Chapter Twenty-Two #3
They had tried to lie in bed together, and it had been too much for both of them.
When Maeve heard Sam’s muffled sobs, she’d rolled over onto her side, tried to comfort him.
He’d flinched, out of what she read as disgust. That was when he grabbed his pillow a second time and slept on the couch again.
Dylan was eleven and old enough to know something was up—Maeve had noticed him averting his eyes, ducking out when conversations went ice cold—but savvy enough to keep his head down and not ask questions.
Sam spent more nights out, used bowling for an excuse, though Maeve suspected he was sitting in his office at work until the last possible moment, slipping in late with murmurs of “accounting” and “inventory.” The solution was to make a demarcation line down the middle of the bed with pillows.
They slept with their backs to each other.
A temporary solution to a permanent problem.
Maeve’s other problem was Wendy.
It was one thing that the marriage had failed.
The reason it failed was an entirely different problem.
She missed Wendy desperately, but there was something exciting buried underneath all this uncertainty and confrontation and disclosure.
When Maeve called Wendy after that first confrontation with Sam, she’d been sympathetic but encouraging too.
Maeve heard relief in her voice. She’d felt it too.
They talked about really being together, out in public, out with their friends and family.
Out, finally. But there were hurdles to clear first.
“Must be up there,” she said. “Looks like a crowd.”
William parked behind a white utility truck. “Okay, kid. Out with it.”
Maeve took a deep breath, shifted to face him. She had planned to deal with it on the way home, not now, not when they’d have time to talk and talk and talk. She tightened. “Sam’s leaving at the end of summer. It’s over.”
William wrinkled his nose. “Maeve! No! What happened?”
Maeve covered her face. She remembered doing that as a kid, thinking if she couldn’t see her dad, he couldn’t see her. His hand pulled her wrist down, exposing her. She clucked her tongue. “Oh, Daddy. I’m no ray of sunshine, that’s for sure.”
And she told her father, who she revered above all others, about having feelings for someone else and that someone else was a classmate from high school and that they’d reconnected and that one thing led to another.
“How long?”
“More than a year.”
William puffed, straightened his ball cap. “Jesus, Maeve. How did Sam find out?”
She didn’t say anything, just stared him down.
“Oh, no. Poor guy. Well, I know Sam well enough to know he didn’t throw any punches. Not exactly his style. How bad was it, with the other guy?”
A van pulled up behind them, and lookie-loos parked up the street. “We’d better go in,” Maeve said. “We can talk later.”
“Maeve. Come on. It’s me. What happened with the other guy? You’re not still seeing him, I hope. No way you and Sam can make this work if you’re running around with—Jeez, at least it’s not your boss! Who is it? Do I know him?”
Maeve’s skin prickled, and she rubbed her arms like she’d caught a chill. She was not trying to be dramatic, but she couldn’t make herself speak. Once it was out, they could never go back. “It’s Wendy, Dad.”
“What about Wendy? Sam’s not with Wendy! No way. C’mon. He’s no match for her.”
“No. Dad. It’s Wendy. Wendy’s the other guy. Just not, you know, a guy.”
William shifted his attention forward, so Maeve did too. “We better get in that line. Don’t want to miss out on something good.” His voice was low and even.
Maeve’s heart sank. She didn’t know what she’d expected to happen, though she’d run through every scenario. He couldn’t leave her here. He wouldn’t. It wasn’t like him to shout, especially not with so many people around. “Dad. Say something.”
He stared. “Does Mom know?”
The question was a simple one, but the answer was far more complicated.
Maeve thought about that night, years ago, her mother’s expression.
And then when she and Wendy rekindled their friendship, the way her mother had said she didn’t like her, didn’t trust her.
“No. She doesn’t know. I’ll tell her when we get home.
Daddy, if Wendy didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t have bothered telling you.
I know this is hard. She . . .” Maeve choked on the words, thrilled at the thought of saying them out loud.
Pride bloomed like a sprout caught in a time-lapse.
“I love her. I want to be with her. I want you to understand.”
Color rose in William’s cheeks, flushing his hairline. Flustered, he reached for the door handle. “We gotta get in there.”
Maeve followed him up the walk like a chastised child. At the top step of the brick house, he paused. Maeve halted, braced herself. “A lot’s going to change,” her father said. “But not the way I feel about you. Not ever. You understand? Now let’s go hunt treasures.”
After they unloaded the estate sale haul into the barn—a primitive apple cart, a box of depression glass, an oak secretary desk—Maeve begged off. “You mind if I go find Mom? May as well do this now since never isn’t an option anymore.”
The conversation on the way back had been mostly a diversion, though her father had asked about Wendy’s job, whether it was stable. “You think she’ll be around after the summer?”
“I hope so,” Maeve had replied. “Would that be okay with you?”
“Not gonna say it won’t take some getting used to—the idea and all. But I would never turn you away, so I would never turn her away. Easy as that.”
Maeve left her father to sort his antiques and thoughts. Her mother would be anything but easy, never one for airing dirty laundry, not metaphorically or literally. Buttercups creeped along the lattice under the back steps. Glass clanked in the kitchen. Her body told her to run.
Faye sat at the kitchen table, twisted in her chair, bent over a scrap of paper taped to a cutting board.
A child’s watercolor tray in front of her, she dipped a red brush into the muddy water.
“Let me guess,” Maeve said, surprising her mother.
“A seascape. For a woman who’s not fond of boats, you sure do like painting them. ”
“Prettier from the shore to me.”
“A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not where ships are meant to sail,” Maeve said, reciting words from a poster that hung in Opal’s kindergarten classroom.
“So, I hear. Lucky me. I’m not a ship.”
“You want to take a break, sit on the porch with me for a second?” Maeve asked, pushing away from the safety of the dock.
They sat facing each other on the porch in her parents’ wicker chairs, the table between them a growing chasm. Faye went white, stiffened like a stoic. “You didn’t tell him about before, about back in high school?” she asked. “I never did, you know. I kept your secret.”
Maeve couldn’t understand why her mother focused on that detail above all the others as if she deserved a medal for keeping a secret Maeve never asked her to keep in the first place.
“No. I figured—look.” She didn’t want to think about that night, about the way Conor O’Kane had peered into the car, the words he’d said to her, or about the guilt she’d felt watching a dead man’s boots go out the door.
“That’s the past. I want to focus on these next couple of months.
I have to think about Dylan and Opal. And Sam. I never meant to hurt him.”
“Poor Sam! So, your father . . . he was fine with . . . with Wendy and all?”
“I wouldn’t say fine, but he said that there was nothing I could tell him that would make him stop loving me.”
Faye’s eyebrows twitched and flicked like she was having a complete and separate conversation in her head.
“That’s always seemed so strange to me, when people say things like that.
Of course, you could say something—or do something—that could change everything.
Even dogs run away when they’re treated badly. Love is full of conditions.”
“I think he meant I didn’t need to keep anything about myself secret from him.”
“Well,” her mother said, a million miles away.
“Are we going to be okay, Mom? You and me?”
Her mother refocused, returned to their conversation. “Like you said, you’ve got a lot to deal with, the kids, Sam. With Wendy, I suppose. Your job. You’ll have to call Molly. She’ll be disappointed. You know she looks up to you.”
There was that word Maeve feared. Disappointed.
She nearly doubled over. “Does she, Mom? Look up to me? I’m not so sure about that.
” It occurred to her then. “Wait. Do you have conditions for loving me? Which is worse: That my marriage fell apart or that I was in bed with Wendy? Is it worse that I’m a cheater or that I’m a lesbian?
You made it pretty clear a long time ago that I was an embarrassment to you.
I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you thought I was.
” If that hurt her mother, Maeve didn’t care.
She was done pretending. She sat up straight, wished Wendy was there to hear her say the word, to own her feelings after all these years.
“Maeve! That’s not true. I have loved you every single day of your life. I will always love you. You are not an embarrassment. Not at all.”
She could not read her mother’s face, flushed now, her expression far away again like she was trying to remember the verses of a poem or the thing she’d forgotten from a long list. Finally, “I don’t understand why you would choose such a difficult path, is all.”
“Mom. I didn’t choose. I want what you and Dad have—a happy life, children, the whole thing. As much as I have that with Sam, I hid this part of myself, even from myself. I thought I could keep faking it. Then Sam found out, and it spilled all over the place into this mess.”
Her mother shook her head like she’d been swarmed by bees. “I can’t believe your father threw up his hands and accepted this.”
“Why are you so shocked by that? You don’t give him enough credit.”
“But you lied to us. I would have thought . . .”
Maeve bit her tongue, remembering that it was her mother who told her to keep the part about Wendy a secret.
It would break his heart, she’d said. There was no use trying to fix blame.
This was simply the way it unfolded. “If I lied, I did it because I thought I had to. I was afraid you guys would hate me if you knew. I tried to be what I thought you wanted me to be, Mom. The worst part is that I lied to myself. If I’d been honest from the start . . . who knows?”
“Well, you wouldn’t have Dylan and Opal,” her mother snapped.
“That’s true,” Maeve said, dismissing her mother’s accusatory tone. “And as hard as that is to think about, I’m also glad I don’t have to keep pretending to be something I’m not.”
“We all do our best to not hurt people. I did my best to protect you, to protect this whole family, to keep you all safe. That’s all I’ve ever done. But no one is perfect.”
“I never said I was perfect, Mom.”
“And neither did I, Maeve. Neither did I.” Her mother leaned forward, arms extended, both hands open.
Maeve accepted the gesture. “Honey, I’m sorry if I made you feel like you weren’t enough for me.
Jean, my mother, held me—” Faye’s voice faltered, and Maeve tightened her grip.
“She held me apart from her. I would never want to do that to you or Molly. I swear.”
Her father came around the side of the house, his white shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, jeans and boots tired from wear and overuse. Still, the sun hit him in a way that for the briefest moment caught Maeve by surprise.
Tears welled in her mother’s eyes. She must have seen it, too, that halo.
She let out a rough laugh and slapped her own knees, putting an end to the conversation.
“You’re braver than I ever was, I’ll give you that,” she said before turning her attention to William, who lifted his shoulders, surrendering to the moment.
“Quite the bombshell, huh?” he said.
This can’t be it, Maeve thought. No screaming, no cursing. She wasn’t disowned or told to stay away from the house, the family. “So,” she said. “What’s next?”
“I don’t know about the two of you,” her father said. “But I sure could use a beer. Anyone else?”