Great Big Beautiful Life(64)

“You mean about Ruth?” I ask. “You think your grandmother knew the truth? That Ruth was her husband’s daughter, not Gigi’s?”

Margaret nods. “She never said, but I’m sure of it. She loved her family too much to cause a scandal by bringing it up, and besides that, I think she came to genuinely love Ruth. Everyone who ever met her did. She had a spark.

“Anyway, my parents’ divorce was highly publicized, and it didn’t help that my father’s reaction to losing the love of his life was to throw himself back into public womanizing with a vengeance.”

The Playboy and the Shrew Part Ways, I remember one article declaring.

“We barely saw our mother that first year they were divorced, but we saw even less of him. It was an incredibly lonely time.”

“When did things thaw out between them?” I ask. “How, after all that?”

“My mother had a movie release,” Margaret says simply. “And my father hadn’t missed a single one since they’d met. So he went, by himself, the same way he had done years earlier. He couldn’t keep being her husband, but he couldn’t stop being her fan.”

I feel myself smile even as my chest aches for her.

She shakes her head as if dispelling a cloud of dust. “Anyway, he sent her potted daisies the next day. She called him. They had one short, civil conversation, but a couple of weeks later, something funny happened—I don’t remember what, though I’m sure she told me at some point—and she wanted to tell him. So she called him. Soon they were talking every day, going on walks every once in a while.

“She started coming by for dinners occasionally. We had her over for Christmas. Eventually we were happy again, even if things were never the same.”

“You were fifteen when she married Roy?” I say, checking my notes.

“That’s right,” she says. “And Dad married Linda a year later, but they split up when I was twenty-one.”

“And after that,” I say, trying to sound as even and nonjudgmental as possible.

“Carol for about…six years?” she says. “Does that sound right?”

“It does,” I agree. “Were you close with either of them?”

“Close enough,” she says. “It was a big house, and it wasn’t uncommon for Great-Aunt Gigi’s latest beau to be hanging around too. We’d see everyone for dinners, but if anything, Dad’s wives after Mom were like…like distant cousins. We knew each other, but we didn’t spend much time together.”

“And Roy?” I ask.

“We loved Roy,” she says. “Laura and I both. He was a good man. And he let us be a family. He did what our father couldn’t.”

“And what was that?” I ask.

Her narrow shoulders hitch upward. “He shared her.” She pauses for a long moment, and I watch her weigh her next words, deciding whether she can trust me with them.

I don’t rush forward to comfort or to cajole. The next couple of weeks are likely going to feel a lot harder for her than the first two, and as eager as I am to prove myself, I can’t force her to be ready.

“Roy and my mother were married for thirty years, you know,” she says.

“I do,” I confirm. “Until he died.”

“Afterward…” She pauses again, still unsure.

I reach forward and turn off the recorder, stopping the one on my phone as well.

“She loved him,” she says, a sideways lurch in the conversation, or perhaps a detour that will lead us to the same place. “She loved him, and he loved us, and I think she appreciated him every day of their life together. Dad went first, from liver failure, and then a few years after that, Roy died from heart disease. Mom had him buried in the family cemetery, because Roy was family.”

Her lips quiver. “After his funeral, after everyone had left but Mom and me, she went over to my dad’s headstone, and she started weeping. You know, she’d held it together all that time. She was never an easy crack, my mother. But she lost it, slumped down at his headstone and coiled her arms around it. And she said something I won’t ever forget. Something I still hear, in her voice if I try, like I’m replaying it on film.

“Why couldn’t it have been you? Why couldn’t you be who you were supposed to be?”

Shivers crawl down my arms, and my chest feels too small for my beating heart. “What do you make of that?”

“I don’t make anything of it,” she murmurs. “I know exactly what she meant.” She sets her mug down. “He was the love of her life, and he let the world make him too small for her.

“The world Freddy Ives lived in was built around him. There wasn’t room for her.”

I swallow a knot. “What do you think he should have done?”

She turns the full force of those shining blue eyes on me. “For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”



* * *



? ? ?

“You’re strangely quiet,” Hayden says.

“Hm?” I look up from the road, nearly startling at the sight of him hunched in the passenger seat of my slightly too-small rental car.

“Are you regretting this?” he asks. “It’s not too late to turn around.”