The Good Liar(51)

Was she mad at Kaitlyn for keeping Franny a secret?

“Oh, no. A lot of people did that then . . . still do it, I expect. Give a baby up for adoption and don’t tell anyone. She must’ve felt so ashamed and sad and . . . And though I’m sure she was thrilled to meet Franny again, how do you tell your husband or your children about something like that?”

Not all of Kaitlyn Ring’s neighbors and friends are so forgiving. One woman, who agreed to talk to me only on the condition of anonymity, spoke with some venom at the shock wave Franny produced at the funeral.

“Can you imagine? There we all are, another funeral, a young mother, Joshua left alone with those two girls, and then this woman none of us has ever heard of tells us she’s Kaitlyn’s daughter? It’s just so selfish. It was making the day all about her. Why did she need to be at the funeral? She must’ve known people would ask who she was.”

Then this forty-five-year-old mother of three asks, “You know who Chris Pender is, right? The lead singer of The Penderasts? Charming name for a band. Anyway, his sister’s married to one of our neighbors. And when her father-in-law died, he came to the funeral dressed in his rock-star costume. He didn’t put on a suit. So the moment he walked in, everyone knew who he was and started taking pictures. It was so disrespectful. And that’s what Franny reminded me of.”

Perhaps Chris Pender didn’t mean to be disrespectful? Perhaps it was nice of him to come to the funeral in the first place?

“Sure, but if he were just trying to make a nice gesture, take off the costume. Dress like a normal person. I know this is controversial. I know what I sound like when I say this, but Franny was enjoying the attention that day. I’m sure of it.”

Couldn’t Franny have sought out all kinds of media attention? And yet she hadn’t.

“But you’re writing about her, aren’t you? I rest my case.”





Chapter 23


Hopes Dashed


Cecily

When I get home from the restaurant I find the kids sitting together on the couch, each engrossed in an iPad. Henry’s playing a game, and Cassie’s texting with someone, her fingers flying around the screen, a flash of emojis I couldn’t understand if I wanted to peppering her abbreviations. I used to be better at keeping up with this kind of stuff, the music they listened to, the cultural references they made. A year ago, I probably could’ve deciphered Cassie’s texts, or certainly guessed at their meaning. Now they’re like the grad note I wrote in my high school yearbook. Indecipherable.

“Hey, guys.”

Cassie flaps a hand at me, but Henry doesn’t move a muscle.

“Screens down, please.”

“Not another family meeting,” Cassie says.

I sit down on the coffee table that faces them. “Nope, just family time. It’s been a long day.”

Maybe hearing something in my tone they’re not used to, they each lower their screens.

“You okay, Mom?” Henry asks. His hair’s getting a bit long, but when I asked him this morning if he wanted a haircut, he said no, he was thinking of growing it out.

“I’ll survive. Though I’m thinking we should probably rethink this whole World Wide Web thing.”

“Paparazzi suck.”

“They do. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about you guys. Tell me about your days. Leave nothing out. Not even the subtext.”

“What?”

“The currents and undertows, I want to hear them all.”

Cassie frowns, but Henry complies, telling me a story of something that happened in history class and how the class smart aleck got the best of their young teacher. Cassie, who was in his class in his first year of teaching, and who I always suspected had a crush on him, comes to his defense, and Henry and Cassie are soon squabbling in the way only siblings can.

This might sound strange, but I like listening to them bicker. It’s all so innocent, so before, that I half expect Tom to walk into the room and ask them to keep it down because he’s trying to watch golf in his study. When he used to do that, they’d turn to abusing him, making fun of his golf-watching habits, and soon they’d be tossing a baseball around in the yard or pulling out the Monopoly board so we could have a “real family fight, I mean moment,” as Cassie often said.

But that’s not what happens. Instead, I hear my phone ding with a text, and I realize I haven’t checked my messages since lunch when I’d told my mother, probably more forcefully than I should have, to stop texting me. I let Cassie and Henry finish their argument, then tell them they can go back to their screens. They look surprised, but that doesn’t keep them from diving back in.

I retrieve my phone and open my texts. I disabled the function that floats a preview across my screen after Tom’s texts. I never wanted to be taken by surprise again. The universe laughs at me, it does.

I have more than a hundred texts I haven’t responded to. A cascade of WTF and you go, girl! from my friends and pseudofriends and anyone who has my cell number, apparently. But buried in there are two texts from someone I shouldn’t have been ignoring today.

Teo.

Call me, he says. And so I do.



Given how we ended up, it’s easy to think badly of Tom. To forget all his best characteristics, the things I loved about him. The things I vowed to remind the children of, no matter what happened. After he died, I’d even started keeping a list, one that time and bitterness could not erase.