The Favorite Daughter

by Patti Callahan Henry

  “Okay, adorables, it’s time to go. We’re taking Grandy grocery shopping.” A pause followed and then high-pitched little-girl voices before Colleen heard her dad’s voice join them and then the sounds of leaving.

  Colleen sat on the newly vacated swing and shifted against the back pillow. Dad had had this swing made when they were in middle school—by an old friend who needed work, he’d said. He’d taken the friend a single bed mattress and had him build around it with nautical ropes hanging from the ceiling. If ever Colleen thought of taking a nap, she thought of this swing, of this musty-smelling mattress and the many blankets and pillows that had come and gone.

  She closed her eyes. It had been Walter, right? Yes, of course it had. She hadn’t imposed his image on some random man kissing a crying woman. Her memories might haunt her, but not under the bright lights of Watersend River Park.

  Walter. The man she’d loved; the man she had held up against all other men; the man who’d married her sister. Charming and smart and full of adventure. And yet, and yet, there he was doing to Hallie exactly what he’d done to Colleen.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I’m finished!” Colleen set the final stories on Shane’s kitchen table. “I finished this morning after Hallie and the girls stopped by and then took Dad shopping. So the book is done now, right?”

  Shane grinned at her and leafed through the sheets. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “You did not know that.” Colleen slapped his arm. “But you could.”

  He nodded while skimming the stories.

  “Shane.”

  “Hmmm . . .”

  “I need to tell you something.”

  He glanced up, a lock of hair falling over his forehead just as it had when he was a child, making him appear younger. “What is it?”

  “Last night I think I saw Walter with a woman at the river park.”

  “You think you did or you did?” He set the papers on the table and gazed directly at Colleen.

  She hesitated but knew the answer. As surely as she knew it was Walter in the alcove of the church. “I did. He was holding her, kissing her, consoling her. It was clear they were intimate. They drove away in her car before I could confront him.”

  “Just damn.” Shane slumped into a chair. “I would never have thought or guessed this. Honestly, he’s been like a model husband and father, a great son-in-law to Dad. Are you sure?” He held up his hand. “Don’t answer that. Of course you’re sure.”

  “You like . . . him?” Colleen leaned forward. “I mean, you two get along well and all that and you’ve never suspected this?”

  “They’re both under a lot of stress. Jobs. Kids. The move to the new house. Maybe it’s the first time.”

  Colleen almost, but didn’t quite, laugh. “First time?”

  Shane cringed. “Second.” He slapped his hand on his leg. “Just damn. I trusted him, too. He’s been a help to all of us. He’s been such a part of the family.” He rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “It took a while for me to forgive him, you know? I blamed him for your leaving. I still do. But at some point I had to trust him for Hallie. What now?”

  “Remember when Hallie said she was exhausted and had ‘enough crap’ to deal with? Maybe this is what she meant.”

  “Maybe, but they have a really busy life. It could have been a load of other things.”

  “Well, I . . .” Colleen stopped as the door handle made a clicking noise and Hallie entered the room, her satchel over her shoulder and a take-out coffee cup in hand.

  “You what?” Hallie dropped her things on the table directly on top of Colleen’s stories.

  “Nothing.” Colleen eased the papers from under Hallie’s bundles. “Just need to finish . . .”

  “Bullshit.” Hallie took a sip of coffee and glared at her sister. “But right now I don’t care what you were talking about, even if it was me.” She sat at the table. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had a glazed look. Colleen had a vague sense her sister was seeing the river park and a red-haired woman.

  “You okay?” Shane asked.

  “The timeline.” Hallie’s words were robotic. “You know it’s not right.”

  “It’s not.” Colleen glanced at her brother before turning back to her sister with a nod. “You’re right, Hallie. But I think that in the memory book we have to give Dad the timeline he’s always given us. It’s what he told us, so it’s what he believes and maybe that’s the best we can do.”

  “The best we can do?” Hallie’s face seemed to come alive again, her cheeks flushed. “It damn well isn’t the best we can do. And you know that. You just don’t care.”

  “Don’t care?” Colleen felt her voice rising and she checked it, spoke more softly. “I do care. I totally care. Listen, I found my baby book and it’s like I didn’t even exist for the first two months of my life. Of course I care. But the memory book is supposed to be for Dad, so he can look at it and see his life in some sort of narrative way, and if this is the narrative he told us, maybe that’s the one he wants to remember.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter what we want to remember,” Hallie said, “but what is true. Isn’t that what you want all of us to do? Face the truth?”

  “No. I don’t know what I mean.” She glanced between brother and sister. “Have you ever wondered why we never visited Grandma and Granddad in Virginia? Or Rosie and Fred? I mean, I know we have a small family compared to most, but we never went to see them. They always came to us. We never visited Mother and Dad’s town. We never saw where they grew up. We never once visited.”

  Hallie’s eyes flitted to the note cards, back to Colleen and then again to her brother. “I never thought about that. It was just the way it was.”

  “Exactly.” Colleen exhaled. “Just the way it was.”

  Shane lifted a folder from the table and then set it down again. “Maybe South Carolina was just more fun. It was Dad’s home. He didn’t like leaving it. We know that. Sometimes the most simple explanation is the right one.”

  “And sometimes it’s not,” Hallie said. “Right, Lena?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Hallie stood and walked to the wall where her note cards still dangled, looking as though one strong breath would send them all to the floor, where they might rearrange themselves in a new order. “My husband in a park when he’s supposed to be out of town. The most simple explanation is that you were wrong. But it’s not the correct explanation, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Hallie shook her head, breaking free of something invisible binding her, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. She glanced first at Colleen and then at her brother. “We have to ask Dad. It’s the only way. Nothing else makes sense. He has to tell us. Was he in Ireland for two years or one? Did he marry Mother in 1980 or 1981? That’s the bottom line.”

  “I’d go by the stamp on the pictures.” Colleen pointed to the pile of them on the table, the black-and-white, the faded color and the newly printed.

  “Then you were born in Ireland.”

  “That can’t be right. My birth certificate says Watersend. Unless my father isn’t . . . Dad.” She shook her head. “No. There has to be a logical explanation.”

  “Exactly.”

  Shane paced the room, running his hands through his hair. “We have a lot bigger things to figure out than that one year.”

  “Yes, we do. Like who’s going to take care of Dad.” Colleen was the one who spoke what they were all thinking.

  “We are.” Shane slapped his hand on his thigh, a sound that reverberated through the room.

  “Well, we can face the truth or pretend it’s not happening,” Colleen said.

  All these conversations, overlapping and underlapping, but all of them pointing to the same thing: a cold hard look a
t the truth.

  Hallie shook her head. “You aren’t talking about Dad. I know that. You’re talking about seeing Walter with a friend and making me think it’s . . .”

  Colleen held out her hand to interrupt Hallie. “If she was a friend, she was a mighty friendly friend. I get that you don’t want to admit the truth. Hell, I wouldn’t want to see it either. But guess what—not wanting to see it doesn’t make it go away.”

  “Shut up, Lena. Shut up.” Hallie pushed at the back of a chair, the scraping sound like nails on a chalkboard. She slammed her fist on the table. Then her face went as still as a lake, turning from the rigorous and tumultuous river during a storm to something so still it was eerie. Her eyes were dry, her expression blank.

  Colleen waved her hand in front of her sister’s face. “Are you okay?”

  Hallie’s eyes didn’t move, not seeming to be looking at anything. She spoke softly. “I guess there’s no use pretending anymore, Lena. You hate me. Dad is disappearing. And my husband is a philanderer.” She exhaled and her gaze didn’t shift. “No more pretending.”

  Colleen sat as still as she knew how, unable to find the words or actions that might soothe this awful moment.

  “Neither of you can say anything right now to make it better, so to relieve you of that burden, I’m leaving.”

  “Don’t.” Shane reached out his hand, touched her shoulder. “Stay.”

  Hallie looked at Colleen and then grabbed her bag and left, the door clicking shut behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

  Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

  The pub buzzed with activity—a bridesmaids’ party had descended, the women ordering shots of tequila and wearing pink T-shirts with the hashtag #gettinghitched. As if getting married meant this poor girl would be pulling a wagon for the rest of her life.

  Colleen felt that old ache again, the one of betrayal, but this time it was for Hallie, and it was a feeling she didn’t want to have, one she didn’t want to indulge. Placing another brick in that wall of protection around her heart, she added some spackling and walked through the screeching girls, each laughing at the other in such high-pitched squeals that Colleen almost put her hands over her ears. Her dad sat at the far end of the bar, his head bent almost forehead to forehead with old Mr. Levin. Colleen knew his story, too: a widower who had lost his wife to lymphoma, who had sat on the same stool for the past twenty-five years, who drank only beer before his wife passed, and then afterward enough whiskey to kill him and need a ride home every night, and now only one shot a night. He twirled his whiskey glass. He nursed it. He sniffed it. He made it last as long as he could, and then he went home.

  A doctor, an elegant woman with dark hair—Colleen didn’t know her name—a woman who was new to town and had opened an emergency clinic, sat with the bookshop owner, Mimi, in the middle of the room, laughing and drinking a beer. Colleen waved at Mimi and both women waved in return. Tales of the town filled this pub as surely as tables, chairs and taps.

  “Dad.” Colleen said this gently. She didn’t want to startle him. It scared her, the way she felt about Gavin’s vulnerability. If her dad was easily frightened, if he couldn’t find his way, how could she?

  “Hello, little lark.” Gavin smiled and kissed her cheek. “When did you get here?”

  “Just now. I was upstairs visiting Shane and . . .” Had he meant when did she get into town or when did she arrive at the pub? Never say “remember”; never say “I told you”—Colleen saw the words on the placard in Shane’s apartment.

  “Oh, yes,” Gavin said with a nod. The noise level rose as the three-piece fiddle band began playing. Colleen thought again, as she had so many times, that although she’d never been to Ireland, if someone was put to sleep and awoke in this place, they would believe they had been transported to the Emerald Isle. At least as long as no one spoke in a thick southern accent or glanced at the photos on the walls.

  As Dad walked away, Beckett approached. Colleen greeted him. “Hey, you. Sorry about last night. Not the best way to end a lovely date.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for. How is . . . everyone?” He glanced around the pub.

  “Not so great. But how’s the research coming for the historic marker?” She switched subjects quickly.

  “Should be done in the next week or so. I thought it might make a good birthday present at your dad’s big party, but it won’t be ready in time.” Beckett approached the bar and ordered a glass of tonic water with lime for himself and Colleen nodded that she wanted the same, as Hallie made her way toward them. She reached their side and put her hand on Colleen’s arm. “We need to talk.”

  “I thought you left.”

  “I did, but . . .” She placed her hand on her stomach. “But I feel sick. I wanted to run away, find a place to hide, but I can’t. I want to talk to you. I know that doesn’t make sense and you can tell me to . . .”

  “I’m here, Hallie.”

  Beckett took a few steps back and engaged quickly in a conversation with a man he knew on the next bar stool.

  “You are right about Walter.”

  “For once, I don’t want to be right.” Colleen nodded but not with the satisfaction she’d thought might come.

  “How it starts is how it ends.” Hallie motioned to Hank and he brought her a shot of whiskey. She drank it and slammed the glass to the bar. “Right? How it started, with cheating lies, is how it’s ending. How could I have expected anything less? It’s my own doing.”

  “No, Hallie. It’s not your own doing. It’s his. You can see that, right? You didn’t do anything to make him cheat.”

  “I’ve always felt that something was . . . wrong between us. Always, but I blamed it on you. Not on you, but on what I did to you. So I worked even harder to make our marriage great. I worked even harder to be a good wife and mother. I worked even harder to be . . . hell, I don’t know, as amazing as you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Colleen took her sister’s arm and gently guided her through the crowd, outside to the sidewalk and then to the river’s edge.

  Hallie was full on crying by then and Colleen put both hands on her sister’s shoulders. “It’s okay.”

  Hallie shook her head. “I’m not like you, Lena. I can’t turn off my emotions. I can’t stop because you say ‘it’s okay.’ I’ve tried to be like you. All my ever-loving life I’ve tried to be like you.” She pointed to the pub. “For God’s sake, you’re Dad’s little lark. I’ve never even had a nickname.”

  “Why, Hallie? Why would you want to be anything like me?”

  “Because you’re just you.”

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  “You don’t see it, do you?” Hallie’s voice rose. The mingling couples and families and joggers and amblers all turned their faces toward Hallie and Colleen. But they kept on as though they were alone as they once had been, unraveling life’s mystery, or at least their life’s mystery.

  “See what?”

  “You’re different, Colleen. You aren’t like the rest of us. You’re a little like Dad, the best of us, and then something more, something almost magical. The way your eyes shine brighter and how you gulp life by the mouthful, how when you put your full attention on someone they only see you, how you laugh and the sound falls through the air.”

  “It’s the same as you, Hallie. I’ve always felt that way about you, too.” Colleen couldn’t quell the feelings now; tears filled her own eyes and a breach had been broken or crossed. Everything must be said at that river’s edge.

  “No. It’s kind of you to say, but it’s not true.”

  “We aren’t the same, of course we aren’t. But you’re amazing. When you aren’t trying to be someone else or . . .”

  “Cheating wit
h your fiancé.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Lena. I’m sorrier than I’ve ever been for anything ever. I’ve always suspected that the only reason he stayed with me was because he was caught. He denies it, but he wasn’t going to leave you. He wasn’t. If you hadn’t seen us . . .”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Ten years. Do you realize you haven’t spoken to me in ten years?”

  “I know.”

  “And you’re so hard. So . . . hard. Like you’re made of something else now. I hate it so much.” A shudder passed through Hallie’s body.

  “I hate it, too.” Colleen spoke the truth. She hated being so cold, but it was all she’d known to do.

  “Then quit.” Hallie looked up. “Be Lena. Please. You told me I was obsessed with planning the party so I didn’t have to think about my marriage. And maybe you’re right. But you’re obsessed with your job so you don’t have to think about us—your family here without you.”

  “That’s not why. I love what I do and where I get to go and . . .” Colleen was defending something that was both true and not altogether true. Yes, she loved her job. But yes, she’d used it to avoid her family and the pain and the loss.

  “All these years, I’ve known the truth about Walter. Deep down I’ve known.” Hallie sat on the soft grass, her legs crossed.

  Colleen sat across from her on bent knees, her hands denting the moist grass, mud wet against her shins. “You’ve known?”

  “Guessed at best. But, Lena, he’s a good dad. A great man in so many other ways. We have a community and a life and the girls, the precious girls. I needed to believe he was faithful. I needed to believe that having him was worth the price of betraying you.” She looked to Colleen, her eyes now clear and her voice clearer.

  “We fool ourselves,” Colleen said. “We fool ourselves to make circumstances tolerable. We fool ourselves to avoid the pain. We fool ourselves to make sure that life can chug along at its slow, grinding, safe pace. I understand. But you deserve everything good and true. So do I. We both do, and Walter Littleton wasn’t and isn’t either of those things.”