The Sweetness of Forgetting (5)
“Don’t beat yourself up,” he says. He pats me on the back and clears his throat. “She loves you, Hope. You’re a good mom.”
“Yeah, uh, thanks,” I say, avoiding his eye. Sure, we’d seen each other nearly every day during the months he was working on my house, and when I returned home from work in the afternoons, I often fixed us lemonade and sat on the porch with him, doing my best to avoid looking at the tanned swell of his biceps. But he doesn’t know me. Not really. Certainly not well enough to judge me as a mother. If he knew me that well, he’d know what a failure I am.
He pats me awkwardly again. “I mean it,” he says.
Then he too is gone, leaving me all alone in my giant pink cupcake, which suddenly feels very bitter.
Chapter Two
I close the bakery early that day to run a few errands. Although the sun hasn’t set yet when I get home at six fifteen, it feels dark and depressing inside the cottage I’m trying hard to think of as my own.
The silence inside is deafening. Up until last year, when Rob surprised me just before Christmas by announcing he wanted a divorce, I’d looked forward to coming home. I was proud of the life we’d made together in the solid, whitewashed Victorian overlooking Cape Cod Bay, just east of the public beach. I’d painted the interior myself, retiled the kitchen and hall, installed hardwood floors upstairs and in the living room, and planted a garden dominated by blue hydrangeas and pink salt spray roses that looked crisp and beautiful against the sail-white clapboard.
And then, just as I was finally done with everything, finally ready to relax in the dream home, Rob sat me down and announced in a soft voice, without meeting my eyes, that he too was done. Done with our marriage, done with me.
In the space of three months, while still reeling from my mother’s death from breast cancer and the decision to put Mamie in a memory care home, I found myself moving back to my mother’s place, which I hadn’t been able to sell anyhow. A few months later, exhausted and discouraged, I’d signed all the divorce papers, eager only to have it all over and done with.
The truth was, I felt numb, and for the first time, I understood something I’d wondered about my entire life: how my mother had always been able to stay so cold about the men in her life. I’d never known my father; she’d never even told me his name. As she once crisply explained to me, “He left. A long time ago. Never knew you existed. He made his choice.” And when I was growing up, she always had boyfriends whom she would spend all her time with, but she never let them get close. Not really. That way, when they’d ultimately leave her, she’d just shrug and say, “We’re better off without him, Hope. You know that.”
I always used to think she was heartless, even though I admit now that I’d looked forward to those brief periods of time between boyfriends, when I’d have my mom to myself for a few weeks. Now I wish I’d understood sooner, in time to discuss it with her. I finally get it, Mom. If you don’t let them in, if you don’t really love them in the first place, they can’t hurt you when they leave. But like so many other things in my life, it’s too late for that.
By the time I shower, washing the flour and sugar out of my hair and off my skin, it’s a few minutes before seven. I know I should probably call Annie at Rob’s and apologize for the way we left things earlier, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Besides, she’s probably doing something fun with him, and my call would only ruin it for her. Regardless of how I feel about Rob, I have to admit that he’s good with Annie most of the time. He seems to get through to her in a way I haven’t been able to in a long time. I hate that watching them laughing conspiratorially with each other sometimes makes me jealous first, happy for Annie second. It’s like they’re forming a new family portrait, and it no longer includes me.
After throwing on a gray cable-knit sweater and slim black jeans, I stare at myself in the mirror as I brush out my shoulder-length dark brown waves, which, blissfully, haven’t started to turn gray yet, although they soon will if Annie keeps up this behavior. I search my own face for Annie’s features, but as usual, I come up empty. Oddly, she doesn’t look a thing like Rob or me, which led him to ask me once, when she was three, “Are you absolutely sure she’s mine, Hope?” His words had cut me to the core. “Of course,” I’d whispered, tears in my eyes, and he’d left it at that. Unless you counted her skin, which tanned evenly and beautifully, just like Rob’s, there was virtually nothing of her tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed father in her.
I examine my features as I put on a coat of nude lipstick and swipe some mascara onto my pale lashes. While Annie’s eyes are an uneven gray, just like Mamie’s, mine are an unusual sea green flecked with gold. When I was younger, Mamie used to tell me that her looks—everything but the eyes—had skipped a generation and settled on me. While my mother’s dark brown, straight hair and brown eyes made her resemble my grandfather, I look like a near carbon copy of some of the old photos I’ve seen of Mamie. Her eyes, I used to think, were always sad in old photos, and now that mine carry in them the weight of living, we look more alike than ever. My sharply bowed lips—“like an angel’s harp,” as Mamie used to say—are just like hers were in her younger days, and somehow, I’m fortunate enough to have inherited her milky complexion, although in the last year, I’ve developed an unfamiliar vertical line between my eyebrows that makes me look eternally concerned. Then again, these days, I am eternally concerned.