Chapter 50
All the innate Thank you, Sheriff, I’ll deal with it from here politeness vanished when the two men left, and Mom paced and raged at Anna, who sat slumped at the kitchen table with her head in her hands.
“You’re going back to therapy as soon as I can get you an appointment.
You’ll have to come in and do it at the hospital where I work. ”
“I’m fine, Mom.” She wanted to smoke. She wanted to get out of here. The heat coming through the window glass was intense, a spotlight of fire on her, brightening everything and making her eyes hurt.
“Fine?” Mom’s pacing stopped momentarily.
“Explain what about any of this is fine. Aside from the fact we’re new here and you’re already causing trouble, you threatened Lucas to make him break up with me?
” She shook her head, still in disbelief.
“You saw how hurt I was, Anna. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, you accused him of murder. ”
“For the last time, I didn’t accuse him.” She barely had the energy to speak. “I was curious how hard they’d investigated. And he worked at the school.” What was the point? She couldn’t make Mom understand.
“It worries me that you actually believe your own excuses.”
“Maybe it was too soon, Claire.” Grandma had poured two glasses of iced tea and put one in front of Anna and another on the table for Mom. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d come inside, and Anna and her mother looked at her. Both of them surprised. Mom more than Anna.
“Too soon?”
“I know you think I’m a prude, and perhaps I am.
” She poured her own tea. “I have my values and my religion and I try to live in God’s good grace.
But I understand that you’re lonely, Claire.
I understand you might want some male company, maybe even to fall in love again.
But I can also understand why it upset Anna.
Maybe it was too soon to have a man stay over.
” She pulled out a chair and sat down carefully, feathery-light and birdlike in her careful movements.
Face as prim as her blouse buttoned up to the top despite the heat.
“Perhaps you should have stayed at his place if you’d wanted … well, that sort of thing.”
“Stayed at his place?” Mom’s voice dropped, as if the anger had been punched from her guts.
She stared at her mother and then her daughter in disbelief before letting out a small laugh so full of despair it could make angels cry.
There were fresh bags under her eyes. Dry patches on her cheeks.
Anna and Grandma were pushing Mom into disrepair.
“And tell me how I could do that,” she said.
“Go out for a whole night as if I don’t have a care in the world.
Leave you both. You’re never here when you’re supposed to be, Anna, as if you’re still a selfish teenager coming and going as you please, and you know, that’s almost fine, apart from we have Mom to think about, and it’s not your fault, Mom, I know, but it’s hard worrying all the time that you’re going to have a moment and wander off or fall over or turn the stove on with a dish towel on it or a million other things that I know can happen. ”
She barely breathed, the words coming out in one long sentence, from broken, tired heart straight to mouth.
“I am the only adult in this house because you don’t help me, Anna, and you can’t, Mom.
I work all the hours I can in a hospital I have to drive an hour there and back to get to, and while I’m working, I see everything bad that can happen to people, and that includes what happened to you, Anna, and what’s happening to you, Mom, and I’m sorry for you both, I really am, but Jesus Christ, I’m so tired of having to look after everyone. ”
Anna and her grandmother stared silently in horror as Mom fought back tears and shook her head, staring at the floor as if she couldn’t believe she was having to explain any of this.
“And now Caroline has gotten her period and so that’s my one ally in this house—and I am grateful for the house, Mom, I really am—about to turn into a teenage hormonal monster sure to blame every slight thing that goes wrong in her world on me.
” She paused, whole body shaking. “I feel so old. I’ve felt so old for such a long time, and then there was suddenly something—someone—who liked me.
Liked me for myself. And maybe it was too soon, and maybe I should have stayed at his place and let whatever calamity might happen here happen, but I just wanted to feel like a normal woman for once in my own home.
” She took a breath, holding herself together.
“I thought you would both allow me that.”
Time stopped in the silence that followed.
Anna thought that if she looked at her iced tea, the condensation droplets on the side would have paused their slow roll down the glass, and the second hand on the hallway clock would be hovering between numbers.
All of Mom’s frustration and pain and upset and how did my life come to this hung in that frozen moment.
“I’m sorry, Claire,” Grandma said at last. “We’ll do better.” She darted a look at Anna, stern and commanding, clearly requiring Anna to add her apology.
Anna scoured inside herself for something she could say to make it better. Her dry mouth, the iced tea untouched, worked for a moment or two, trying to find the right shape for the words.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled eventually. And then, without warning, other words tumbled out, determined to be heard, defiant. “But I still don’t think Jamie’s death was an accident.”
And Mom exploded all over again.