I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(56)

The next morning, his father left for a business trip, and once he was gone, George’s mother washed her hair, pinning it so the lump on the back of her head didn’t show, and packed two suitcases, one for her and one for George. They rode a bus—his first time ever on a bus; he could still remember the smell of the seats—to a church on the other side of town. Although she and George’s father had been married at a different church, one up north where they had met, she had grown up going to this one, had always taken George on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. It was a place his father never went.

There was an elderly rector and another, younger priest. Neither had been there when George’s mother was growing up, but the rector remembered meeting her father. “A humane man,” he said. “A philanthropist. A rich man who felt a true responsibility to the poor.”

Dry-eyed, George’s mother told them about her marriage; she included terrible details without flinching; she called her life “hell,” a bad word, one George had never heard her say. She told the priests that she couldn’t bear for her son to spend another minute in that house for fear it would scar him or, worse, turn him into the kind of man his father was. The old rector held her hands between his large, wrinkled ones, prayed with her, said that she and George could stay two nights, or maybe three, however long it took to catch their breaths, regain their balance.

“But after that respite, I must ask you to go back,” he said. “Marriage is a sacred bond and a deeply private one. Use the time here to think of ways to talk with your husband and also to avoid angering him. He’s gone astray, lost his moral compass, but the fact that he never hits your boy is a sign that he has a good heart. A man like that can be reasoned with.”

George remembered that the old rector’s voice and eyes were sorrowful and kind. But the young priest got angry with him.

“We cannot, in good conscience, send them back!” he said, through gritted teeth.

“But they can’t stay here forever,” said the old man, sadly. “She will have to go home eventually, and the longer she stays away, the worse it will be, the wider the rift. He is her husband.”

In a flat voice, George’s mother thanked them. She said they would just go home that day. “Three nights will make no difference,” she said.

“Try to persuade your husband to come to church with you next Sunday,” said the old man, as George and his mother were leaving. “Help him to heal. Help him find his way back to God.”

The young priest walked them to the door of the church. He was red-faced and his mouth was trembling; George thought he might burst into tears. He braced himself for seeing a man cry, but it never happened.

“I’m so horribly sorry,” said the priest. “I wish there were more we could do. If you think it would help, I could offer counsel to you and your husband. To preserve your privacy, I could even come to your house.”

George saw his mother’s lips twist, as if she were laughing at the young man, but she didn’t laugh. She just said, in the same flat, dead, empty voice she’d used before, “Thank you for your kindness.”

They went home. That very evening, his mother made telephone calls to people up north, and when George’s father returned a few days later, she told him she had arranged for George to go to boarding school. To George’s amazement, his father agreed to the plan, and even though it was the middle of the school year, fifth grade, George went. His mother rode the train with him. They ate from china plates—china on a train!—as, out the window, state after state blurred by, smears of green and brown punctuated by steeples and roofs and occasional roaring tunnels. Before his mother left to go back home, she hugged him hard, whispered, “I love you more than life itself,” in one ear and “Be brave,” in the other.

George came home for three weeks out of every year, one at Christmas, one in the spring, and one in the summer. He never saw his father hit his mother again, but he never stopped hating him, hate upon hate upon hate. For eight years, George stockpiled rage. On his eighteenth birthday, two things happened: he found out he had been accepted into Yale and he came into his inheritance, money left to him in a trust by his mother’s parents. His mother called him at school to wish him a happy birthday. A week later, she overdosed on sleeping pills. No one called it suicide, but George knew.

“She waited until I had the means to take care of myself,” he told Edith. “When I went back for her funeral, I told my father that I was finished with him, to never contact me again, a request he honored. Six months later, he remarried and moved out west. A year later, he was dead. A stroke. Apparently, he had been an alcoholic for decades. I never knew. I can’t remember even seeing him take a drink. Isn’t that strange?”

In the dark, Edith nodded.

“He cried at her funeral. Can you believe that? Somehow, I couldn’t shed a single tear, but that bastard cried like a baby.”

There was a catch in George’s throat, his first display of emotion. Edith tensed, waiting for more, but the moment passed so quickly and completely that she wondered if she’d imagined it. His dispassion should have put her off; no one should have been able to tell a story like that without sorrow or anger, but she wasn’t put off. She was relieved. She didn’t want to see this man as fragile. His breaking down, her comforting him, the intimacy of it would have been a sham, would have looked too much like love. She wished he hadn’t told her the story of his parents; if she could have given it back to him, every word, she would have.