Chapter 5
“Mom, this isn’t because you’re sick, right? You’re not going to tell us you’re dying?”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Anne gestured at Brooke to sit down. She’d managed to get one of the prized back patio booths at Stone and Tide, no small accomplishment on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. “There’s no need for a dramatic entrance. Please sit down.”
Chastened, Brooke sat in the plush booth next to Claire, opposite Anne. As always, the dividing line between mother and daughters felt quietly clear.
“You didn’t say no, by the way.” Brooke touched one of her pearl earrings—the David Yurman studs Anne had given her for her thirtieth birthday—in nervous reflex. Probably checking to make sure it was still there. She’d been doing that since adolescence, always expecting the worst.
Claire turned to her sister, eyebrows raised. “Have you met our mother? Do you think she’d tell us she’s dying over mid-priced chardonnay and pumpkin tortellini?”
“You’re ordering the pumpkin tortellini?” Anne asked automatically.
“See? Status quo. I rest my case.”
Brooke sighed. “Why does everything have to be a joke with you?”
“She isn’t dying, Bee.” Claire turned back to Anne. “You’re not dying. Right?” A tiny voice crack cut into her bossiness. Maybe she’d been worried, too. For once, Claire had arrived on time.
“No, I’m not dying. I’m perfectly healthy, as always. Honestly, do I need to have an ulterior motive for inviting my two beautiful daughters to lunch?”
“Yes,” Brooke said.
“For our entire adult lives,” Claire added.
Below the patio, the ocean waves crashed loudly, as if in agreement.
Great. Five minutes in and they were headed for a train wreck.
Anne was already regretting the impulsive invitation she’d texted Claire and Brooke yesterday, soon after she’d calmed down.
At the time, it had seemed like a good idea—a way to wash off the embarrassing emotional mess she’d made all over Sadie.
What were kids for if you couldn’t rely on them to distract you from yourself?
“I’d just like to catch up with you both.
Hear how your lives are going. Is that a crime? ”
Brooke looked at her watch. “Well, if you’re not dying, then you should both know that I can’t stay for more than an hour. Maverick’s soccer game is at two.”
“And I had to break a date,” Claire announced, “so whatever this actually is, it better be good.”
Surprise crinkled Anne’s forehead without her consent, a good reminder to book her next Botox appointment. “I didn’t know you were seeing someone new.”
“Staying in bed until one in the afternoon and dropping my phone on my face while I try to watch videos of failed public marriage proposals counts as a date. With myself.”
“I see,” Anne deadpanned. “I’m so proud.”
“You always make that very clear, Mom. Thank you.”
The waiter appeared with the bottle of wine Anne had ordered. After the obligatory taste, he spent no time waiting for her approval before filling their glasses.
All three of them drank simultaneously.
“Brooke, how are the kids?” Anne asked politely. “Is Maverick still eating Kleenex? Has the baby—oh, help me out here, what milestones are you supposed to hit by six months?”
“See, she can’t remember your baby’s terrible name either,” Claire stage-whispered to Brooke.
“Kaisley’s eight months old,” Brooke said, “Colton’s the one who used to eat Kleenex, and okay, what the hell, you literally never bring up my kids. What’s going on with you?”
Anne opened her mouth to say nothing, nothing’s going on, everything’s fine, but instead, she blurted out, “Sadie might move to New York.”
Her daughters stared at her, and just then, the waiter reappeared with his tablet and inquisitive expression, clearly about to take their orders.
Claire turned her head and glowered at him.
The waiter immediately did an about-face, racing off toward another booth.
Once they were alone again, Claire turned her attention back to Anne. Her eyes, the same shade of blue as the afternoon sky, pinned Anne like a insect against a display. “Elaborate.”
As concisely and dispassionately as she could, Anne relayed the news of Sadie’s job offer.
“And I had—well, honestly, I didn’t handle the news very well.
” Brooke and Claire didn’t need to know the details.
The fact of her panic attack was bad enough; attempting to explain it would be even worse. “It was upsetting. Understandably.”
“Understandably,” Brooke repeated. She exchanged a quick glance with Claire.
“I saw that,” Anne said immediately. “That look. What’s that look?”
“Nothing. A sister thing.” Claire leaned forward, arms on the table. “I mean, obviously, you’re upset, Mom. Your best friend might be moving three thousand miles away. Freaking out about it is a normal reaction. I mean, not normal for you. But normal.”
The rest of the story refused to crawl out.
Instead, Anne said, “I understand why she’d want the job.
Sadie loves what she does. Really, truly loves it.
” A sharp, little laugh. “God knows I spent those three hours of my life helping her collect seaweed so she could make homemade paper for her students. You don’t do that without a lot of love. I mean, Sadie wouldn’t.”
“Sadie loves you, too.” For once, Claire’s voice carried no sting. “Clearly.”
“What do you mean by ‘clearly’?” Anne took a long swig out of her wineglass and didn’t ask: What do you mean by love?
“We all know emotions really aren’t my thing, but come on, Mom, the way she looks at you with those big eyes? It’s exactly the way my dog looks at me when she wants me to take off my socks so she can eat them. You know how much Sarah Jessica Barker loves eating socks.”
So they’d all seen how Sadie looked at her. Like a sock-eating mutt, apparently. Anne didn’t know how to feel about that.
“And Sadie talks about you constantly when you’re not in the room.
It’s always ‘Anne thinks this’ and ‘Anne said that’ and ‘Anne could glare the enamel off teeth’ and ‘Anne’s laugh sounds like the offspring of a wind chime and a wood thrush’ and ‘Don’t be too hard on your mother, Claire, she tries her best.’”
“Sadie said not to be hard on me?” That was news to Anne.
“Repeatedly. It’s extremely annoying.”
“She said something else, too, when she told me about the job.” Get it out, just state this fact, that’s all that it is, it’s just a fact.
“Sadie said that she hadn’t decided yet what she wants to do.
Except—she knows that—that she doesn’t want to live without me.
That she can’t live without me. Isn’t that—? ”
Sweet, kind, nice. Any of those bland words would do just fine, but instead, in horror, Anne could feel the tears rising in her throat. She held her eyes open without blinking as long as she could to keep any drops from falling.
“Mom.” Brooke looked alarmed. “Shit. Are you crying?”
“Oh my God, she’s crying,” Claire said helplessly, and turned to Brooke. “Bee, she’s crying. Do something.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Brooke hissed.
“Why are you asking me? Which one of us has seventeen children?”
“Three, and just because I have kids doesn’t mean I know how to—”
Anne, blinking furiously to get it all out of the way, managed, “There’s nothing to handle. I’m fine. It’s just—I can’t stop thinking about what Sadie said. Because the thing is—” She could get this out. “The thing is that I don’t think I can live without Sadie either.”
Brooke and Claire stared at her, slightly open-mouthed.
“Would somebody please tell me what that means?” Anne wailed, and then immediately slammed her mouth shut. The other people on the patio might not want to witness an existential breakdown.
“Mommy,” Claire said quietly. Anne felt the old name like a pull in her stomach. “Are you trying to tell us you have feelings for Sadie?”
“Obviously I have feelings for her,” Anne snapped. She wiped her wet cheek with the corner of her napkin. “She’s my best friend.”
“Fantastic, you’re going to make me spell it out for you so we can all be even more uncomfortable. Mom, are you trying to tell us that you have romantic feelings for Sadie? Please respond in a way that traumatizes the two of us as little as possible.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Claire, I’m not a lesbian. Don’t be ridiculous.”
It was preposterous for her daughter to even suggest it, as if the problem was that Anne just lacked the sophistication to understand what was going on.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
She wasn’t some uncultured rube; throughout her life she’d come across a number of gay women, enough for her to know plenty about what lesbians were like.
At Dartmouth, she’d had an androgynous-looking women’s studies professor who’d once alluded vaguely to her “significant other.” The mother of one of Brooke’s childhood friends had cut her hair alarmingly short after her husband’s death, then moved in with a woman.
A few of the agents at Backlight Artists Agency over the years had obviously been of that persuasion.
And that feminist group Anne had visited exactly once when the girls were little was full of them, looking like they’d stepped right out of that one chapter of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
It wasn’t wrong to be a lesbian. Of course not. This was the twenty-first century. Being a lesbian was perfectly fine, if you happened to be one.
Anne just wasn’t anything like those women.
She replenished her glass.
“What I think Mom is saying,” Brooke interjected, “is that she has really intense feelings for Sadie, and she wants to be around Sadie all the time, and she can’t stop thinking about Sadie, and she’d do gross things just to make Sadie happy, and she’s realized that she can’t live without Sadie, and that talking about it even a little makes her cry in an extremely public place, but all that doesn’t mean she’s in love with Sadie. Right?”
At least one of Anne’s daughters was able to frame this reasonably. “Yes. Thank you, Brooke.”