Chapter 22
The brunch was perfect.
Oh, things went terribly wrong. Half of the mini pancakes Claire had made were burned at the edges.
Somehow, the waffle iron set off the smoke detector, making Kaisley shriek even louder than she had that morning.
They’d had to toss the parfaits, since the Greek yogurt tasted just a bit off.
And right before Hal had finished the frittatas, Colton ran face-first into the kitchen counter and cut his lip open, subsequently requiring some quiet time on the couch with cotton gauze, his father, and his iPad.
But none of that mattered one bit because Anne couldn’t take her eyes off Sadie.
Sadie sat where she always did when they all gathered at Anne’s house, at the other end of the dining room table. In the middle of a passionate conversation with Arthur, her hands were fluttering in the air like birds.
Once she’d told Anne that it wasn’t just an ADHD thing, using your hands to talk; it was Jewish, too.
Something about prayer and inherited memory.
Anne had no reason to doubt her, but she suspected there was more to it than neurodivergence and ancestry.
Sadie’s hands had to fly because they were an essential part of her personal language.
She spoke not just in sentences, but with her dancing hands, her lifted chin, her crinkled nose, her keen eyes.
With her full-bodied, volcanic, and beautiful laugh.
At Anne’s end of the table, Talisha and Brooke were intently debating the best way to get to Larchmont from Mar Vista.
Sure, you could take the 10, but there was always so much traffic where it met the 405, and honestly, Beverly Boulevard really wasn’t a bad through route, when you got right down to it—
“What’s your pick, Anne?” Talisha asked. “The freeway? Or streets?”
“I never go east of La Brea if I can help it,” Anne said vaguely and placed her fork down on her half-empty plate.
She was staring at Sadie’s smile, which seemed even brighter than it normally did.
And she was listening to Sadie’s deep laugh as she cracked up over something Arthur had said, threw her head back, displayed that long, lovely throat.
Sadie’s crow’s feet rayed out from her dark eyes.
At this distance, Anne could only see them because Sadie was lit up with her delight, grinning widely.
For years, Anne had wondered why Sadie wouldn’t try some remedy that would make time a little friendlier: Botox or a chemical peel or at least retinol.
But Sadie had always dismissed those options.
I love my crow’s feet, she’d told Anne once.
They’re a history of my happiness. Thank God I’m marked by all that laughter. Thank God it stuck around.
Anne hadn’t been able to hear Sadie then, but she heard her now.
All that pleasure Sadie had etched into her skin over a lifetime: the proof of an existence filled with joy.
Some of it she’d told Anne about, and some Anne had witnessed herself.
The first time Sadie’s poetry had appeared in print.
Hal’s high school debate team performances.
A truly excellent burger. Hearing the lowest note in a handbell choir.
The news of Talisha’s pregnancy. Rabbi Aviva’s best sermons.
Her long-gone father’s bad jokes. How waves curled around stranded kelp and took it back home.
A new fountain pen. Spinning in the desert.
When she kissed those lines, she’d kiss Sadie’s history, and her future joy, too.
Without knowing she was going to speak, Anne did, her voice raised. “Sadie.”
Instantly, the conversation around the table fell silent. Everyone looked in her direction, Sadie included, forks and glasses paused en route, as they waited for what came next.
“I love you,” Anne said simply. “I love you so much.”
Sadie stared at her, and in no more than a second, those red stains on her cheeks returned as her mouth opened with obvious astonishment.
Barely daring to let it out of her mouth, Anne whispered, “Sadie?”
Sadie burst into loud tears.
“Oh boy,” Claire said under her breath.
That broke the spell. A sudden clatter of noise joined Sadie’s sobs as everyone else stood, almost in unison, and Anne could hear, faintly, the sound of Brooke telling Maverick that everything was okay, that Sadie would be just fine, that she just needed some alone time with Grandma Anne—come on, let’s all go outside, let’s go, let’s go.
Anne had said it. She’d finally said it. And she’d made Sadie cry. Anne’s limbs didn’t want to work—she was frozen, couldn’t get up from her chair.
“Mom,” Hal exclaimed and rushed over to Sadie. He was the only other person still at the table besides Anne. “Mom, what can I get you, what do you need?”
Sadie covered her face with her hands. She shook her head back and forth, wordless, cries jerking out of her bent body as Hal crouched down next to her.
Anne’s chest ached with distress. Why was Sadie crying? Didn’t she want to hear those words? Should Anne have said it differently?
“Hal,” Talisha said, from the French doors. “We need to let them be alone for a while, okay? Come outside. Please.”
Hal made a sound of protest. “But she needs me. You weren’t there when Dad left her—you don’t get it—”
“This isn’t like that, baby,” Talisha told him very gently. “You can talk to your mom later. I think she needs Anne right now.”
Still crying, face hidden, Sadie nodded her agreement.
“Hal?” Brooke was calling from outside. “I need to show you something, okay? Like, right now? This second? It’s out here, and it’s really important, so, uh, could you just come over here?”
“It’s called tact,” Claire hollered. “We’d like to introduce you.”
Hal looked between his wife and mother, then landed, finally, on Anne. “I can trust her with you?” he asked quietly. “You promise? You’ll take care of her? You’ll treat her right?” His tight expression held back years of pain.
“I promise,” Anne told him, with all the sincerity she felt. She held his gaze until he nodded, seemingly satisfied, and followed Talisha out onto the back deck.
With the door closed, Anne and Sadie finally had a bit of privacy. Well, as long as their families kept their backs to the dining room windows and doors—which, thankfully, they seemed to be doing.
Heart pounding in her throat, Anne finally found the strength to take the chair next to Sadie, scooting it as close as she could get.
Sadie hadn’t removed her hands from her face. Another observer might’ve read it as an attempt to hide, but Anne knew better. Just another kind of touch, that was all, one that soothed Sadie and connected her to herself.
“Sadie,” she said, pulling gently at Sadie’s wrists. “Honey. Please look at me. Just let me see your face. Come on.”
After a moment, Sadie relented. Her face was wet and creased with effort, and when she finally spoke, the words were crammed with tears.
“You what?” Anne took Sadie’s hands in her own and squeezed. “Stared? I don’t understand.”
“Scared,” Sadie exclaimed, hiccuping through her halting confession. “I was. So scared. That you. Would never say it. Out loud. You haven’t. Not once. Not in. Four years.”
“Are you saying you didn’t know how I felt about you?” Guilt, sudden and terrible, twisted in Anne’s stomach. Oh God. She’d thought—assumed—she’d tried to show Sadie, even when the right words wouldn’t come—
“Oh, I knew.” Sadie was still crying. “Especially after this past week. The way you look at me, everything you’ve said to me.
Wanting to commit to me for the rest of our lives.
Of course I know you love me. But—” Another hiccup.
“But it’s one thing to know it, and another thing to hear you say it out loud, when I wasn’t sure you ever would.
I convinced myself it was all right. What mattered was how you made me feel and what you did, not what you said.
That you just weren’t the kind of person who put your feelings into words.
That it wasn’t anything like—him, hiding from me.
Because you told me you were done hiding, and I trust you, I do.
Then—this.” Her wet face was bright with awe and joy.
“And—oh, Anne, it was in front of our families, too. Like you wanted everyone to know exactly how you feel.”
Finally, it clicked. Even though Anne believed that actions mattered most, she was in love with a woman who’d been eviscerated by her ex-husband’s words.
Sadie, a poet, needed words to heal.
Language fails. Speak anyway.
“Before this past week, I didn’t think I needed to say it out loud,” Anne began, and then, “No. That isn’t true.
I couldn’t let myself say it. Because I knew on some level that it meant more than it was supposed to mean.
” She swept Sadie’s hair away from her face with both hands. “I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long.”
Sadie sniffed loudly, and a few more tears fell. “Does that mean you don’t mind saying it now? Because I really do need you to tell me you love me sometimes. I thought I could be fine without it, but I was wrong.”
“I was scared, too,” Anne said quietly. “Not just to say it. To mean it. Because I mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything in my whole life. But I’m not scared now.”
With her palms pressing against the sides of Sadie’s temples, she leaned in and kissed one cheek.
Said, again, “I love you,” her own eyes stinging with new tears, and she kissed the wet cheek a second time, her mouth gentle on Sadie’s paper-soft skin.
“I love you.” Salt bit at her lips as she moved to kiss Sadie’s nose, kiss the creases on either side of her eyes, kiss her other cheek, her forehead, her chin.
“I love you, my beloved—my darling—my dearest—I love you.”
Sadie gasped, shook, cried in what seemed like pure, helpless relief.
“You’re the love of my life, Sadie. I’ll tell you every single day for as long as we live. I’ll tell the world, too. I will. I will. I promise—”
Then, for the first time in nearly a week, they were kissing.
Sadie made faint sounds as her fingers threaded through Anne’s hair. She grabbed at Anne like she wanted to take anything she could touch, pull Anne’s body into her own and make the two indistinguishable.
Anne kissed Sadie until distance became a lie. Her cheeks were wet with Sadie’s relief.
“My love,” Sadie said softly against Anne’s mouth, after a minute or so.
“Yes?” Anything. Anything Sadie wanted. Especially if she kept using that husky voice.
“Will you do something for me?”
Anne would get Sadie the sun using only her bare hands. “What?”
“Go tell our families to clear out, would you?” She rubbed her nose against Anne’s, a gesture that managed to be both absurd and delightful at the same time. “I need to be alone with you.”
“Couldn’t I just yell at them from right here?” Anne was only partially joking. Pulling away from Sadie felt near impossible. “Believe me, I can be loud enough.”
“Oh,” Sadie said, “I believe you completely,” and kissed her again, little kisses. And again and again. “I’ll give you a chance to prove it later.”
With the heat of that promise, Anne used her less-than-steady legs to get herself from the table to the French doors. She opened them, stepping out.
Every adult on that deck was staring at her. At some point, clearly, they’d turned around.
“Great job, Mom?” Brooke said brightly, and her voice scaled up at the end of her sentence, as though asking a question. She bounced Kaisley in her arms a little too hard. “It’s so great? That we just saw our mothers make out with each other? On Mother’s Day?”
“We’re very happy for you,” Hal added, his eyes extremely wide. “That, uh, absolutely wasn’t incredibly weird to see. At all. For any of us.”
Maverick and Colton appeared temporarily distracted by the garden hose, but everyone else seemed to be in various stages of processing. The one exception was James, who had a silly grin on his face. He elbowed Arthur in the ribs, hard, not even doing Anne the courtesy of trying to hide it.
“Stop,” Arthur said in a stage whisper, and smacked at James’s arm. “Okay, okay, okay. Fine. You were right! You were right. I owe you a pomegranate margarita.”
“And a California burrito,” James informed him.
Anne would not be embarrassed. Not when she felt this proud of herself.
“That’s right,” she said. The floor beneath her feet was solid, but it didn’t feel quite real. “I’m in love with Sadie. And she’s in love with me. I take it everyone’s on board with that?”
Still looking like he’d stood up too fast, Hal nodded. So did Brooke and Dan. Talisha’s smile was nearly as large as James’s.
Claire lifted her drink in the air and said, “To Mom One and Mom Two officially making the Rosenthal-Clark-Emmerman-Lowells the gayest family on record. May your cars always be Subarus, may your Girls always be Indigo, and may your season tickets for women’s soccer be heavily discounted.”
Anne didn’t like soccer or Subarus, and she had no idea why girls would ever be indigo. But she smiled appreciatively at Claire.
“Congratulations, Anne.” It was James’s turn to lift his glass. “Tell you what. Name the day, and Arthur and I’ll take you and Sadie out to that new bistro near Point Dume to celebrate properly. A date, just like old times. Except there’s one obvious difference.”
“We’ll be happy,” Anne said, surprising herself.
The grin on James’s face faltered, faded. And then, just when she’d started to worry he hadn’t understood her after all, a different smile replaced it, this one very tender and just a little bit melancholy.
“That’s right, kid,” he said gently. “We’ll both be happy.”