by O. J. Lovaz
“Losing your mom so young must have been really hard for you. I can’t even imagine that kind of heartache.” As her words came out, Anna tried to imagine what it would feel like to lose her mother. Would it be sorrow, regret, anger? And her father, what would she feel if he dropped dead right now? The answers frightened her.
“Is your father still alive?” she asked.
“He died last year. He was sixty-nine. Went to bed one night and never woke up—heart failure. At least, he died peacefully. That’s how I like to think about it.”
“It’s a comforting thought. May we be so lucky when our time comes.”
“I have good memories of both Mom and Dad. We had our time together. We humans can’t ask for more than that, right?”
Anna nodded. How could she avoid having to talk about her parents?
Michael gazed at her inquisitively while blindly pouring copious amounts of sugar into his cup of coffee.
“Whoa, should I go get some insulin?” Anna joked.
They laughed like kids laugh.
“I just like sweet things. Can’t help it,” he said with a charming little smirk.
“Is that right?”
How she loved his nerdy, awkward charm. Nothing like the witless dudes she’d made the mistake to date before. Some of them could’ve not named five US presidents.
She felt a sudden impulse to go over to his side, without saying a word, sit on his lap, and kiss him long and slow. So strong was her instinct that she could almost feel the warmth of his face pressed against hers.
Though she hadn’t even moved, Anna wondered if her gaze could have given away her impish thoughts. Embarrassed, she looked away, pretending to check out the place. The entire time, she sensed Michael’s eyes on her.
If only she could read his mind. There was an attraction between them, that much she knew; but could this be the beginning of a meaningful relationship? Was his interest in her only skin-deep, or was he craving to peek into her soul?
Was she even letting him peek, though? Of course, she wasn’t. Why not tell him right now about that awful dream? Nothing’s more intimate than one’s fears.
Okay, that’s insane, she now scolded herself. Yes, go ahead and tell him everything—that your father is the devil incarnate, and your mother a tortured soul. That’s the hot mess where you came from, a dysfunction supernova. Let him take a peek at that and see what happens. He’ll run like a gazelle that’s just stared into the eyes of a hungry lion.
A subtle smile crept up on Michael’s face.
“What?” Anna asked. Gosh, had she had a funny look on her face or something?
He leaned back, running a hand through his hair. “Just enjoying watching you lost in thought, holding your cup of coffee, your gaze set on some distant point, and that intriguing intensity in your eyes.”
She laughed nervously. “Wow, that’s…the way you described me…you, um, seem to be rather perceptive.”
“I can be, but only if the subject truly captures my interest.”
“So you find me interesting then?”
“That would be an understatement.” Michael grinned, one hand behind his neck. “But I think you already knew that.”
A warm flush rose from her chest to her neck and cheeks. She let out a sound of mild surprise.
“Hope that wasn’t—”
“I liked it,” she interrupted him.
Michael’s face lit up. He picked up a saltshaker from the table for no apparent reason.
A moment of silence. Not uncomfortable but somehow intimate.
“You know, it was nice hearing about your childhood,” Anna said.
“I bet yours was very different.”
“So very different, yes. I envy yours.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Mine was the complete opposite. Money was never an issue. That, we had plenty of. And yet I bet that your family, your home, your childhood, were much happier than mine.”
Michael leaned forward with his arms on the table and his eyes wide open, fixed on her.
Anna continued. “You know who my father was, but all you have is a name—Victor Goddard, son of Charles Goddard. Big fish in a small fishbowl. But the man, the husband, the father; that’s a whole different matter. He’s my father, and it pains me to speak ill of him, but the plain truth is that I only remember him as a deeply selfish, arrogant, and cruel man.”
Anna paused to sip her coffee, avoiding eye contact with Michael. She could feel her hands beginning to shake.
“I’m so sorry that you have to feel that way about your father,” Michael said. “No daughter should have to feel like that about her dad.”
His thoughtful words were comforting. Reassured, she carried on speaking.
“He poisoned my childhood.” Anna tried stave off the tears that she already sensed were on the way. “He made Frank and I feel like burdens he was forced to carry, unloved and unwanted. I could never understand it. He seemed constantly disappointed in us. Frank got interested in music, not sports, which is what Dad would’ve wanted. And me, well, I don’t think he ever wanted a daughter at all. I disappointed him right at birth.”
“That’s so sad,” he said.
“With other people, he’s a different person, always preoccupied with his public image. I remember how he faked fatherly pride, even love. He painted a smile of contentment on his face, made us hold hands, and never missed church, constantly posing for a postcard picture someone might be taking.”
“How about your mom? How did he treat her?”
“I have some early memories of him happy with Mom, but they are rather foggy, and I often wonder if I imagined those moments. Mostly, I remember Dad treating Mom like she was his property, and not a highly valued one at that. He humiliated her constantly. I don’t want to go into all the grimy details, but he was awful to her. Still is.”
Anna had told him much more than she had intended. She’d flung the door wide open.
“I can probably only begin to understand the full tragedy of it all. It’s not fair what they did to you.”
“They?” Anna asked, resenting the judgment on her mother.
Michael looked down at the table, as if searching for the answer there, then looked her in the eye. “No doubt your father was the villain, but your mother should have stopped it, for her own sake and yours. She could’ve divorced him. She could have sought help if she was scared…I’m sorry, I feel like I’m overstepping here. I don’t want to upset you.”
“I get what you’re saying. And you’re right. Mom should have done something.”
Liz had just arrived with their bountiful breakfast—it was a sight to behold. The two stacks of pancakes looked amazing, golden, and fluffy; the French toasts also looked delicious, the scrambled eggs were soft and creamy, and the bacon was crispy perfection. With a sunny smile and careful, delicate motions, Liz put everything nicely on the table, went back to the kitchen, and returned a moment later with the coffee pot to top off their coffee.
“They didn’t disappoint,” Anna said, biting into a strip of bacon. “Oh, this tastes like heaven.”
“I know. It’s so good.” He poured lots of syrup on his pancakes, cut a wedge from the stack, and put it in his mouth. He closed his eyes in ecstasy.
“Here we go, pigging out again,” Anna said, breaking into laughter.
“No half measures; let’s pig out like royalty,” Michael said. And indeed, they ate greedily and unabashedly, laughing at their own gluttony without a care, as if they had known each other for years.
Between bites, they got to talk about Frank. Michael seemed rather curious about him, probably because she held him in such high regard. She described him as a highly principled man who at the same time could be cynical, quick to anger, and impulsive—a combination of attributes that Michael found rather interesting. Anna herself often thought him a puzzle, a singularity that could only have emerged from the flames of his childhood. From time to time, she also pondered how that
same furnace might have shaped her.
Time flew by. Soon every face around them was new, and they were all having lunch. She was stunned to realize that it was past 1:00 p.m. already.
Getting ready to leave, Anna saw that she’d received a message from an out of state phone number. “Anna, this is your cousin, Diane. Could you call me around 2 pm?”
“Everything all right?” asked Michael.
“Just perfect, actually. It’s Diane—she just texted me.”
“Wow, that’s great. You could still get her to call her mother today, on her birthday.”
Anna instantly felt terrible about that lie she’d told him only the day before, but she reasoned that to come clean now would only make matters worse. To remove a lie, one must be willing to show what that lie has been hiding, and Anna wasn’t quite ready to tell Michael the real reason why she’d urgently needed to find her cousin.
They’d just walked out the diner’s door. Anna stopped and turned to him. “I’m so grateful for your help finding my cousin.”
“I’m very happy I did,” he said, his lips curling up into a smile. She wanted to kiss those lips. She imagined the kiss and could almost taste it.
Would he try to kiss her? He looked like he wanted to, and she wouldn’t have stopped him. But the moment had passed, and they were walking to the car.
It was a quiet drive back to her place. She kept thinking about that kiss that didn’t happen outside of the diner. Michael seemed lost in thought; his eyes were on the road, but his mind was somewhere else. A moment later, they arrived at her house, and Michael pulled into the driveway.
“This was wonderful. I had a great time,” Anna said, leisurely taking off her seatbelt.
“I truly enjoyed this time with you. I can’t wait until Thursday night.”
“Yeah, me too.” She leaned toward him for a kiss on the cheek. He leaned toward her, and they met in the middle. She kissed his cheek softly and started to pull back slowly, feeling the stubs of his beard brushing against the side of her lips and chin. She felt him slowly turning his gaze toward her, until they were face to face, staring into each other’s eyes, their noses nearly touching, and then they were kissing. Anna finished up with a gentle tug on his lower lip as she pulled back.
“Best breakfast ever,” she said in a smoky voice.
“I’m afraid to wake up right now, alone,” he said.
“You too, huh?”
“I’ll be counting the days till Thursday.”
“Me too. Until then,” she said.
“Until then.”
She got off the car and walked straight to her front door, not looking back, smiling all the way until she was inside. There she stood for a moment with her back to the door reliving the moment.
The thought of Diane intruded into her mind, like an alarm going off. She saw that it was past 1:30 p.m. and hastened to send a reply to her cousin, “Hi Diane, it’s sure great to hear from you. I’ll call you in half an hour.”
The minutes dragged on as Anna sat around waiting for the clock to strike two. She tried to read, but she couldn’t really focus on the story and kept having to reread entire passages. She fell to fretting about what she was going to say to Diane. I believe your mother had an affair with my father—would she say it like that? Seemed awfully raw.
The moment she realized that she needed more time to work out how to soften the blow to Diane, time seemed to speed up. Two o’clock came, and Anna wasn’t any closer to deciding how to tell her cousin about her appalling suspicion, but she made the phone call anyway. They’d have plenty to talk about before she addressed the dreaded subject.
The first part of their conversation went as one might expect from two cousins who had not talked for over two years. Anna explained to Diane, though rather cursorily, how she got a hold of her resume, a story Diane found remarkable.
“I’m sorry you had to go to such lengths to find me,” Diane said with a note of shame in her voice. She didn’t offer any explanations regarding her vanishing, though.
Anna didn’t explain right away her sudden need to locate her. Instead, they chatted for a long while about Diane’s decision to become a nurse, her job at the hospital, and about Boston. Also Frank’s engagement to Sarah—it was too important not to mention.
Eventually, their small talk ran out of steam and Anna had the opening she’d been both looking for and dreading.
“Diane, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Yes, you said so in your email. I’ve been wondering about it. Judging by the way you downplayed it in your email, I expect it is rather serious. Am I right?”
“Yes, you might be, although my sincere hope is that I’m wrong about everything. There’s nothing I’d want more than to hear you say I’m being ridiculous.”
“Holy shit. Okay, Anna, let’s hear it then.”
“I don’t know how else to say this, so I’m just going to come out with it.” Anna paused and took a deep breath, then closed her eyes and forced herself to say the words, “I have reason to believe my father and your mother may have had an affair.”
Silence, a frozen vacuum of anticipation.
Anna braced herself for an over-the-top emotional reaction from Diane. Instead, her brief silence was followed by a deep breath and a collected response, “I’d be lying if I told you I don’t believe it’s possible. Sadly, I know my mother is capable of very selfish actions; and from there, it’s a short, downhill path to wickedness.”
“I was afraid you might say something like that.”
“So, what makes you think this affair happened?”
Anna wished she had this chronicle recorded so that she could just hit play and have Diane listen to it, instead of having to relive the whole darn thing all over again.
Her mother’s text message made quite an impression on her. Anna’s conversation with her mother in the garden, on the other hand, didn’t impress her much.
The matter of the high school photographs seemed to stir Diane considerably.
“Okay, that’s really creepy,” she said. “When do you think this affair between them may have actually happened?”
“We think it happened recently.”
“We?”
“Frank and I.”
“Frank knows about this?” Diane asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“And why do you think it happened recently?”
“Because your mom’s message seems to refer to something they’ve just done.”
Diane seemed suddenly agitated. “But they may have been lovers for years, for many years, in fact. I mean, they dated in high school. Had you not thought about that?”
Her words stung a little. “You’re right—it’s possible. I guess I didn’t want to believe it could be that bad.”
“I’m sorry to have talked to you like that just now. You’re just the messenger here. You didn’t ask for this crap.”
“It’s quite all right,” Anna responded, moved by Diane’s show of compassion, a quality she didn’t recall her displaying ever before. “This is pretty heavy stuff I’m laying on you.”
“Yes, it is,” Diane said. “I wish I could tell you that you’re crazy and laugh it off, like you wanted me to, but the evidence is distressing.” She paused. “Listen, I must tell you there’s something I saw once. At the time, I thought it was bizarre, but I didn’t have anything else to connect it to. I was only fifteen.
“My mom and I had been arguing about something, pretty much like any other day. I remember she was talking to someone on the phone and locked herself in her room. A while later, she came out, dressed up nicely. I was sitting on a rocking chair we had, listening to music. She walked past me and told me that there was food in the fridge and that she would be back in a couple of hours. She didn’t say where she was going. I thought she seemed restless, but I was mad at her right then and said nothing.
“Then I heard a car pull over in front of the building—our apartment was o
n a second floor. I went to the balcony and saw Mom getting into a black car with a man, a blond man that looked like Uncle Victor.
“I was never sure, though. I asked Mom later who she’d gone out with; someone from work, she said. Seemed annoyed that I even asked. I supposed it couldn’t have been Uncle Victor. It just didn’t make any sense to me. I figured it must have been some other blond guy who just happened to look like him.”
“Was the car a Mercedes Benz?” Anna asked.
“It may have been. I don’t know. It was a nice car.”
“Dad has a black Mercedes Benz. He’s had it for at least ten years. He loves that car.”
“That’s messed up. Now, I think it really was him,” Diane said.
“This is a nightmare. What are we going to do? We can’t just turn our backs on this thing, don’t you think?”
“No, you’re right, it is too awful. We need to get to the bottom of this. Should we just confront them with what we know?”
“Most of it is inconclusive if you think about it,” Anna explained. “Your mom’s message is the most solid piece of evidence we have, but only I saw it. Frank and you only have my word. The high school photographs don’t prove that they’ve had an affair, but only that they dated in high school. My chat with Mom, strange as it was, is even less consequential. Your memory of your mom getting in a black car, which may have been a Mercedes, with a blond man, who may have been my father—that could be really something, if you were certain.”
“But I’m not,” said Diane.
“Exactly. And confronting them without conclusive evidence could backfire. We could end up looking pretty stupid, and then we’d really have to let the whole thing go.”
“You might be right. So, what now?”
“I’m not sure, but I think the three of us—Frank, you and me—could figure it out together. What do you think?”
“Yes, I think so. Should we do a three-way call later?” Diane asked.
“No more calls. Let’s meet. I want to see you anyway. It’s been over two years. Plus, I’ve never been to Boston, and it is high time I started going places. I’m sure Frank would love the idea. How does that sound to you?”
