Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
“He already had the ring,” Marly told me, looking at the ring on the finger of the girl in the photograph.
The same ring was still on her finger, I saw.
“The idiot planned to propose to me. Even though he thought I was already engaged.” She shook her head, still clearly pleased, all these years later.
“And he didn’t even know I was knocked up!
” Marly turned the page and there were the wedding photos, Marly and her belly in a pink dress, with a cap and veil and a little bouquet of daisies and Freddie in his uniform, still beaming from ear to ear.
“How did he take it when he found out you were pregnant?” I asked. I took a sip of the hot chocolate, and the sweetness flooded me. I felt better.
I remembered telling Tim I was pregnant.
I’d taken the test in the bathroom at the mall, straight after buying it from the pharmacy.
I’d sat in the cubicle, watching the line form and knowing my whole life had changed in an instant.
Telling Tim had been terrifying—mostly because I’d had a gut instinct how he’d take it.
We’d been sitting on his bed, and he’d unconsciously leaned away from me as I spoke.
He said all the right things, because he was always a nice guy, but there was a new haunted look in his eye.
And he never quite looked at me the same way again.
Although, I don’t suppose I ever looked at him the same way again either.
“Oh, it was exactly as I thought it would be.” Marly rolled her eyes, looking for a moment like Lainey.
“We fought. I said I wouldn’t marry him in a million years.
He said he’d ask me every day of his life ’til I said yes.
I said go ahead. We fought some more. And then, well, you know what it’s like, there’s a moment where it all comes tumbling down around you.
And then you stop fighting and start listening.
And you say I love you and fall into bed and live happily ever after until the next fight.
” There was a wealth of bittersweet love in her voice.
Jake had never talked about Freddie, I realized. His grandfather. And he hadn’t been at the school play. My stomach squeezed with sympathy as I watched Marly turn the page of the photo album. What must it be like to lose the love of your life?
Soon after the wedding photos there were baby photos. A round-cheeked baby girl with bright blue eyes.
“Jake’s mom,” Marly said, her voice fragile with sadness. “Amber.”
“You called her Amber?” That fact filled me with delight. I glanced at the book on the table, and the postcards dotted through it.
Marly gave me a sideways smile. “Nobody thinks I’m a romantic, but I have my moments. I was reading that book the night I met her father.”
As Marly turned the pages of the photo album, I saw Jake’s mom grow up.
Playing in the garden at Tinker Street; making sandcastles on the little horseshoe beach with her dad; sitting on the swing on the back porch, surrounded by dolls and teddy bears; laughing at a local carnival, holding a Kewpie doll in one hand and a candy apple in another.
All those sun-splashed days by the coast, smiling and dimpled, in the summer house where she was conceived and born and loved.
My house had always been Marly’s place in my head; I’d never really had a clear picture of Jake’s mom as a person, even though I’d been clearing out her junk all these months. And developing feelings for her son. But seeing these photos of her as a kid made her seem real to me for the first time.
I could see why Amber had wanted to live on Tinker Street as her memories melted away. It was somewhere that had cocooned her with love. I felt a stab of pure jealousy as I traced her childhood through the album. I wished I could have grown up in that house too, with all that love.
The last photo in the album showed Amber at around Flo’s age; she was holding a kitten like it was a baby and grinning gap-toothed at the camera.
In the background Marly was standing on the black-and-white checked linoleum I recognized from the kitchen, a vinyl record dangling from her hand. She was laughing.
“Freddie took that,” Marly said softly. “I remember that day like it was yesterday. Just an ordinary day.” She sighed and closed the album. “The best ones always are.”
“Not all of them,” I said, remembering the ordinary days with Tina.
My childhood couldn’t have been further from these photographs.
I wondered when Freddie had died. Had it been while he was in the army?
In Vietnam maybe? Had he left Marly a single mother?
Had she had the same starkly lonely experience of parenthood that I’d had?
Marly considered me. She reached out and took my hand.
“Jake told me not to pester you, but what do men know? A trouble shared is a trouble halved. So, do you want to tell me about it?” There was something so direct and disarming about her.
She wasn’t motherly exactly. It was more that she saw me.
She looked me dead in the eye and didn’t flinch.
“I think I just sent my mother back to prison.” The words came out bluntly, brutally.
She still didn’t flinch. “Is this a story that requires something stronger than hot chocolate?”
I started crying again, and for the second time that night my whole past flooded out of me, like a dam had collapsed under the pressure of it. I thought I had nothing more to unburden after the Nar-Anon family meeting, but it turned out I had a lot left to say.
And Marly was a good listener. “Mothers put you through the wringer, don’t they?” she said eventually, sighing. “My mother broke my heart slowly, too, although in a different way.” She gave me a kind, sad look. “Life comes with its share of grief.”
“I don’t want it,” I said quietly, panic rising at the thought of these feelings lasting forever.
“Of course you do. If you want the good, you’ve got to take the bad.”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t. I don’t want good or bad. I just want simple and ordinary. Boring.”
Marly rolled her eyes again, reminding me even more strongly of Lainey. And of Flo. It was that preteen eye roll. “Even boring has pain attached to it,” she told me. “No one gets away without hurting.”
“But how do you survive it?” I wailed. “How did you cope, losing your mom and Amber and Freddie?”
She frowned at me.
“Life’s just misery.” I burst into tears again. “And it just keeps hurting. I don’t want to lose people.” The thought of raising Flo only to lose her made me feel wild with pain. And the thought of her one day losing me and being alone in the world hurt even worse.
“But you don’t just lose them,” she told me, exasperated, tapping the photo album. “You get to have them too.”
I shook my head. “No. You get to borrow them. Look at your daughter. Look at Freddie. All that love and then all you end up with is a house filled with junk.”
“You’ve got everything backward.” She was frowning in earnest now.
But before she could say anything more, we were interrupted by a commotion in the hall and we felt a blast of cold air billow through the house.
“Zoe?” Jake burst in and all but hauled me off his grandmother’s couch and into his arms. “I’m so sorry, honey.
” He pressed his cold lips to my forehead, then my cheeks and my lips, as though he were trying to kiss my tears away.
“I should have told him not to call the police until I’d talked to you again. ”
I closed my eyes and pressed my face to his chest. I didn’t remember the last time I’d been held so tight. It filled me with a golden warmth so strong I could barely breathe. “It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered now that he was here. It was like his arms kept the world at bay.
What was happening to my mother was my fault, not his. If his cousin hadn’t called the police, they still would have picked her up. Because of me.
“It does matter. You matter.” He pressed a fierce kiss to my lips.
“What matters is you didn’t take your boots off at the door,” Marly scolded him, pushing him off her rug. “Let the poor girl breathe, and get your wet feet off my floor.”
“I’m sorry I took so long to get here. The girls took forever to round up.” He shot Marly an irritated look as she separated us.
“You can kiss her to death later. For now, I want you to drive us somewhere.” Marly took me by the arm and pulled me with her toward the entryway.
“Drive somewhere? Where?” Jake was irritated as he followed after us.
“Hush up and come on.”
I realized where we were going as we drove past the sign. The Sea View Care Home was on a hill overlooking the sprawl of Camden and the harbor. It was still decorated for Christmas and colored lights twinkled through the falling snow.
“This isn’t a good idea,” Jake protested. “She’s exhausted. The last thing she needs is this.”
“She’s fine. I was there before supper and she looked fresh as a daisy.”
“I meant Zoe, not Mom.”
I agreed with him. I was in no state to meet his mother. I was crumpled and worn and running on empty.
“We’re tired,” he pleaded with his grandmother.
But Marly was determined. And she was intimidating when she was determined.
“Just be warned, Amber’s not much of a talker anymore,” she told me, as she jammed her hat on her head and left the car. “But there’s something you need to see.”
“What does she want me to see?” I whispered to Jake as he opened the passenger door and took my hand to help me out.
“Hell if I know,” he admitted. He reached out to zip my jacket up to my chin. He had snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes.
“We don’t have to do this right now if you don’t want to,” I told him.
Jake nodded. “I know. But, I mean…” He bit his lip and gave me a shy look. “I was planning to introduce you soon. If you wanted to…”
I did want to. Just maybe not after turning my mother in and crying my face off.
“Come on!” Marly insisted.
“It’s up to you,” Jake said quietly.
I glanced at Marly, who was giving us an impatient look, and sighed. “Well, I guess we’re here now…”