I didn’t know how to tell you, so . . .”
“So?” I demand, shaking—physically shaking—as the room spins then shrinks.
All this time I thought Nash got the papers—which I gave to my mother to mail.
I thought he signed then sent them to his attorney who then filed.
I thought our divorce was final. A closed book.
History. I’d never been divorced, and with a new baby, I figured his silence meant it was taken care of.
You don’t get an official birth certificate unless you apply for one at the courthouse.
I assumed divorce records would be the same.
I didn’t need evidence of it, I wanted to pretend it never happened. So much so I’d burned every photo I had of us. Our divorce made him dead. Bennie would never be able to pick him out of a lineup.
“I liked him, Rue,” Mom says. “But you loved him.” My attempt to argue comes out like a death rattle. “Really loved him.”
“I love Jonathan,” I cry.
She scoffs. “You do not. Not the way you loved him.” She drills a finger into the stack of postcards. “You were besotted.”
“I was not besotted.” Briefly, I think of Bennie asking me if I loved Jonathan the way I loved Nash.
“And who cares if I was? Who cares if I love Jonathan differently? Maybe it’s a good thing not every love makes you so overwhelmed with the other person it makes you crazy.
I don’t want to be crazy. Crazy made me love someone I couldn’t keep.
” When I think I’m finished, I shout, “And you make me crazy enough!”
“I know you didn’t think he was what was best for—”
“What was best?” I need to be put in a straitjacket.
“He was a traveling substitute history teacher.” Just saying that ridiculous profession out loud still shocks me that I was with such a person.
“At Fontain Academy. For the summer. Living in a hotel. Who didn’t want to stay here.
” I’m angry just reciting that list. “And I was pregnant.” She opens her mouth, causing my voice to shout my final point: “And he didn’t want kids! ”
“But you married him.” She says it like that makes up for his complete lack of regard for responsibility.
Like it was a real marriage and not one that started and ended so quickly, I never changed my last name.
Like the ink wasn’t barely dry on the marriage certificate before I had the divorce papers drawn up.
“That was a lapse in judgment.”
Because it was.
Because I got swept up in him and that summer and made the mistake of marrying a man who was completely wrong for me. Who was beautiful, and fun, and made every decision in his life based on what he wanted in any given moment. As deep as my roots were in Fontain, his were shallow.
“I couldn’t watch you make the same mistakes I did,” she says.
I physically teeter. “You kept me married because you were vicariously living through me?”
“Because I knew exactly what you were doing because I did the same thing. Because I knew that you would never be as happy as you were.”
I let out a guttural groan.
“According to the latest postcard,” she says, ignoring my outburst. The evenness of her voice is at complete odds with the fury surging through me. “He’s also in Charleston. A tour guide or something.”
Of course he’s in Charleston—of course he is. It was on his list of cities to live in. Eastern Seaboard historical hotspots. I want to light my entire life on fire.
She passes me a pamphlet. In a line-up photo of guides, I spot Nash instantly.
Dirty blond hair, cocky smile on his face, and a ridiculous postage stamp-patterned button-up shirt that stands out against the golden tan on his skin and sleeve of tattoos covering one arm.
Eight years older but still very much the same, his coffee eyes stare right at me.
Thirsty for History is printed in a bold font and the coincidence of those three words alone nearly knocks me over.