Daddy's Girls (59)
He asked for the check then, and while they waited for it, he asked her about the ranch. “What are you doing about that? Are you asking Kate to buy out your share? You never go and you hate it there. It doesn’t make much sense. And there are better investments to make than a ten-thousand-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, although the land is valuable.” She didn’t tell him that Thad had just bought Gemma’s share. It was none of his business.
“It’s better without my father. That was always the problem for me. It was nice being with my sisters this summer, and it was good for the kids. They loved it, and so did I.” They had told him as much when he saw them. And he was surprised to hear she’d loved it too. He hadn’t gone to see his parents in Maine at the end of August, as they always did. He didn’t want them to know they were having trouble.
He paid the check then, and they left the restaurant together. “Thank you for lunch,” she said politely, but she looked less nervous than she had when she arrived. In spite of everything, it was nice to see him.
“Thank you for talking to me,” he said with a small wintry smile. He wasn’t sure if it was the beginning or the end, and neither was she. He leaned toward her and kissed her cheek, and she smiled. “I’ll email you a schedule that works for me to see the kids, let me know how it works for you. I’d like to try to keep this informal for now.” She nodded. She agreed. Her car was in the opposite direction from his office, so they left each other outside the restaurant.
He had his head down as he walked away. It hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped, and hadn’t been as bad as she’d feared. She had wanted to be more decisive and ask for a divorce, but she realized at lunch that she wasn’t ready to do it. Once she was across the table from him and she looked him in the eyes, he wasn’t as easy to walk away from as she thought he would be. The good memories were still in her mind too with the bad ones. They had a lot invested in their marriage, and it was hard to throw the good away with the bad. As she hurried toward her car, she remembered the idea that she’d had at lunch, and was determined to start on it as soon as she got home.
She drove to Marin as fast as she could within the speed limit and with the traffic. She didn’t want to be late for Billy’s carpool, and he had soccer practice in San Rafael that afternoon. She was left with what she’d had in their marriage, all the chores and errands and responsibilities. The only difference now was that he wouldn’t come home at night. She didn’t have to cook dinner for him, talk to him, or care about his problems. She didn’t have to have sex with him, and clearly she must have bored him, if he wanted the kind of stuff she had seen in the photographs of Veronica. She was thirty-nine, almost forty, not twenty-three, and her ass was never going to look like Veronica’s again no matter how many Pilates classes she went to or even if she had an ass and boob lift like the people Gemma knew in Hollywood.
She had a new book to work on now that she had started at the ranch that summer. She had her kids to take care of, and a life to live alone, to try it on for size. It wasn’t entirely a bad thing, it was different, and some things would still be the same. But it would be a life without Peter. She needed to clear out some of the past. After she got back to the house after dropping Billy off at soccer, she made the first call. Another mother would be driving him home. She called a secondhand furniture store and arranged to have them pick up all the furniture in their bedroom. They had spent a fortune on it, but she didn’t care. It was part of the ugliness he had left her with, and she didn’t want it anymore. She was getting rid of all of it. She was going to fill the room with beautiful new things. It was her bedroom now, not theirs. Maybe after she did, she would feel new too.
* * *
—
When Juliette got home on Labor Day weekend, she looked alive and well, and her eyes were bright again. She’d cut her hair just a bit shorter and it didn’t look quite so wild. She was smoking French cigarettes again, and Kate noticed that her English had suffered a little, but she looked peaceful, had gained a few pounds, and said she had seen a lot of old friends all over France. She had mostly spent time in Provence, and visited the Camargue, where she grew up.
She looked both sad and nervous when she told Kate about the decision she’d made, but she knew she had to tell her. Kate looked shocked when she did. Juliette had decided to move back to France. She realized that she belonged there. It was her culture, her language, her home. It was too hard for her to be at the ranch without Jimmy. He was really her only reason to be there, and now he was gone, and she felt it was time for her to leave too. She said it had been a hard decision, but she thought it was the right one. She would come back to visit, but now she wanted to live in France again. She had come to California for a summer and stayed for twenty-four years, because of him.
“You and Thad should move into my house, your father’s house,” she corrected herself, “when I go.” Kate had told her about them as soon as she got back, so she heard it from her first, and Juliette approved.
“Your father thought about that sometimes too. He said he was the only right man for you, but it would never work because he was the foreman, and a man needs to be the boss.”
“We both will be, we work well together.” Kate smiled at her, surprised by her father’s comment. “He’s going to build a house on the land he bought from Gemma. They’re starting to lay the foundation in a few weeks.”