19. Natalie
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Natalie
My parents drove up from Chattanooga the second weekend after I moved to Claire's, my mother calling ahead three times to make sure she wasn't imposing, my father saying almost nothing on the phone at all, which I recognized immediately as its own kind of statement.
They arrived Saturday morning with a casserole my mother had clearly made at six a.m. out of pure nervous energy, and a bag of small gifts for Maddie and Jack that had nothing to do with the actual crisis and everything to do with my mother's conviction that children handled hard things better with a new coloring book in hand.
My father hugged me longer than usual at the door, said nothing about Daniel at all, and spent the first hour of the visit fixing a wobbly leg on Claire's back porch table that had bothered no one until he decided it needed fixing, which was, I understood, simply how he processed things he couldn't otherwise do anything about.
We finally sat down together once the kids were occupied in the yard, Claire tactfully finding an errand that kept her out of the house for an hour, and my mother reached across the table for my hand the moment we were alone.
"You don't have to tell us everything," she said. "But I want you to know we're not going to sit here and pretend everything's fine if it's not."
I told them most of it, the gala, the erasure, Rebecca's phone call, the fountain, the dance.
My mother's face moved through the whole story with me, wincing at the right moments, and my father listened with the specific stillness he'd always brought to serious conversations, the same stillness he'd used the night he found out I was pregnant with Maddie before we'd planned it, the same stillness that meant he was thinking harder than his face let on.
"I never liked how much of himself he gave to that business," he said finally, when I'd finished. "The business itself was never what bothered me. What bothered me was watching you disappear into propping it up for years, and I never said anything, because you seemed happy, and it wasn't my place."
"I was happy, Dad. Mostly."
"I believe you. I'm just telling you I noticed, even if I didn't say it.
" He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, an old habit, one Daniel had apparently inherited from somewhere entirely unrelated and made his own.
"I don't know the man's heart. I know what I've watched him do to you these last few months, and some of it, if I'm honest, makes me want to have a conversation with him that wouldn't be very fatherly. "
"Gene." My mother's voice held a note of gentle warning.
"I'm not going to do anything, Carol. I'm allowed to want to.
" He looked back at me, something softer moving into his face.
"What I actually want to say is simpler than that.
Whatever you decide, whether you go back to him or you don't, your mother and I aren't going to tell you which one is right.
We didn't raise you to need our permission for your own marriage.
But I want you to know, if you never went back, we'd be proud of you for that too.
I don't want you staying out of obligation to some idea of what a good wife does. "
"I'm not staying separated out of pride, either," I said. "If that's what you're worried about."
"I know you're not." He reached over and squeezed my hand, a rare gesture from a man who showed love mostly through fixed table legs and quiet presence rather than words.
"I just want you choosing whatever you choose because it's actually right for you, without letting fear of what people will think make the decision for you. "
My mother, for her part, was warmer about it, cautiously so, the way she'd always approached hard things, looking for the version of hope she could hold onto without lying to herself.
"I did notice something, for what it's worth," she said.
"Watching him with Jack in the yard just now.
He's different than he was at Christmas.
Quieter. Paying more attention. I don't know if that means anything, but I noticed it, and I wanted you to know I noticed it, since I know you're the one who has to actually weigh it. "
"I've noticed it too," I admitted. "I don't know what to do with it yet."
"You don't have to know today," she said.
"You've got time. Nobody's putting a clock on this but you.
" She squeezed my other hand, so that I sat there, briefly, held on both sides by two people who had loved me my whole life and had built, between them, an entirely different marriage than the one I was trying to save, quieter, less ambitious, but steady in a way I'd taken for granted growing up and understood, now, to be its own kind of hard-won achievement.
They stayed through dinner, my father teaching Jack an elaborate card game that Jack immediately declared his new favorite thing in the world, my mother helping Maddie with a book report at the kitchen table with the specific patience of a woman who had once done the same for me at that same stubborn age.
When they finally left that evening, my father hugged me again at the door, longer this time, and said, quietly, so only I could hear it, "For what it's worth, if he does earn his way back, I'll shake his hand and mean it.
I'm not rooting against your marriage, Nattie. I'm just rooting for you first."
"I know, Dad. Thank you."
I stood in Claire's driveway and watched their car pull away, taillights disappearing around the corner, and felt something steady settle into me that had nothing to do with Daniel at all, the specific, bedrock reassurance of parents who loved me enough to withhold judgment in either direction, and would be there, solid and unchanged, whichever way this eventually resolved.