Life and Other Inconveniences(108)

She simply sat there, a self-satisfied teenaged Madonna, so complacent and even happy because she’d been stupid enough to let an egg get in contact with a sperm. As if she were the first female ever to get pregnant.

I spoke a great deal. I gave her an ultimatum—if she planned to have and keep the baby, I would no longer support her.

“That’s fine, Gigi,” she said. “I’m not asking you to.” She had the audacity to put her hand on her stomach. “I want this baby.”

“Fine!” I said. “Have your baby and join the ranks of uneducated teen mothers and see how good you’ve had it your entire life, which, by the way, has been entirely funded by me.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“You’re even more stupid than I thought, in that case.” And then I said what I wished I could take back from that moment on, one of the few things I’ve ever said that gave me shame. “You have no skills for this. No preparation. You will fail, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you ended up like your mother.”

She left the room then, quietly. I didn’t see her leave the house later. Indeed, I didn’t see her for seventeen more years.

If she had ever called, I would have apologized. Well, perhaps not. But I would have set things right. But with each week, then month, then year that passed, the words were increasingly walled in, festering.

That was my punishment for Clark, I suppose, though being Clark’s mother was punishment in itself. I had lost Sheppard and failed Clark, and then circumstances took Emma from me, just as Sheppard had been stolen away.

Emma hadn’t forgiven me. I could hardly blame her. But all these years later, she’d brought her daughter here and let Riley get to know me and even love me a little.

Sometimes, that gift was almost too generous to bear.





CHAPTER 32


    Emma


The first week of August was thick with humidity and mosquitoes. Though Sheerwater had central air-conditioning, the house felt close and still. Every day, we were promised evening thunderstorms, and every day, the sky stayed white and flat. The flowers drooped by mid-afternoon, and the pool was too warm to be refreshing. Jellyfish had found their way into Long Island Sound, so there was little respite from the heat.

I was kind of loving having a shaved head. It certainly made prep time easier. Genevieve kept giving me the side-eye, murmuring about odd style choices and women who could pull certain looks off, and women who couldn’t. She didn’t seem too interested in just how I’d come to have a shaved head, but that was my grandmother for you. It was always about how things appeared.

I’d been doing more and more counseling with Rose Hill families. It was the best work I’d done as a therapist yet, and I’d been Googling similar facilities back in Chicagoland. Four more of my online clients were winding down, scheduling their next appointments for weeks out, rather than days. Three of them seemed to be doing well, and I suspected that Jim, the guy with the fascination for tall women, had found himself a girlfriend. He’d met her for coffee three weeks ago, and while he’d said it was hard to be with a woman who was only five ten, he was generously giving her a chance.

Dirk and Amy, the angry couple who’d been trying to find a way back from Dirk’s cheating, decided to get a divorce, and honestly, I thought that was best. Dirk had never seemed truly regretful about his affair, and Amy didn’t seem like the forgiving type. She’d already put up a dating profile, then had complained about the “losers” who wanted to go out with her. “I want someone way better than Dirk ever was. A surgeon, maybe. Someone really rich,” she’d admitted in a one-on-one session, and all my advice about healing and investing in herself fell on deaf ears.

Riley was not quite dating Rav. She went to his house for dinner once or twice a week, and he spent a lot of time at Sheerwater, dutifully playing board games with the three of us older ladies and my daughter. Even Helga joined in once in a while.

Speaking of romance, I seemed to be dating Miller. Every other night or so, I’d walk over to his house under cover of darkness, breathing in the smell of verbena and petunias from the well-tended gardens of Stoningham, and sit on his porch, maybe have a glass of wine or iced tea. We hadn’t managed another proper date (which, given how the first one went, was just fine), but the porch nights were lovely. Sometimes, we held hands, sometimes we kissed, but mostly, we just sat and listened to the crickets and cicadas, the soft laughter from the family next door, and talked about our girls and life.

He mentioned Ashley often, his voice still a little wistful for their old life. I didn’t mind. Why would I? It was absolutely lovely to hear a man talk about marriage with a sense of awe that it had been so happy.

“Do I talk about her too much?” he asked one night as we sat side by side on his porch.

“No,” I said. “It’s nice to get to know her.”

His voice was husky when he answered a minute later. “Thank you. She liked you, you know. Said you could do better than Jason.”

“Did she?”

He laughed. “Yeah. Sorry. I shouldn’t bad-mouth my cousin. He’s just one of those Peter Pan types.”

“So I’ve learned,” I said. “What do you think of him and Jamilah getting back together?”

“She could do better,” he said, and laughed again, a low and smoky sound that made my lady parts hum. “So could’ve you, but at least you got Riley.”