“Because it wasn’t fair to you to pretend that nothing was happening,” I said. “Because I have always felt guilty that you tried to protect me from the ugliness that was always present at home.”
“I didn’t protect you well enough,” she murmured.
“You did the best that you could,” I argued. “You went above and beyond. I never knew what was happening until I saw it with my own eyes, and then I realized that you shouldn’t have endured all of that just for me.”
My mother shook her head. “You don’t understand. You are my child. I was afraid for your safety. I would have done anything to protect your physical health, your mental health, your sense of well-being.”
“But you sacrificed your own happiness.”
“And I would do it again in a heartbeat. This is one of those things, Gemma, that you can’t understand until you have a child of your own. It might not make sense to you now, but I would’ve cut my own veins if it meant that you would be okay. I could’ve endured anything — and did — at just the thought of you.”
I swiped at a stray tear that slipped down my cheek. “I wish you hadn’t had to. I wish you could’ve gotten out of it sooner.”
“It was nothing,” my mother said dismissively. “Not when the goal was to make sure you believed that life was good. That life is always supposed to be good. You’re not supposed to struggle and struggle. Good things are supposed to happen to good people.”
“But life doesn’t really work like that,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t.” My mother dabbed at her own eyes. “You should’ve been able to talk to me about it when you were struggling in New York City.”
“I didn’t want you to worry about me,” I said. “Not after everything you did for me.”
“Gemma, you are my life. It is my job to worry about you.”
“I wanted you to believe that my life was good, too.” I sucked in a breath and let it out again. “And you told me, that night, that the reason you couldn’t leave my father was because you didn’t have the money to.” She flinched, but I persisted. “And I knew how important that point was for you to make — that if you don’t have enough money to be independent, you might become dependent on a bad situation.”
“I never wanted to make you feel like you had to lie about your life,” she said. “I know just as well as anyone that there can be some low spots.”
I had to smile inwardly at that. Trust my proud mother to refer to the years-long span of her life in which her husband beat her as a “low spot.”
“Well, it was all high spots for a New York minute,” I mused. “My dreams came true. And then I ruined it for everyone.”
My mother looked crestfallen. “If it wasn’t meant to be, we just have to let it be. We can’t do anything about it now.”
“I’m so sorry it happened like this. You seemed like you were really happy with Frank, and he seemed like he cared about you a lot.”
My mother waved her hand at me as if to dispel further conversation on the matter. She opened her mouth to say something that was probably going to be pithy, but the doorbell rang.
“Who could that be?” she wondered. “Gemma, if you ordered us pizza again, we are going to blow up to irreversible proportions.”
“Pizza helps heal broken hearts,” I said, pushing myself up from the couch and stretching my legs. How long had I been sitting there? I was used to city life, used to walking around everywhere every single day. It was too easy to be sedentary in the suburbs. Maybe there was wisdom to my mother’s words. Without exercise, our scorned women’s diets of pizza and ice cream with a smattering of wine was going to devastate our waistlines.
I threw open the door, reaching for my purse on the coat rack in the entrance, when I realized it wasn’t the pizza delivery at all.
It was Frank.
Chapter 15
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Frank said nothing, seeming not to know what to do or why he was there. He took a step backward, then stood firm, and cleared his throat.
“Is Lydia — that is, to say, your mother — here?” he asked. For all his billions of dollars, he didn’t seem very sure of himself. Maybe that was one of those things money couldn’t buy.
“She is here,” I said carefully, “but I’m not sure that she is available to see any visitors.”
I watched Frank’s Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed hard. He was nervous. What could he be doing here? I wouldn’t allow him to see my mother if he was only going to make her more upset. Neither of us needed that.
I turned as I heard a noise behind me and saw my mother stop in her way across the foyer to the kitchen, probably going to get some napkins and drinks for the pizza that should’ve been here by now. The pizza that should’ve been here instead of her former fiancé.
“Lydia…” Her name left his mouth choked, as if the sound of her couldn’t quite make it past that bobbing Adam’s apple.
My mother had been shocked into stillness. She gaped at Frank standing in the open door for so long I worried that she’d lost her power of speech entirely.
“Excuse me? Did someone order pizza?”
Unnoticed by the three of us, a delivery person stepped around Frank bearing a couple of boxes of the thing we’d expected. The pizza jolted us all into movement: Frank stepped aside, my mother continued to the kitchen, and I settled up with the delivery person and stood holding the cardboard boxes whose contents were supposed to lick our wounds for us.
Frank was utterly unexpected. I heard my mother rattling around in the kitchen, and Frank and I both watched the delivery person drive away.
He turned back toward me. “Is it good pizza?”
I shrugged. “It’s pizza.”
“That’s all pizza’s meant to be, really. I don’t like the restaurants that have started reimagining pizza with the vegetable of the moment. Pizza’s meant to be chewy dough with tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperonis. Nothing more, nothing less. None of this cauliflower and kale buggery.”
I smiled and jumped as my mother cleared her throat at my shoulder. “Frank, would you like to join us for lunch?”
“Are you only just now having lunch?” he asked, checking his watch. “Lydia, it’s nearly six o’clock.”
“We’ve had a busy day,” she said. “Are you saying you don’t want to have pizza with us?”
“Have you ever known me to turn down a meal?” he asked, beaming as he slapped his ample stomach. “Pizza it is — as long as it’s got the right toppings.”
“Pepperoni only, apparently,” I informed my mother as she raised her eyebrows in question.
We all busied ourselves with ordinary tasks designed to bring normalcy to an abnormal situation. Frank set plates out while my mother poured drinks. I got some napkins and forks, in case anyone was going to try to be fancy about their pizza. It was funny. My mother and I would’ve just found another television show to watch and eaten the pizza straight from the boxes in the other room.
Curiosity simmered just under the surface as we dug in to the steaming pies. What was Frank doing here? Why had my mother let him in the house in the first place? What was going to happen?
“You know, I think the two of you have some things to talk about,” I said, standing up abruptly and taking my plate.
“Gemma,” my mother hissed. She raised her eyebrows at me meaningfully, like she was trying to convey some message to me telepathically. It was probably something along the lines of “don’t you dare leave me alone with him and this pizza.”
I grabbed another slice and beat a retreat. “I think I’ll eat this upstairs.”
It was a strange and sad realization I had just moments later, on the landing right in front of my room, when I understood that this was exactly what I would do to her when I was a child. I would leave her to deal with my father, to absorb his punches, while I escaped elsewhere. I paused and sat down at the top of the stairs, munching on my pizza, ready to intervene if things got ugly a
nd, let’s be honest, playing the voyeur, because I could hardly stand the suspense of Frank’s visit.
Why had he decided to come all the way out here? If he had something he wanted to add to the breakup, couldn’t he have more easily called my mother? Maybe she’d turned her phone off, just like I had, to avoid any unwanted contact.
“Lydia…” Frank spoke in that same choked voice, the one he’d used while he’d still been standing on our front porch, looking for all the world like a dog with its tail between its legs. I could barely hear him. I had to stop chewing to hear his next entreaty. “Please…”
I blinked. What was he asking her for? Was he begging? I strained to listen.
“Help me to understand,” he said.
“If you had wanted to understand, you would’ve asked me,” she said, her voice quiet but calm. There was a long pause in which I imagined them to be chewing their pizza. I might’ve been able to see into the kitchen if I’d scooted a couple of steps down, but that would’ve put me at risk of being caught spying on them. I just had to be patient, I supposed, chewing resolutely on my pizza.
“You’re right,” Frank said. “I should’ve asked you. And I tried to, but only after…”
“Only after you thought you already knew everything,” my mother finished for him. I wasn’t sure that he was going to say that, but he didn’t contest the point.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t hang up immediately. I’m sorry that I didn’t think about how much that would hurt you.”
“Is that what you came here to do? To apologize?”
“Yes, I mean… I don’t know. I had to see you, Lydia. I…I missed you terribly. I still do. Miss you.”
“I’m sitting right here.”
“Us, I mean. I miss us.”
“We’re both here.”
“You know what I mean.”
There was another long silence. My pizza was getting cold. I was having trouble eating it, too entranced by what Frank and my mother were saying, what was still remaining unsaid. I wasn’t sure what was at play yet, or why he’d come out to the house to see her. Missing her just wasn’t a good enough excuse. If he’d said that at the door, I doubted she would’ve let him in.
“What am I supposed to say, Frank?” my mother asked. “That I forgive you? That I’m over you? That the way everything turned out is for the best?”
“I don’t know what you’re supposed to say. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say. I just… I was in the city, and something told me to go to you. That’s all there was to it. I couldn’t resist the impulse.”
They lapsed into silence again. What was there to say when everything was over? Or maybe there was just too much to say, too much left unsaid.
“I love you.”
I blinked and leaned forward, trying to discern who’d whispered those three words. I didn’t have to wait very long.
“Then why did you end things?” my mother asked. “Why did you trust the words of some stranger over the woman you were ready to marry?”
“Because it’s happened before,” Frank said. “I’ve been blinded by beauty and youth and what looked like love, and it was only through Peter’s intervention that I was saved, at the last moment, from certain ruin. He’s concerned about me. He always has been, calling me a hopeless old romantic. That’s why he sent the private investigator.”
“You are a hopeless romantic, and I’m neither beautiful nor young.”
“Stop. You’re the woman I want to be with. I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it. Do you want every cent of mine? Take it. If that’s the price I have to pay to be with you, it’s a bargain.”
“No.” My mother said nothing else for a long stretch. I was in just as much agony as I imagined Frank was downstairs. “If you truly want to be with me, you will listen.”
“I’ll listen to anything. Anything you want. Forever.”
“I want you to listen to me now.”
“I am listening.”
And my mother told him, from start to finish, the long saga of her first marriage. Of taking the beatings to protect me, to protect the idea of a perfect life she wanted me to have. Then, taking the beatings because she couldn’t escape. Nothing in this house was hers; it was all his. She was beholden to him, and he exacted payment from her blow by blow.
“So when we started dating, and you asked me to start spending money, I invested it in a savings account instead,” she said.
“I know about the savings account.”
“I know. But you don’t understand. I was still looking to protect myself after all of these years, after my marriage has been over for years. I couldn’t leave him because it would’ve made Gemma and me homeless, penniless, without a single friend in the world. I saved with the idea that you were going to do something bad to me. That you were going to raise your hand to me because I’d never be good enough for you.”
“Lydia, I adore you. I love you so much. You are more precious to me than anything else in this entire universe.”
“I am… You’re going to have to be patient with me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to cast doubt on our relationship. It’s just… I’ve been through a lot. And you didn’t know that before you got in to this relationship with me, and maybe it wasn’t fair to you.”
Frank inhaled deeply. “I loved you before I knew anything about your past, and I love you more than ever now that I know it, know how strong you had to be to get through it, and how wonderful you are now to be on the other side of it.”
“Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m on the other side of it, though,” my mother said softly. “That’s the problem. That’s why I was making that savings account. So that I would have a way out if I needed it. I never meant to steal from you.”
“Enough.” There was a very long silence, and the sounds I heard made my face go hot. That definitely couldn’t have been them taking a break to eat their pizza. I hemmed and hawed over disappearing into my room to give them their privacy or remaining so I could listen to the conclusion of what they would decide after wading through their feelings, which had somehow prevailed through all the doubt and upset. It made me ache oddly for Peter even though I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. Our relationship hadn’t been torn apart by outside forces. It had ripped itself up from the inside out.
“Lydia, will you marry me?”
I covered the gasp that leaked out from my mouth as quickly as I could, hoping neither of them had heard me. Of everything that had happened, everything that they had shared with each other over those two boxes of pizza on the kitchen table, I hadn’t expected this. Not at all.
“I’ve already said yes once, Frank.”
“But will you say it again? Will you agree to take me, warts and all, and spend the rest of our lives together?”
“I would love nothing more,” my mother said, and then they were quiet for a long time, and I slipped back up the stairs and into my room, happy and sad all at once, wondering where that left me with Peter.
Chapter 16
I awoke suddenly, and it was still dark. The nights were so black out here that it was difficult even to see your hand in front of your face until your eyes adjusted. New York City was different, of course. There was always an orange cast to darkness from all the lights the buildings and streets and cars and people gave off. I liked the orange. It felt comfortable.
“Gemma, are you awake?” I blinked, trying to clear the cobwebs from my head. It was my mother. I could only just barely make out her form in the dark, perched at the edge of my bed.
“I’m awake,” I said, my own voice sounding thick and foreign to my ears. “What’s wrong? Is everything okay?”
“Do you love Peter?”
“What?” I rubbed my eyes, trying to decide whether or not I was dreaming, but my mother was still there.
“I said, do you love Peter?” she asked. “Is there even a part of you that still loves him?”
“I d
on’t understand why you’re asking that.” That wasn’t something I wanted to think about. It physically hurt me to turn my mind to Peter, to the things we’d said to each other. I wasn’t convinced that there would be any chance of reconciliation. The way we’d parted had been contentious, furious. Did that mean I didn’t still love him? The answer to that question was very complicated. Very painful.
“I’m asking you that because if there’s a chance — even a tiny, tiny chance — that there is still love there, you should seize it,” my mother said. “Don’t let that relationship go because of one bad fight, or one misunderstanding. If the love is there, make it work. Do anything you can think of.”
I didn’t know what to say. Was the love still there? There were parts of me that still loved Peter — helplessly, and hopelessly. Wasn’t that the case for everyone who went through a breakup? Didn’t everyone still retain some kind of love for the way things used to be? Wasn’t I supposed to get over that? It was useless to pine over the way things used to be, because things couldn’t be like that anymore. It wasn’t realistic. I had to move forward, because there was no going back.
“Frank and I are getting married,” my mother said, breathless with excitement.
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Congratulations. I’m glad that the two of you were able to work things out.”
“It’s going to be the same date that we originally had,” she continued. “Frank contacted everyone, and we’ll still be able to do it.”
“I’m very happy for you two.”
“The thing is, Frank still wants Peter as the best man.” My mother hesitated. “And I want you for my maid of honor.”
Ah. That was why she was asking about Peter and me. She wanted to know if there was any miraculous chance of reconciliation ahead of the big day.
“The wedding will turn out perfectly,” I assured her. “Peter and I are both adults. We don’t have to be in a relationship to behave.”
“We can reshape the way the ceremony is,” my mother said. “You won’t have to walk in together.”
“Don’t change a single thing. This is going to be fine. It’s going to be great. I promise.”
CALLIE (The Naughty Ones Book 1) Page 63
