The Winter Sister(48)

She paused. “I remember.”

“Okay, well . . .” The house was unnervingly quiet, like a street after snow has stopped falling. “I was just wondering if you knew anything about Mom and Will. Like, did they go out or anything?”

Jill sighed against the phone, and her breath sounded like the air outside on nights when I left the window cracked for Persephone. “Yeah, they dated,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied, trying to sound casual. “Why’d you sigh about it? Was it a bad relationship? Did he hurt her or something?”

“Yeah, he hurt her quite a bit, actually.”

I swallowed, imagining blue fingerprints like smudges of paint on Mom’s skin. “Bruises?”

“No,” Jill said after a moment’s hesitation. “No, not that kind of hurt. I was away at college when she was with him. I never even saw them together—not until he came to Persephone’s wake. And by then, it had already been over between them for—what? Twenty years?”

I pulled back my blankets and got out of bed, the floorboards cold against my feet. Pacing around the space between Persephone’s bed and mine, careful to keep to the large oval rag rug that had been there for as long as I could remember, I posed my next question.

“Was it serious?”

“Eh,” Jill said, her voice like a shrug. “It was to your mother, but I don’t know about him. They started dating in high school—senior year, I think? Then he went off to some fancy university and your mom stayed in Spring Hill so she could go to community college. She’d only applied to one school—one that was close to where Will wanted to go—and she hadn’t gotten in. So he broke up with her soon afterward. The distance was too hard, I guess.”

She coughed for a second, and I stopped pacing, watching my toes dig into the rug. When she continued, my feet resumed their steady march between the beds.

“Anyway,” she said, “maybe a year or so later, he ended up getting married to some girl he’d met at school. Your mom was devastated. I think she thought they’d eventually get back together, once he graduated and came back to Spring Hill. Instead, he came home with a wife. She used to call me up back then and just cry into the phone about it.”

I tried to picture it—Mom crying over a boy. All my life, she’d been the one to leave men feeling jilted and disappointed. There was one who’d shown up at our door once, a couple days after they’d been on a date, and he’d had a look on his face like he wasn’t sure how he’d ended up there. “Send him away,” Mom had told us from the couch with a dismissive wave of her hand, and Persephone and I had had to stand in the doorway and explain that it was nothing personal—our mom just didn’t do second dates.

“Did she . . . lock herself up in her room?” I asked. Her closed door was the only way I knew how to measure my mother’s grief.

“I don’t know,” Jill said. “As I said, I wasn’t really around. But you know, to me, it was a good thing—Will getting married—because she finally stopped waiting around for him. She sent out some more applications, transferred to a four-year college, finally started—”

“Mom went to college?”

As far as I knew, she’d always been a waitress, drawing flowers on people’s checks, maintaining eye contact even with those who looked down on her for her faded green uniform, her sauce-splattered shoes.

“Well,” Jill said, “briefly. You know what I mean. Just that one semester before she got pregnant.”

I froze midstep, my legs locking into place. “Wait, what?” I asked. “Mom went to college . . . and met Persephone’s dad there?”

Jill was silent for a moment. “Well—yeah,” she said. “Annie never told you any of this?”

“She always said he was a one-night stand. She said both of our fathers were one-night stands.”

“She actually used those words?” Jill asked. “When you were a kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Annie,” Jill said, as if Mom were on the line with us and could hear the disappointment in her sister’s voice.

I remembered knowing that phrase—one-night stand—before I was even old enough to fully grasp its meaning. I remembered how literally I took it, imagining my parents in an open field beneath a sky dusted with stars, standing together until morning came and they went their separate ways. I couldn’t expect Aunt Jill to understand how, as a child, that phrase had been a comfort to me. How could she know that, for me, being with Mom had been like sitting in the sun on a cloudless spring morning? Never mind the Dark Days. Never mind the shifts she had at the diner, the dates she had with men whose names we never knew. When she was with me, she was all that I needed. I was warm and safe and loved, and a father—someone more than a one-night stand—would only distract her from me, only pull the sun from my sky.

“Well, sure, she had some of those over the years,” Jill said, as if unwilling to use the phrase that Mom had taught me without a second thought. “Your dad, for example. Definitely a quick fling. He wasn’t from town. He was in and out, and Annie didn’t seem to mind. But Persephone’s father—I don’t really know how long that lasted. Less than a semester, I guess. They met in her classical mythology course, which I only remember because that’s why she named Persephone the way she did.”