Daddy's Girls (28)
“I used to hate coming here,” she admitted, as the kids bowled and they waited for their turn. It still reminded her of her father, but with a space of their own to retreat to, it no longer gave her that oppressive feeling. He had taken up every inch of space wherever he was, not only physically, but psychologically. She always felt like she couldn’t breathe when she was around him. “It feels better now,” she admitted to her sisters, although her children said they missed him. She was embarrassed to admit that she didn’t.
Billy had loved the idea that he had a real cowboy as a grandfather, in contrast to Peter’s very East Coast intellectual parents. Peter’s was the kind of family Caroline had always wanted. His father was a publisher and his mother had been a political journalist before she retired. They had a house in Maine where she and Peter took the kids for a week every year at the end of August, and spent time with his sister and her three children. She was a physics professor at Harvard, and like Peter, her husband was in high-tech finance.
Their childhoods had been very different from Caroline’s, and at first she had felt like trailer trash when she was around them. Born in Texas, and raised on a ranch in Southern California, she didn’t have the same highbrow background they did. Jimmy had been uncomfortable around Peter’s parents when they met at the wedding, which Peter and Caroline had insisted on having in San Francisco, where their friends were. It was a small affair at a stuffy club that was affiliated with Peter’s father’s club in New York. Jimmy had worn cowboy boots and a Stetson with a suit to the wedding, and at twenty-two, Caroline had nearly died of embarrassment, compared to the well-tailored dark blue suits of Peter’s family and guests from New York, and Boston, where his mother was from.
But the marriage had worked well, despite their different backgrounds. Caroline deferred to Peter for most big decisions and even small ones. Their children went to the best private schools, and after the first few years, Peter stopped teasing her about what he called her redneck background. He had been impressed by the ranch, although they seldom went, and acknowledged that her father was an interesting man, and not nearly as simple and modest as he pretended to be. He was a powerhouse, and had an extraordinarily good grip on the concepts of finance, and had made some very successful investments with little advice from anyone, just using his own instincts. The two men had never become friends, and Peter had never warmed to him but acknowledged that he was worthy of respect. Jimmy was a smart, straightforward man from a simple background who had made a huge success of his ranch, without the benefit of Harvard Business School or the East Coast establishment Peter had grown up in. Whether one liked him or not, Peter gave him credit for what he had achieved. Peter always respected financial success.
It had taken his parents longer to warm up to Caroline, but they finally had and admired her steady success with her young adult books. Her publisher father-in-law was particularly impressed by them, once she won the Printz Award, and started making real money for them. Young adult books were very much in demand. Material success was important to Peter and his family, it was their yardstick of someone’s merits, and determined whether or not they liked people. Peter emphasized those same values to their children and Caroline didn’t agree. But it was how Peter had been brought up. And in spite of Peter’s materialistic views about money, he was a good and attentive father and loved his children. And he was attentive to Caroline too, although he wasn’t demonstrative or overly emotional around other people. He was warmer with her in private.
It was their third night at the ranch when Kate broached a delicate subject. They’d had dinner at her house, which Caroline and Gemma cooked, and the children had gone back to Caroline’s house to play videogames on their new TV. They were enjoying the freedom of being on the ranch, able to go wherever they wanted to. Kate had given them both bikes to ride, and Thad was proving to be an excellent babysitter, assigning them chores, and riding with them whenever possible, or taking them in his truck when he had some task to perform at the far reaches of the ranch.
“I was thinking we might take a ride down to Santa Barbara.” Kate opened the subject with caution, knowing it was a sensitive issue for Caroline, and for them all.
“Am I correct in assuming you don’t just have shopping in mind?” Gemma inquired, as she poured them all another round of wine. Kate had purposely waited until they’d had dinner, and at least a glass of wine, so they’d be more relaxed. She saw Caroline stiffen when she nodded. Their father had been dead for six weeks, and in some ways, it seemed like a long time, and in others, it felt as though his funeral had been yesterday. There were already noticeable changes in their reactions to the ranch, without his powerful presence. Neither of Kate’s sisters had ever been willing to spend a week there since they’d left. They never lasted more than a few days when their father was alive.
“I just think we should follow up on what we discovered. We can’t spend the rest of our lives knowing that our mother is alive, fifty miles away, and not finding out more about her, and why we never knew she was alive,” Kate said calmly.
“We never knew because our father obviously lied to us,” Gemma said bluntly. She was angry at him about it.
“I’d like to know why he lied. Maybe she’s some awful derelict and he was protecting us from her our entire lives. Maybe she’s a drug addict or a criminal of some kind. But if she is, I want to know,” Kate said. “I think we should know. Or at least I want to. I would have checked it out sooner, when we found out right after Dad died, but I wanted to wait for you two. It affects all three of us, it didn’t feel right to just rush into it without you.”