I'd Give Anything(15)

When I got home from my mother’s house, Avery was already there, sitting at the kitchen table with her favorite snack laid out before her: a bowl of microwave popcorn, a dish of yellow mustard to dip it in, and a glass of milk. Her laptop sat open on the table as she watched what I knew without looking was an episode of Friends, her latest resurrected-from-the-past series. She’d watched the whole ten years’ worth of episodes twice through and was starting on a third go-round. When she heard me come in, she didn’t glance up but lifted a finger and announced, “I’m about to do homework, just as soon as Chandler chokes on the gum.”

She sat there, my daughter, so lovely and absorbed and eyelashy and full of grace in her soft gray sweater and red suede sneakers, her hair tucked behind her ears and pouring down her back.

“Fine, but after the choking, maybe you could put off doing homework for a few minutes,” I said.

With a dramatic flourish, Avery hit pause and cast concerned eyes upon me.

“Mom, are you feeling okay?”

“Ha-ha.”

“Because I thought I just heard you request that I delay homework, which just can’t be right. Are you feverish? Or possibly febrile?”

“Feverish and febrile are the same thing.”

“Really, Mom? Thank you so much for clarifying that. How about drunk?”

“Drunk is different.”

“Are you it?”

“I wish.”

“Blow to the head, maybe?”

I wanted her to go on and on in exactly this manner all night long. But instead I said, “Honey, I need to talk to you about something,” and her playfulness vanished—instantly, like a channel switch—and was replaced by a tense, watchful stillness. I wanted to slap myself and then Harris and then Harris again, harder.

I sat down at the table and closed her laptop and told her. I had asked Harris if I could be the one to tell, which made so much sense that I couldn’t even get mad at how eagerly—like a frog snapping up a juicy fly—he’d agreed. After some soul-searching, I had decided to tell the truth, but with all of my darkest suspicions, even the ones that were so close to certainties as to be almost indistinguishable, left out.

After I’d finished, Avery shut her eyes and said, with tenderness and sorrow, “Oh, Dad. What did you do?”

“Honey, your father’s not a person who is used to people thinking he’s done anything wrong, so when it happened, he panicked.”

“By ‘it happened,’ you mean that someone thought he’d done something wrong, right? Not that he actually had. Right?”

I paused, searching for a path between facts and what I only believed were facts, and settled on, “Dale Pinckney jumped to the conclusion that your father was having a sexual relationship with the woman he’d seen him with, his intern.”

Avery held up her hand, like a traffic cop.

“Sorry,” I said. “Bad choice of words. I just hate the word affair, always have. It’s too pretty.”

Avery shook her head.

“You said woman,” said Avery. “It should be girl. You said she was still in high school, so even if she was eighteen, she was still a high school girl. If you say woman, it sounds like you’re trying to cover something up or make it sound better than it was. So it’s girl. We should just say that.”

“Okay,” I said. “But anyway, he wasn’t. Dale Pinckney was wrong.”

While I did not know this to be an absolute fact, I felt in my bones that Harris had not had sex with Cressida Wall. I couldn’t quite explain why. Maybe because his demeanor bespoke longing—bottomless, desperate—but not satisfaction. I would not have gone so far as to say that he wouldn’t have had sex with her at some point; I just didn’t think he had.

“But just knowing how it appeared to Dale sent your father into a whirlpool of confusion. So he tried to convince Dale not to tell his boss. Your dad couldn’t bear the thought of other people thinking what Dale thought.”

Avery considered this, and then looked up at me, with light in her eyes. “Oh. Because of us. He wanted to protect us.”

I remembered my conversation with Harris that first night in our yard. He wanted to continue his relationship with Cressida, I thought. But there was no way I could say those words to my child with her face full of hope. Besides, maybe wanting to protect us was part of Harris’s motivation, deep down. Who was I to say it wasn’t?

“Well, that would make sense,” I said. “He would never want anything to hurt you.”

Avery sat in silence, serious, blinking, thoughts flickering in her coffee-colored eyes. Then she looked at me and said, “Who is she?”

I hesitated. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

Avery sat up straighter. “You can tell me her name. What if I know her? Does she go to my school?”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Please just tell me.”

Even though I had spoken aloud that odd name more than once, I suddenly found it hard—physically hard—to say. Oh, Harris, could you not have dallied with a Susie or an Anne? My mouth was sticky, clumsy. I swallowed. “Cressida Wall.”

Avery gasped, her mouth falling open. Automatically, she raised her right thumbnail, rested it on her lip, which was trembling, bit down. I knew what I was seeing: doubt swinging toward her like a wrecking ball, her faith in Harris taking a hit, bricks tumbling down.