"I can't believe we're saying these things. Martin, how did we get to this point?" He took a breath and closed his eyes and I knew he was considering whether to reveal a painful truth. I braced myself for the hit.
"I let it go on way too long," he said, stepping away.
"Wait." I reached out.
"Are you listening?" he whispered. "You're a lost dog." He shook his head. "Go home."
At home, my phone was ringing and I raced to answer it, expecting a remorseful Martin.
"Hi, Lily." It was Karen, my sister in Houston. I'd never had much use for her growing up except during tours of my house I gave my six-year-old friends. I'd fling open her bedroom door to reveal a real live teenager in bedcovers; we'd scream and run if she moved.
"I'm so glad to hear your voice," I said. "Do you think I'm needy?"
Karen hesitated. "No," she said.
I waited in case she wanted to elaborate. "You don't sound good," I said, clutching the gold cross around my neck and twisting the chain around my finger.
"I just got off the phone with Dad." Karen inhaled sharply; the news was bad. "And I'm counting on you not to fall apart." In the early stages of Mom's illness, Karen had counseled me not to jump to conclusions. She reminded me that the doctor hadn't ruled out tuberculosis. Or bird flu. We clung to the hope of bird flu. Now, I sat on my kitchen floor, preparing myself. It hadn't been bird flu and Mother had died within six months of the diagnosis.
"What happened?" I asked, wishing for a tissue, wiping my nose on the dishtowel hanging from the fridge handle as I felt something slither around my neck, into the dishtowel, and then onto the floor. My necklace lay sprawled on the linoleum—the necklace my mother had made for me when she knew she would die. I couldn't bear to let it touch the ground, much less lie there broken. "Oh my God," I said. "My necklace just fell off." Karen had one, too, a cross, made from the melted gold of our mother's wedding rings. It wasn't just a necklace to us, and my dad's girlfriend knew this, so I always made sure the cross hung outside my shirt in her presence. "Hang on," I said, bending to gather the cross and chain from the floor, making sure none of the tiny links had skittered off under the fridge or stove. "Things are really falling apart," I said.
"Is it the chain?" Karen asked.
"Yes," I said. "But I think I got all of it. Don't worry, I can fix it."
Karen sighed.
I braced myself for the bad news.
"Lily, I talked to Dad."
"Yes?" I held my breath, staring at the legs of my breakfast table, fuzzy dust freeloading in the curves of the woodwork.
"Dad and Sue are going to be married."
I remembered then where I'd seen The Look Martin and Ginny exchanged. My father shared the same exclusive look with his new girlfriend, Sue. A look that telegraphed secret communication—about me—and conferred privileged status to the gold digger sucking the life out of him. The pain was exquisite, razor-sharp surprise from a dark corner, completion of the outrage that began with my mother's senseless death.
I'd puzzled so long over the mystery of Sue's sudden arrival in my father's house that I wondered if she found him in the obituaries. She would have seen my mother smiling from the newsprint, her face cropped from the family portrait we'd taken right after Karen's second was born. Sue shed no tears over my mother's life story, the Great Books Club she ran for the library, her term as president of her garden club, or the years Mother spent touring children through the Butterfly Garden. Sue skipped instead to the list of survivors, underlined my father's name, and marked her calendar for one week after my mother's funeral, the standard grace period in her business. Sue gave us a week to say good-bye. The bridge club, Mother's Bible group study buddies, and her hairdresser all paid respects, dropping off food, hugging my sorrowful dad, and lending support in the funeral home. But then everything changed. The day Sue appeared in my mother's house, my dad met me in the front hallway. He stood in front of Mother's antique armoire we named The Monster, stopping me with his eyes as if I'd committed a mistake entering his house without knocking, something I'd done every day of my life and would continue to do when I moved back home. When I asked him who was talking on our kitchen phone, he said it was "Sue." I asked if Sue was from hospice, noting she'd collected my mother's unused meds from the counter and loaded them into a box.
"Lily?" Karen said. "Are you there?"
"Yes," I said, my voice breaking. I cleared my throat.
"So, what will you do?" Karen asked, knowing I'd soon be homeless.
"I'm going to England."
"You don't have a job, how can you afford England?"
"England is a job," I said. "I'll get paid." I pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge, kicking the door shut. Vera had never mentioned pay. "How did Dad tell you?" I asked.
"I don't remember and it's not important," Karen said, unwilling to feed the old dysfunction.
"But did he use the word love?" I asked, recognizing early stages of fresh turmoil like a black wind howling inside me.
Karen sighed. "Don't make me say these things to you. I'm not the bad guy, Lily."
"But I just want to know what happened to my father. I don't know this man who's taken over his body." Where was the father who held me up on ice skates, who loved me enough to punish my white lies and celebrate my report card? "What did he say?"
Karen sighed. "He told me Sue had been cleaning out the garage to make room for her stuff. It went from there."
I found a glass and slammed the cupboard. "It makes no sense. How could he care about someone so different from Mom? I can't even stand to look at her, those eyebrows tweezed to death and hair teased like a rat's nest. She is so opposite of everything Mom was. I can't stand by and watch him do this to our mother," I said. "Can you?"
"He's an adult." Karen paused. "You know, this really isn't a good time for you to be making big changes. Is there someone at church you could talk to?"
"No," I said, pouring wine, spilling on the counter. "I know what I have to do." The important thing was to get off the phone, hide my car keys from myself, and focus my energy on figuring out how to get to England. There, I could start over without all this mess. My mother would want me to go, her well-known desire to travel unfulfilled because Dad objected; he traveled too much for work. "See the world," Mom had said, offering me A Passage to India when I was twelve, teaching me to escape the confines of my life through literature. "I've got to go," I told Karen. I hung up, gripped by new fear of the many potential obstacles, financial and otherwise, between me and Mansfield Park.
I had to see Vera.
Two
The next morning, I crossed the river and drove toward Oak Cliff. My mission: to accept Vera's invitation to her literary festival. Once I decided to go to England, my recent failures stopped looking so bad. In fact, they began to seem like necessary groundwork for a possible turning point in my life. If I hadn't failed, I'd still be failing.
Posters crowded the bookstore window: "Breastfeeding Mothers Welcome Here," "Winter Solstice Ceremony at White Rock Lake," and "Holotropic Breathing Workshops." Tangled in a roaming philodendron, a hand-lettered sign reached out to me: "Dallas Office of Literature Live." An Oriental brass bell announced my arrival as the breeze from the open door blew stacks of free newspapers, their pages fluttering against the red bricks placed to ground them. Colorful fliers advertising yoga teachers or seeking lost exotic pigs hawked phone numbers on tear-off tags. A portly cat patrolled the entryway and I thought of Aunt Norris.