Chapter Fourteen Augusta #3
Augusta slammed the car door and spun to face her, hot with anger. “Did you know, Fran?”
“What? Augusta—”
“Did you know about Colin and Eben?” Augusta was suddenly done being Diana Spencer. She couldn’t go another moment in the dark. She needed to know who was with her, who was against her.
“I did. But it was between you and Colin. Or Colin and Eben,” Fran stammered.
“I can’t believe you. You’re a shitty friend.”
“No,” Fran tried.
“Did Van know? Did he tell Caroline?”
“No, it was me. I didn’t mean to—”
So there it was. “I will never, ever forgive you,” Augusta spat, getting into the car and slamming the door. She left Fran standing there and pulled quickly away, aware that she was shaking with rage.
“Mommy, what happened?” asked Charlie.
“Nothing, sweetie,” Augusta croaked, swiping at her eyes. She was crying and trying so hard to fight it. “You were so good and I am so very proud of you. I just got a bad headache and so that’s why I’m sad.”
“Poor Mommy,” Charlie said quietly. “When we go home, I’ll get you a snack.”
Jane and Beatrix were still awake when they walked in the door, but Augusta couldn’t face them.
She asked Zoey to stay for another hour and start the bedtime routine while she went back out for a bit.
She was crying and she drove aimlessly, off toward the castle, but it was dark and the gates would be closed, so she turned around and headed downtown.
As she crossed over the Choate Bridge, she saw the lights twinkling in the pub and, on impulse, pulled into one of the parking spots out front.
She would sit alongside the old men and drink a glass of wine and stare at the game.
The wine would be bad, and the game would be baseball?
Basketball? She didn’t even know, but she just couldn’t be home.
She found a seat and ordered from the woman behind the bar, an older lady with dry blond hair in a clip and gold necklaces that fell across her tan, crepey throat. The wine wasn’t good, but it was cold and she drank it quickly and ordered a second.
She was furious with Fran. Furious to realize just how foolish she had been.
If Fran knew about Colin and Eben then so did RJ.
Van must have known too. And her own mother, Augusta realized with a start.
How could her mother have missed it? Augusta was the only one who hadn’t seen what was right in front of her face.
What was the most humiliating part? Was it that he had been with her brother, or that he had kept it a secret?
Would she be more or less upset if Colin had slept with a sister?
The fact that he had been with a man felt like an implicit rejection, or a double-layered deceit.
He had hidden more than a relationship, but some part of himself.
And she had shared everything with him, even the hard and shameful bits.
She had told him about the time she’d passed out on a sofa in an off-campus house in college and woken up to find cigarettes stuffed up her nose, boys she didn’t know taking her picture.
She told him about a one-night stand and broken condom at age twenty, the pharmacy clerk who refused to give her the morning-after pill for religious reasons, the gray dawn hours she spent driving around trying to find a Plan B.
She showed him how she liked to be touched, where she wanted to be kissed.
Colin was her intimate, her holder of secrets, her most sanctified.
And yet he had kept this huge and heartbreaking thing locked away from her.
And he had let it become a wedge between her and her own brother.
Augusta finished her second glass of wine and then a third.
The crowd at the bar was turning, the kitchen closed, the old men eating fish and chips went home to bed, and only the true drunks remained.
When the baseball game ended, the bar down the street at Riverview locked up and there was a changing of the guard, a flood of new bodies arriving at the pub.
When Augusta felt hands on her shoulders she turned; it was Van’s friend Stavros, wasted and grinning hugely to see her there.
They hugged like they were long-lost sailors meeting by chance at a tropical island port.
Stavros was drinking whiskey and made Augusta take a sip.
She locked her eyes on his and bolted the entire glass in one and he cheered and called for another round.
The rest of the night Augusta would only ever be able to remember in flashes: shots of tequila, spilling the contents of her purse on the pub’s bathroom floor, leaning against Stavros on the sidewalk, dropping her keys on her own lawn.
Had she really driven that drunk? Of the many things she would never forgive herself for, that would remain near the top.
She must have given Zoey money, Zoey must have seen the whole thing.
Augusta and Stavros had opened a bottle of red wine—she would discover a dark stain on the counter in the morning—then they were in her bed, and she remembered nothing more.