“I mean, it’s obvious what he saw in her.” Clemmie was undeterred by Grace’s attempt to curtail the conversation. “She’s a pretty girl and no guy is going to say no to that if it’s on offer, is he? I blame her.”
I blame him.
The David Grace had married never would have had an affair, but she no longer knew the man she was married to. He was a mystery to her.
It was depressing to be part of such a desperate cliché, and mortifying to think everyone was talking about her.
“Here—” Clemmie dropped two doughnuts into a bag and handed them to Grace. “No charge.”
To top it off, she looked like a woman who needed to drown herself in sugar.
Sophie was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework when Grace arrived home. “Hi, Mom.” She’d lost that open, trusting happy smile that had been part of her personality. Now there was caution, as if she did a quick audit to check if life was about to slap her again or if it was safe to smile. “Did something happen? You look pale.”
“Forgot to put my makeup on.” Grace put the loaf and the doughnuts on the table. As a child she’d learned to hide her feelings. She’d been a master of secrecy. So why was she finding this so hard? “There’s chicken in the fridge and I thought I’d put together a salad.”
“Delicious.”
The phone rang as Grace was rinsing tomatoes. She glanced at her phone and spilled half the tomatoes in the sink.
“It’s your dad.”
Sophie’s jaw lifted. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
She’d always been a daddy’s girl, which had made it harder when disillusionment took the shine off that relationship. Sophie hadn’t cared much when she’d discovered Santa didn’t exist, or the tooth fairy, but she’d almost broken when she’d found out her daddy wasn’t the man she’d believed him to be.
Grace rescued the tomatoes and sliced them with more violence than was strictly necessary. “He’s still your father, honey.”
She remembered feeling the same shock when she’d discovered the truth about her own parents. The puzzlement and disappointment of realizing they were human and flawed. Somehow you expected your parents to know better than you did. To be able to rise above the failings that afflicted other people.
It was frightening to realize adults didn’t have it figured out, because if your parents didn’t have the answers, then who was a child supposed to rely on?
“I don’t need reminding. It’s all I think about.” Sophie pushed her homework to one side and laid the table. Since that awful day when David had come out of the hospital, she’d hovered around Grace like a protective force field.
It was touching, but it also added stress because Grace had to watch her every move and every reaction. In front of Sophie she had to hold it together. No matter how angry and upset she was with David, she couldn’t share that with her daughter.
Sophie’s reaction had been worse, far worse, than Grace had anticipated. Although David had told her the news, Grace had insisted on being there because she hadn’t trusted David to handle Sophie’s emotions in a sensitive way. In the end he’d stumbled his way through it, as clumsy as a drunk knocking over chairs in a bar. He’d mumbled something about how people changed over time, and had started to say that he and Grace had grown apart but then he’d seen something in Grace’s expression and confessed that it had been his decision and his alone. When he’d started talking about Lissa, it had been hard to figure out who of the three of them was the most embarrassed. It had been excruciating.
For days afterward their daughter had raged around the house, ricocheting between anger and tears. It was disgusting. Gross. She was going to have to leave school. Everyone would be talking about it. She never wanted to see her dad again.
After a few days of continual sobbing, Sophie had returned to school, vowing never to trust a man in her life.
Together they’d stumbled and shivered their way through the next few months.
The only bright light in their dark days was that Sophie had been accepted into Stanford.
Grace showed only her pride and her joy. Dismay and fear she kept hidden.
How would she cope? What would she do when Sophie left, too? She was facing a life that looked nothing like the one she’d planned for herself. It was like hiking in the wilderness with no map.
David had moved in with Lissa the night he’d been discharged from hospital, and they were now sharing her small one-roomed apartment on the other side of town.
“I’ve decided I’m not going to travel this summer.” Sophie mixed dressing for the salad.
“What? Why? You’ve been looking forward to it.”
“I’m not leaving you.” Sophie tossed the salad violently, as if each leaf had personally offended her. “Unless you’d consider still going to Paris?”
“Alone?”
“Why not?” Sophie rescued a leaf that had landed on the table. “People travel alone all the time.”
Grace hadn’t traveled alone since she was eighteen. All the trips she’d taken in the last twenty-five years had been with David.
Should she feel embarrassed about that? Maybe she should have traveled alone. But why would she when the thought of traveling with David was so much more appealing? And it wasn’t as if they could afford multiple holidays.
“This trip was ridiculously expensive. Even if I cancel the hotel, I’ll still lose a fortune on the flights.”
“Then why cancel? You deserve a treat. I really think you should go, Mom.”
But it wouldn’t be a treat. It would be a cruel reminder of what she’d lost. She’d be imagining how it might have been if they’d done it together. She’d assumed they’d be making memories together. It hadn’t occurred to her that those memories wouldn’t include David.
“Maybe I’ll do something else later in the summer.”
Sophie put the salad in the center of the table. “If you don’t go, I don’t go.”
When had Sophie become this stubborn? “You’ve been planning it for months. Things have changed for me, but they don’t have to change for you.”
“Seriously?” Sophie clattered plates. “My father is sleeping with my friend, and you think things haven’t changed? Everyone at school knows, and most people think it’s disgusting and gross, which, by the way, it totally is. I mean, this is my dad and I’m having to think about—” She shuddered. “Never mind. Teachers keep asking me how I’m doing. Hello, humiliation.”
Every word she spoke inflicted more damage to Grace’s wounded heart.
For the first time in her life she came close to hating David.
“We’ll get through this.” She was surprised by how strong she sounded, and Sophie looked surprised, too.
“I don’t get how you can be so calm.”
“I’m doing my best in difficult circumstances, and that’s all anyone can do. You need to carry on and do all the things you were going to do before this happened.”
Sophie slid into her seat and pushed the salad toward Grace. “No.”
It was scary to acknowledge that a small, needy part of her wanted her daughter to stay home for the summer. Don’t leave me. But she wasn’t going to listen to her inner child.
“We’ll argue about it another time.”
They