Page 3 of The Hampton Beach Café 5
“We're not going to press-gang her,” she said dismissively. “Anyway, she owes you an answer.”
“You mean you think she owes you answers,” Frances shot back. “You couldn't care less about me and my answers.”
Kennedy made an unpleasant clicking noise with her tongue and shook her head. “Look, whatever you think, I'm not actually a monster. I just want to know more about my father. At the very least, I want to know what hereditary conditions William and I should be on the lookout for. Hopefully, his thoughtlessness, selfishness, and malicious lack of loyalty isn't genetic, or is it?”
With that last comment, Kennedy looked Frances up and down judgmentally.
“Hey!”
A knock on the car window made them both jump. Frances turned to see her mom standing there dressed in a neat cotton dress with sunflowers on a navy blue base.
“Hello, girls. Why don't you stop fighting and come on inside?”
Frances hadn't even noticed her mom approach the car––how much had she heard?
“Hey, Mom,” she said, hurriedly trying to rearrange her emotions from fraught to relaxed.
How would they explain to her mom why they were even there? She had never made a secret of her and Kennedy's rivalry in high school––would her mom even remember her?
With these questions swimming in her mind, Frances felt almost dizzy as she stepped out of Kennedy's car.
The walk up to the house was almost as awkward as the car ride had been, and though she was still angry with Kennedy, Frances was sure she felt similarly transported back to high school.
It had not been this path, and it was usually Alex next to her, dutifully reporting to one or another of their parents for a talking to. The feeling it evoked was the same.
They came together in the kitchen, where Frances helped her mom put together a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies.
“Now, I know it's been a long time, and we're all adults now, but if I remember correctly, you two weren't exactly friends back in school. Why are you here now?”
Her mom's soft and gentle way of speaking weighed on her, but she knew she had to speak first in case Kennedy jumped in with something horrible.
“Mrs.…” Kennedy started, but was cut off.
“Call me Linda, please.”
“Linda,” Kennedy said, awkwardly flashing a glance at Frances. “I know it will seem totally ridiculous, but it’s not the only factor. I didn’t like Frances because the guy I liked was more interested in her than me. That doesn’t matter now because we’re dating. I’m over it.”
Wait,Frances thought as her stomach dropped,Clarkson and Kennedy?
“Not the only factor, though?” Linda repeated, leaning her weight against the kitchen counter.
“No, not the only factor,” Kennedy said.
Frances felt like her tongue weighed a ton. With the weight of the conversation they were about to have pressing in on her, she willed herself to start talking.
“Mom, we wanted to talk to you about... about Dad. Kennedy and I have been talking... I know he left, and you weren't okay... and I know that you've been searching for him all these years––or at least, you were?”
Frances' mother's face fell, and she sighed heavily as she placed the coffee pot down noisily on the kitchen table.
“I was hoping we wouldn't have to have this conversation,” she said, gesturing for them to make their way into the living room. “But I suppose it's time I faced it.”
As they made their way into the overly tidy sitting room to sit down, Frances explained how she had found the stack of supposedly blank letters her father had sent her, but that had never arrived, the journals she took back with her, her progress through them and her deteriorating patience with the man she realized was more a stranger than a dad.
“Ah, yes, I had forgotten about those letters. I didn't intend for you to find them like that. I apologize, dear. You said you thought they were blank. So did I... were they not?”
Frances shook her head. “No. They were written in UV marker––it's badly degraded now, though. The paper too. It seems like it's mostly him ranting about how unfair it was that he was run out of town...”
Her mom scoffed. “That sounds about right... he never did like taking responsibility for his actions.”
