Chapter Three Lily #2
“Is that what you did?” I ask. “I mean, how did you get over him?”
Sometimes, I have a hard time saying the word “dad.” Even “father” unsettles me. The words seem to imply a certain intimacy my father doesn’t deserve. They connote a role in my life he has never played.
Rose has been single ever since she left him when I was only a year old.
She went on a few dates here and there, but never anything lasting.
I think she wanted to protect me, keep me from getting attached to anyone who could hurt us like my father did.
Sometimes I feel responsible for her singleness.
She always put me first, even to her own detriment.
Mom looks surprised. “What do you mean? How did I get over who?”
“My father, obviously,” I say, confused. “Who else would I mean?”
Her cheeks look pinkish and warm to the touch. “No one. I mean, of course you meant your father.”
It’s a strange reaction. She sounds almost… guilty. “So, how did you get over him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It was never… Well, it was never really anything to get over.”
“You had a baby,” I say, taking one hand off the wheel to gesture to my person.
“Of course. I just mean, I don’t know. I loved your father, but he disappointed me pretty early on in the relationship. I guess my expectations were never that high.” I feel her eyes looking over at me. “I’m sorry, is this awful to hear?”
I don’t speak to my father. He was cheating before I was teething. Gone by the time I could walk, and married to his mistress by my third birthday. For the next couple of years, my father was more shadow than presence. He flitted in and out of our life like bad weather.
Although he occasionally came around on holidays, and to my chagrin, Rose always let him stay even when he arrived with no warning.
She claims it’s “healthy to forgive,” which strikes me as odd for a therapist, who should set better boundaries.
But he was a caricature to me. Whenever I thought of him, I thought first of the back of his head, that thick, dark hair.
When I pictured him in my mind’s eye, I saw him leaving.
“So, you were never in love?” I ask.
Rose met my father, James, when she was my age, twenty-five.
He was a friend of the family. His last name is Gardner, and she always jokes she liked the pun of it all.
She was a Rose and soon she would marry a gardener.
When I was born a year later, she continued the bit by naming me Lily Gardner.
Two girls, two flowers. Despite calling off the engagement, I suspect she still legally changed her name because she was both tired of being an Elliot and committed to the wordplay.
“I loved him,” she says. “But it was a quieter kind of love. Not the all-consuming, ‘can’t sleep, can’t eat’ kind of thing.”
Henry and I were like that, too. The love snuck up on us over the course of that first summer.
We didn’t know yet that Lottie was sick.
I was worried about going away for college in September, leaving Rose all alone, but Lottie convinced her to stay throughout the fall.
That helped quiet some of my concerns. At least they would have each other.
We spent June, July, and August all together like that: Rose, Lottie, me, and eventually Henry, too. It was perfect. It was bliss.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Outside the car window is the dark harbor; the masses of boats are specks in the water.
I can barely make them out in the dim light.
They look like toothpicks at a distance.
A few years ago, there was a town debate about a little red rowboat named 007.
It had been in the harbor for decades, and when the owners decided to change its name to advertise their business, there was an actual petition passed around to force them to change it back.
I thought the whole scandal was silly at the time, but now I get it. Good things should be preserved. Tradition means something.
My heart hurts.
Cobblestones rattle the frame of the car as we enter Main Street.
It took me a while to get used to the bulky vehicle with its high beach tires.
Turning the wheel takes more force than I was accustomed to.
Lottie taught me to drive on the sandy back roads by the airport, the interminable place between beach and road.
The way the tires slid against the loose sand unnerved me at first, but I got my bearings eventually.
I pull over into a free spot by the brick crosswalk, turning off the engine.
Mary: That’s the new girlfriend’s—correction, fiancée’s—name. She reminds me of Mary Had a Little Lamb. The girl looked like she could be a part of a fable or a fairy tale. She looked like the kind of girl you marry, which, clearly, she is.
The physical pain is shocking. My chest is sore, as if I’ve been punched in the sternum. I felt this way when the end of that first summer came around, I left for college, and Lottie confessed she was sick—the grief so violent, I could vomit. It was seasickness with nowhere to land: an unmooring.
I recall what my mom said about all-consuming, “can’t eat, can’t sleep” kind of love.
“Wait, so if you didn’t feel that way with my father, then who did you love that way?”
Rose opens her mouth to answer but a knock on the window startles us both.
“Ladies!” a voice shouts. “Open up!”
I see my mom’s best friend, Josie, in the window.
Josie is a jewelry designer with her own shop on Water Street.
She makes the most beautiful freshwater pearl bracelets.
Rose met her at the domestic abuse hotline where they both volunteer.
She is also a real estate empress. She comes from a long line of brokers, and her family owns the most successful agency on island.
They helped Rose design and ultimately rent out part of the cottage after Lottie passed.
Josie has become one of my mom’s dearest, most loyal friends and, as such, a close friend of mine, too.
“Gardners!” Josie taps the window again. “OPEN UP!”
She enunciates every other syllable like she’s singing a melody. She’s clearly tipsy, and while she’s not yet slurring her words, it’s evident that she’s one or, at best, two drinks away from it. She must have gotten a head start with other friends. I roll down the window.
“Lily! Come out for just one drink, pleeeease!” she says, jutting her bottom lip out in a cartoonish pout.
“I can’t. I have a hot date with some ice cream.” Although, I recall that in my anxiety over seeing Henry, we ditched the ice cream in the detergent aisle and beelined out of the store.
“Come on!” persists Josie. “I’m more fun than some boring ice cream.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to join us?” asks Rose. She looks worried again, still sitting in her seat belt, making no moves to get out of the car. “I don’t want to leave you alone like this.”
“I’m fine,” I promise. “Besides, remember my outfit?” I point toward the pink slippers even though Rose can’t see them from this angle.
Mom looks at me, lips curling into a smile. “We can fix that!”
“How?” I frown, skeptical.
“We’ll switch clothes.”
“You’re going to wear this out in public?”
“Sure,” says Rose. “Who cares? I’m an old broad anyway.”
“That’s right, Lil,” Josie chimes in from the window. “We’re getting gray waiting for you.”
The sentiments are especially ironic considering how young they both look and how miserable I feel. I’m not capable of showing anyone a good time right now.
“It’ll be fun.” Rose smiles. “I promise.”
Part of me wants to join, only so I don’t have to go back home and be alone with my thoughts, but I also don’t want to bring the mood down.
“Mom, I can’t. I don’t feel like running into anyone else tonight.” I think about Henry again and feel something sharp poke my chest like a loose wire. “Besides, you’re a therapist in this town. What are you going to say if you run into any clients and you’re wearing slippers?”
“I’ll tell them exactly what I’m telling you right now.”
“What’s that?”
She shakes my shoulders playfully. “To loosen up!”