Her mother would obviously rather not have said that. Perhaps as a slight revenge, she added, "Which is something that you might want to keep in mind in regard to Ron Stone, now that spring is coming. Considering how far the two of you apparently managed to strip in a snowbank in the middle of February."
"That," Missy said a little stiffly, "was a one time aberration."
Debbie's face clearly expressed her doubts. "Keep in mind how far aberrant you would have been by the end if you hadn't started out wearing parkas," she admonished. "You both had melted snow in your underwear and I did not buy the 'snow angels' explanation for one second.
"Anyway, Chad had to have been able to tell, by looking and feeling through my clothes, that he wasn't getting 'lush.' And when the time came, he seemed happy enough with what there was of my body. Ah… Well, it wasn't very impressive, but it worked fine. All the parts were in order. I got pregnant with you kids and all that."
Missy took a very deep breath. "What went wrong? Nobody explained it to me, back then. Nobody explained anything."
Debbie looked at her. "Long run or short run?"
"Both. If you will."
"Long run, I couldn't shut the door. Sometimes you have to shut a door. I couldn't admit to myself that the way things had worked out, for all practical purposes, Anne was my younger sister rather than my daughter.
"I don't want to blame anyone else. Don's parents would never have liked it that I was marrying again. Bruce and Lily might, just barely might, have accepted my remarriage if I had chosen a man fifteen or twenty years older than I was, well established, and they could have persuaded themselves that I was marrying again for the sake of security. Stability. Something like that.
"But Chad was just getting started, he was younger than I was, and he was, ah, obviously very, very healthy. Which didn't really give them much leeway for fooling themselves that there wasn't a physical attraction component involved in my decision to marry him. Which, as far as they were concerned, was adultery. Betrayal of Don. Even after nearly ten years.
"Maybe, even then, they would have tolerated it better if I had given Mom and Dad custody of Anne. But I didn't. Wouldn't. I did still want to hang on to Don, in some way, through Anne. Even though, by the time I remarried, it was really too late for that. The first few months of our marriage were the easiest, before I put my foot down and insisted that Anne was going to live with us.
"By the time Anne reached her teens, things were very, very difficult. The year after you were born was one of the worst. She was rebellious, Chip turned from three to four and was incredibly active, I was dealing with a baby. Next year almost the same, except that Chip turned from four to five and I was dealing with a toddler. I was tired all the time, like the energy was draining out of me.
"I kept telling myself that if I could hang on until Anne started college, everything would calm down. In 1991, she was scheduled to start WVU. Tuition paid, board and room paid. Three days before she was supposed to leave, she announced that she had changed her mind. Didn't want to go. Wanted to stay with Nani and Pop and commute to Fairmont State, instead. Nani said yes. Pop put his foot down and said no. He thought she needed to learn to live independently. Don's parents got involved. Anne blamed me. Us. Chad. She went to WVU. But she made us regret it. Not academically. She did really well. But the tension built up and built up.
"By then, I was staring forty in the face. Exhausted all the time. Not that… responsive to Chad. Starting to feel, really feel, that I was quite a bit older than he was. One thing led to another."
"You mean," Missy said, "that he had an affair and you threw him out."
Debbie's face turned pale.
"It's true," Missy said. "Nobody explained anything to me at the time, but I found out later. Could you really expect that I wouldn't?"
Debbie shook her head. "I suppose not."
"Why did you take him back?" Missy had decided to press the issue. This might be the best chance she ever had, with her mother a captive audience at the sink. "Why did you take him back. After he had done that?"
"Once I realized that my wounded pride wasn't worth it."
Debbie stopped. "That isn't quite true. It's only a tiny part of the truth, though I guess it had to come first. We didn't plan that meeting as leading to a reconciliation. Just that we finally had to get together and resolve some issues. We couldn't leave the separation hanging forever. We had to decide something. I hate to say it, but before Chip went to live with Grandma Jenkins, he wasn't dealing with the situation well at all. By then though, he and your Gran were getting along well enough that I started having nightmares about having him live with your Gran any longer. Nightmares about having my experience with Anne repeated. We had to come to some sort of closure."
Debbie laughed suddenly, a little bitterly. "In a way, we owe the reconciliation to Anne, I suppose. I asked Gran to take you for the day so your dad could come over to the house without the extra emotions that you'd bring into the situation. I was surprised when she said, 'About time the two of you got this mess settled.' I didn't tell Mother and Pop he was coming. Anne was living with them again and working at the clinic in Fairmont.
"Chad and I were sitting on opposite sides of the living room, sort of talking around what to do, the way we had every time we had tried to come to some kind of a resolution before. Then I heard a key in the front door and Anne came in. I didn't know she was coming. It was a Saturday morning, she should have been at the clinic, but she'd exchanged shifts with another nurse who wanted a weekday afternoon free for her child's teacher conference. When she saw Chad there, she started to spout Mother's lines, which I had been hearing for nearly two years. 'Time to get rid of him. What is he doing in this house? Pull the plug, take off his rings, get a divorce.'
"First, I pointed out that it was his house, really. Which it is. This is the old Williams place. We bought it when it came on the market because he had a sentimental attachment to it and I adored all the oak and walnut woodwork. It's where your Grandma Jenkins grew up. Her parents moved into it after her grandfather died and your father used to visit them here. After Grandpa Joe died, Grandma Esther eventually went to live with your Great-aunt Elizabeth and sold the house. It's not the easiest house to keep, even after all the remodeling we did, but that's fine.
"Then I said that I had taken off her father's rings long after his death, but Chad was still alive and we were still married.
"Finally, I guess, she pushed me too far. I stood up and said, 'I don't want a divorce. I want him to come back to me and have things right between us again. More than anything else in the world.'
"I've never seen Anne look so shocked.
"But not much more than Chad did, honestly.
"Not that I even knew he would be willing to come back. He'd never said so. I kept thinking to myself, the whole time we were separated, that he was probably waiting for me to get to the point where I would cut the knot and set him free to get on with it. He wasn't quite forty, yet. He could have started his personal life over, easily enough.
"Just saying that had brought me to my limits. I couldn't do or say anything else, right then. I was standing there, shaking like a leaf. I couldn't believe that I'd said that.
"Anne opened her mouth to say something else.
"Chad got up and put his arms around me.
"Then he laid down the law to Anne in no uncertain terms. The first time since we married. He told her that she was an adult woman and a registered nurse now, not a ten year old child. So she had two choices. The first was to go home, think about the fact of our marriage in a reasonable way, and come back in a couple of days when she was prepared to talk and act rationally. The second was to go home and not come back at all. And he added that if she went wailing to Vera and Lily and sicced them down on us before we were ready to deal with them, the first option would drop out of the picture.