Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 124320 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124320 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
“I wanted to make something good.” Mama glances at me, her eyes dark and sober under the vibrant head scarf hiding her hair. “You’ll be home for dinner?”
I assess the food. Pork chops, string beans, corn on the cob, sweet potatoes.
“All this for just us?” I ask.
“Just us.” She blows out a breathy chuckle, blinks, licks her lips when they tremble. “Some days it gets bad, missing your father. I know it sounds silly, but it helps when I cook his…his favorite things.”
That feeling I usually try to hide from seizes my unsuspecting heart. Grief. Desolation that Daddy will never walk through that door. Never call me baby girl again. Tears sting my eyes.
“I miss him, too,” I whisper. “All the time. I keep wondering when it stops hurting.”
“For me, it won’t.” Mama scrubs dirt from the sweet potatoes, not looking at me. “I lost the love of my life, and it blasted a hole in the world. It doesn’t so much stop hurting as you just get used to the pain, remember how to wake up in the bed alone. Oh, you have to learn everything all over again like a baby learning to walk because I forgot how to live without that man.”
There are a million things I want to say, want to ask, but she’s never spoken this openly about her grief and I’m afraid anything I say would make her stop.
“Sometimes,” she continues, “I go into his office and pull out those stinky cigars he used to hide.”
“You knew about those?” I ask, my question, my stunted laugh, teary.
“He knew I knew.” She chuckles, snapping the ends of the string beans. “We had no secrets, Tru.”
Her probing stare turns on me. “How did it go with that Washington girl?”
The reminder of our present drama jerks me from the past.
“Good.” I turn around to help snap the ends from the beans. “She’s agreed to the conditions I laid out.”
“So she’s taking it out of the book? The lies about your daddy and Ruth?”
“Yeah. The publisher won’t release it if she doesn’t. And I have final approval.”
“You’re something else, girl.” Mama laughs and shakes her head.
My conversation with Ezra tickles my thoughts. Not the hard parts that he and I have to sort through for our future, but the mysterious parts about our parents’ pasts.
“Ezra and I went up to the lake house the other night.”
“So things must be moving right along,” Mama says, her smile teasing.
“Things were moving right along.” I grimace. “They may be grinding to a halt, but that’s another issue. When we were there, I found that star of David charm Mrs. Stern used to wear.”
Mama’s hands go still under the water, and her whole body seems to freeze. Slowly her hands start moving again, but she doesn’t speak. So I do.
“Ezra didn’t remember his family ever going there, so he asked Mrs. Stern about it.”
She turns her head, stares at me for long seconds. “And what did she say?”
“Ezra didn’t tell me everything, but she said she was there with you,” I say, rushing my next words, feeling on the edge of a knife I can’t see. “I said you would have girls’ trips sometimes with your friends, and it must have been something like that.”
I pause, swallow, wait.
“Was it something like that, Mama?”
For a second, I think she won’t answer, won’t even acknowledge my question. Then she turns the water off, dries her hands on a dish towel nearby and faces me.
“No. It was just Ruth and me.” Defiance and dread vie in Mama’s eyes. “The reason I was so sure Joseph never had an affair with Ruth is because I did.”
“W-w-what?” For once I don’t care that I stuttered. What she’s saying is incomprehensible, but as echoes from that night taunt me with the truth, makes so much sense.
Damn you, Ruth!
Let me explain.
You can’t explain this!
“It was a hard year,” Mama says, looking down at her hands, caressing the small diamond Daddy gave her when they married. She always refused his offers to upgrade. “Your father was busy, working, gone all the time. So was Al. It’s no excuse. Ruth and I just…we were there for each other. I never would have thought…”
She shrugs. “It happened. I let it happen. The day Joe died was the hardest of my life. The day he found out about me and Ruth was the second.”
I’m dumbstruck. Congealing in my shock and clenching a cluster of string beans in my fist.
“I broke his…” Tears trickle over Mama’s cheeks. “I broke his heart and it took years to mend it. I wasn’t sure I ever could. He didn’t leave. He was somebody by then in his own right here in Atlanta. Maybe he was concerned about appearances, but that wasn’t your father. I like to think he didn’t leave me because he couldn’t stand to live without me. Loved me so much he had to figure out forgiveness.”