Page 95 of This Is How It Started
I don’t remember any such debate. I do, however, remember going to Hawaii. Maui. It’s when I realized I wasn’t a beach person after days surfside, baking in the sun. I actually remember Adam and I being bored to tears and Hannah learning how to boogie board. She spent two weeks throwing herself into the sport like she’d found religion.
“How come he never did it? Alaska, I mean.”
My mother lets out a long sigh. “I guess it just never fit in to our schedule.”
Our schedule.
At some point, my father, as I suppose many of us do once we’re married and have a family, morphed into aweand anourand lost his individuality. I wonder if it was Brooke who helped get it back. If Brooke was the bridge from the life he’d chosen to the one he’d always wanted. The epiphany makes me mournful and hopeful at the same time.
“Mom, do you think if Dad hadn’t died, he would’ve left Brooke and come back to you? Do you think he thought he made a mistake?”
There’s a long silence. My mother takes the ice pack, which is starting to melt, off her hip and puts it on the glass coffee table. “First of all, I wouldn’t take him back if he did,” she finally says.
“Because he cheated on you?”
Shana Gold has cut off friends and relatives for things far less egregious than my father’s betrayal. She once went five years without talking to her first cousin for questioning whether my mother’s engagement ring was a cubic zirconia.
But my mother surprises me by saying, “No. I would’ve made his life a living hell, but I would’ve taken him back. The fact of the matter is our love story had run its course.”
I rear back. “What does that mean?”
“It means our marriage was already in jeopardy when your father began his dalliance with Brooke.”Dalliance?It sounds so Victorian. Like Dad and Brooke were having tea behind my mother’s back as opposed to Dad sleeping with another woman.
The thing is there were no indications to me that my parents’ marriage was on the skids until my mother caught my dad sharing a room with his nurse at a medical convention.
“Mom, you loved Dad.”
“I did and I always will. But by the time you went away to school, we’d fallen out of the kind of love we used to have for each other, which left our marriage on life support.” She rolls onto her noninjured side and pulls herself into a sitting position.
I should tell her to continue elevating her hip but am too consumed by this new revelation and whether to believe it to focus on anything else. “Why is this news to me?”
“Because you weren’t paying attention. And why would you? You had your own life to live and your own future to think about.”
“I would’ve known if you were unhappy.”
My mother gives me a penetrating look. “And yet you didn’t.” Her statement is devoid of blame. She’s simply trying to drive her point home. “Honey, you know your father. Do you think he would’ve had an affair if he wasn’t terribly unhappy?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Or I don’t want to understand it because it goes against everything I’ve ever believed.
“What I’m saying is that your father’s affair set us both free.”
“But you were devastated.” I remember that crazy birthday party she threw herself at the Log Cabin. At the time, I thought she was putting on a big act. A big in-your-face fuck you to the curve ball my father had thrown her. Now, I’m not so sure.
“I was humiliated,” she says. “There’s a difference. Do I wish we’d had the courage to walk away from each other like two mature adults who knew when to call it quits? Absolutely. But we didn’t. We didn’t because everything we had, including ourselves, was so intertwined that leaving was too hard—and too damned devastating. Without realizing that it would come to this”—my mother waves her hand to indicate her townhouse, a symbol of their divorce—“your father forced both our hands when he cheated with Brooke. In the end, it’s what we needed. It’s what was best.”
I’m reeling, but deep down inside I believe my mother. It would be so easy for her to say Dad was coming back to her. That Brooke had been a bump in the road of a marriage that came with twists and turns like any marriage. A mistake. But instead, she’s laying it bare, telling the truth.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us this? We thought it was all Dad. That he blindsided you.”
“Oh, make no mistake about it. I was blindsided and hurt to my marrow. No one wants to lose their husband to a woman half their age and twice as beautiful. And he lied. In all our years together, it was the first time I’d known your father to be a liar. A cheater. That was the worst part.”
“Is that why you hate Brooke?”
“I don’t hate Brooke. But what she did—what they both did—was wrong. Your father may have been unhappy in his marriage, but he was still married. I don’t forgive him, but I’m working my way to forgiving her.”
“Why?” I ask, stunned. Because, again, my mother is not the forgiving type.
“Because she gave you a second lease on life. Even before Josh died you needed a jump start, and she gave you that. Because she’s committed to saving the house on Vallejo for you and your siblings, because she’s been good to all three of you. Because my children are more important to me than my resentment for her. She also made your father happy. I may have been angry with him. Hurt. But he was a good man, a wonderful father, and for more years than I can count, the love of my life. I’m beyond glad that in the last leg of his life he was with someone who made him truly happy.”
