Page 112 of Lost Love on 6th Street

“That’s when I started picking up shifts at the library. Put my degree to use for once,” she chuckles. “You remember that, too.”

The way she keeps pointing out what I know and remember confuses my brain. Are these memories I’m having real, or are they put there by her trying to make this story easier to hear?

Mom laughs out of nowhere. “Idle hands, you know?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

Her laugh retreats into a sad smile. “The devil’s playthings. That’s what happened to your father. He had too much time on his hands. He was trying to find a new job, doing what he could here and there to provide. But he was stressed, and he didn’t like to talk about it too much. So, he would just explode all at once instead of just expressing what was going on.”

Sounds familiar. And not in a good way. My brain flashes to the moment I told Eleanor to shut up, and I want to curl up in a hole and die.

“We almost got divorced,” she says almost as easily as she’d say the sky is blue. “But I didn’t want that for you kids. And he didn’t want that either.”

Mom inhales, narrowing her eyes. “It didn’t feel like we were married. At least to me. I would have never considered doing what he did, though. That’s not how my brain works.”

I extend my arm over the back of the bench behind her. “You knew?”

“More or less. I mean, when Diane started dodging my calls, I knew something was going on with her. I thought she was busy with the whole music thing.” Mom laughs. “She was such a free spirit. I could never have done that. You know, I wanted to be married after college and feel secure. Happily ever after.”

I smile. “Not that easy.”

“No, not at all. Not at all.” She picks at a thread on her navy dress. “Make no mistake, it was painful when I found out they were . . . behind my back . . .”

I swallow. “Mom?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Do you know about . . . about the—”

“Their daughter?”

She’s smiling.

“Yes, I know about that.”

She should be angry. Furious. Threatening to burn the world down.

“Your dad, for all his faults, told me everything when they realized she was pregnant.”

“Oh my god, how did you—how did you . . .”

Mom lifts her chin proudly. “I made him do what a man in that position should do. I made him step up. If he was going to make a bed like that, he was going to sleep in it.”

“But didn’t that feel awful? Your friend and Dad?”

She nods. “Yes and no. You see, honey, people don’t do things with other people in mind. We’re all a little bit selfish. I didn’t think any of it really had anything to do with me. Your dad was having a weird life crisis, and I wasn’t going to entertain it. Diane did. Until it was too much.”

I don’t press her with questions, though I have many.

We don’t say anything for a while. Birds cry out in the distance. Tree leaves shuffle together in the breeze.

“He came back on his hands and knees begging, and he remained there the rest of his life. The begging just turned into a kind of worship. And let me tell you, there’s nothing better than that.”

I snort. “Mom.”

“What? It’s the truth.”

“You’re a maneater.”

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