Page 11 of Sunkissed Memories
“It’s just she seems a little down, doesn’t she?” Kathy asked.
“What?” Ada blinked at her. “Who seems down?”
Kathy was quiet, her eyes calculating. “Ada, what’s going on?”
“Who seems down?”
“I was talking about Hannah!” Kathy said, reaching for the bottle of wine to give herself a refill. “But you were a million miles away.” There was the sound of the wineglass filling up. “Who was that, anyway?”
“It was Peter.” Ada didn’t have the will to tell her mother why he’d called, so she said, “The game is going to overtime, so he’s staying a little bit later than he thought.”
“Oh.” Kathy shrugged. “But why did you say, ‘she’ll understand’? Something about the tennis match?”
Ugh. “Something came up tomorrow.”
“He’s going to miss the match?” Kathy looked stricken.
“His job is really important, Mom,” Ada said. “It’s an emergency.”
Kathy leaned against the back of the chair and gazed at Ada with a steely look. For a moment, Ada thought her mother was going to press her for more details about her marriage, about how they communicated, about how often they were intimate.Kathy could cross boundaries when she wanted to, and Ada always forgave her for it. Ada swallowed the lump in her throat.
But instead, Kathy surprised her. “What can I do to help you this weekend?”
All the tension spilled out of Ada’s shoulders. “Oh. Um. Well, I have to meet a patient tomorrow morning, so if you could get the kids’ breakfast ready, that would be amazing.”
“It’s done,” Kathy said, standing. She took the half bottle of wine inside with her, pausing in the doorway. “I’m going to bed. I love you, Ada. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She left Ada on the back porch with a few sips left in her wineglass, gazing out at the inky-black water as she waited for her husband to come home. Through her daughter’s upstairs window, she could make out some of Hannah’s words as she spoke to her father on the phone. “Oh, sure. Yeah. It’s no big deal.” A longer pause. “Really, Dad. I don’t care. It’s just tennis.”
Ada got up and went to the kitchen, where she poured the rest of her wine down the drain and stood with her palms flat on the counter. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss, that she’d been looking at her family life as though it were a painting turned upside down on a wall for a long time.
Chapter Six
Late that night, Ada felt the shift of a body on the other side of her bed and reached over to touch Peter’s shoulder. It was warm and muscular and naked against the sheets. Her eyes smarted with tears, perhaps because of whatever she’d been dreaming about. It was so hard to know where the brain was going to take you and how it was going to affect your waking life. When Ada shifted closer to Peter, he shifted more toward his side of the bed, making Ada feel like she was in a chase she couldn’t win. She drew herself back and glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was two in the morning. Why had Peter been out till two in the morning? Before she could make sense of it, she drifted back to sleep and hardly remembered it when she woke up.
Peter was up and around by six thirty, throwing clothes into a small backpack and padding gently from the bathroom to the closet and back again. Through slitted eyes, Ada watched as he pulled a T-shirt and the sweater she’d gotten him two Christmases ago over his shoulders. He’d put gel in his hair to make it look thicker than it ordinarily did when he went to work. She wondered if it was because he was going into the city, where people cared more about appearances. She pulled herself up sothat she was leaning against the pillows, her arms crossed. Peter brightened when he saw her and dropped down to kiss her on the cheek.
“I wasn’t sure if you were going to wake up before I left,” he said.
“You said you’d wake me up,” she reminded him, flipping the sheets from off her legs.
Peter zipped his bag and gestured toward the dark hallway. “I made a pot of coffee already. But it can always be reheated if you want to get some more sleep.”
But Ada wasn’t tired in the slightest. She dropped to the pads of her feet and put her hands on her hips, sweeping her nightgown across her thighs. “So, Abby left Max?”
Peter nodded, his face darkening. “We called it, remember? At their wedding?”
Ada remembered. They’d said that a wedding so expensive couldn’t possibly last more than ten years, that it was a romantic performance for show. That, plus the pressures of the city, plus Abby’s love of going out, plus Max’s love of flirtation with younger women, didn’t make a believable concoction for a forever marriage. But even as Ada had said so, back at the wedding, she’d wanted to bite her own tongue. Who was she to say which marriages would work and which wouldn’t?
“I mean, you’re a therapist,” Peter said now. “Maybe you can help me figure out what to say to Max? How to help him through?”
Ada reached for her glass of water and held it aloft, waiting for an answer to come to her. “Sometimes it’s good to go and sit and listen rather than offer advice,” she said. “Sometimes people just need space to sit quietly with people they know care about them.”
Peter’s smile was slightly crooked. “You’re a genius, honey.” He dropped down to kiss her on the forehead again, then slung his backpack over his shoulder. “I have to run.”
Ada wandered through the dark hallway and down the staircase, following Peter all the way to the door that led to the garage. She swallowed down her rage, her insistence that he stay for Hannah’s game, her reminders that Hannah would be out of the house soon. None of it would keep him here. She remembered how hard her mother tried to cling to her father when he was leaving. She recalled how that seemed to hasten his departure from the house. But no. This was different. This was Peter, helping out a friend during his time of need.
About five years ago, when her children were mostly old enough to take care of themselves, Ada added a few patients to her Saturday morning roster. It was essential for those whose jobs were impossible to leave during the week, or for those with young children at home, or for those who couldn’t find the time otherwise. After the last of Peter’s headlights filtered into the darkness, Ada forced herself into action: pouring coffee, making toast, and going for a brief yet explosive run. By the time she jumped in the shower, her mind was already on her patients. It was time to give them her all and abandon her own anxious thoughts.
