Quiet nights loving Joe while the children slept.
Birthdays and skinned knees, squabbles and bedtime stories.
Graduations and weddings, her babies’ beautiful babies.
And she’d left her little boy alone.
She’d washed his face and hands in a service station bathroom that smelled of piss-soaked heat because she’d traded her body for pills instead of a motel room.
He’d been angry, whiny so her head felt as if it would split.
Why shouldn’t he have been, when instead of a bath and bed, she’d taken the Oxy and gas money so she could move on? Just move on.
How could she have loved—and she had, oh, she had loved her little boy—and been such a terrible mother?
Because everything about her had been wrong.
She’d known it, finally accepted it, and determined to end it.
But she hadn’t taken him with her. She’d left him at that church. There’d been hope. She hadn’t killed her baby.
Only left him, and forgotten him. Forgotten it all as if it had never happened, as if Lisa McKinney had never been.
And been reborn, with Joe. By Joe, for Joe.
Now he was gone, and all the years, so many years, she’d been a good wife, a good mother, a good person, a caring, loving, productive woman? Gone with him.
Violet had been stripped away to Lisa. Lisa didn’t deserve those years of joy and comfort and love. The selfish, foolish, reckless girl who’d abandoned her own child deserved nothing.
And the Violet who remained couldn’t live with it. How could she tell her children, their children, she’d built their lives on a lie?
Maybe, maybe if she’d remembered it all when Joe had still been alive, they’d have found a way. He always found a way. But he was gone, her North Star had flickered out, and she couldn’t find her way any longer.
She wandered the room, touching photographs and the memories they held. The candlesticks that had been Joe’s grandmother’s—a strong, proud woman who’d given her a pair of diamond teardrop earrings on her wedding day as something old.
The vase she’d found in Venice on their honeymoon, the trinket box—wonderfully gaudy—the children had given her for Mother’s Day so, so long ago.
Precious things, those pieces of the life she’d lived. Violet’s life. But Violet couldn’t exist, not really, without Joe.
She’d walked the house earlier, before all the children came for dinner. A last supper, she thought. She couldn’t do so now, not with Joella staying over. If Joella heard her, she’d try to comfort, and she’d worry.
But she’d walked the house, the gardens, said her goodbyes. She’d fed her children, a big, happy meal. She’d hugged them, held them.
Now, she set out the letters she’d written each of them. They’d grieve, she knew. But they’d forgive her. Forgive Mama. And their lives would go on. She could be proud of that, proud there had been something strong and good in her, something Joe found in her that helped her raise such fine children.
Nothing of Lisa in them, she thought. Only Joe and Violet.
She’d written to her son, her firstborn, the little boy she’d deserted. So strange, so odd, so disconcerting to see him, a grown man, a gray-haired man.
A scientist!
She’d thought to go to him, to speak to him, to tell him everything face-to-face, but she hadn’t found the courage.
But she had to leave him something, had to make up somehow for all the lost years, for the fear he must have felt, waking alone on the steps of the church.
She’d bought the house—not as big as the one where her other children had grown up. But a lovely old house, a solid house, still close to where he worked.
She’d opened a bank account for him, and arranged it all so he could simply move in—or sell the house if it didn’t suit him.
She’d sent all the paperwork just that morning, with a letter confessing, explaining—or trying to.
Would he forgive her? Maybe one day.
But she felt Violet had done all she could for Lisa’s baby darling.
She was a doctor’s wife, and knew how many pills to take. She got into bed, the bed she’d shared with Joe for a lifetime, and began to take them. One at a time, letting each one settle.
When she felt drowsy, she took more. When it was enough, she set the glass aside.
When it was enough, she lay down, stretched a hand out to Joe’s side of the bed, imagined him taking that hand in his.
She sighed once, said, “Joe,” and finally slept.
NOW
Mary Kate heard the footsteps overhead. He was back.