“I thought Bill and Karen would bring their dogs, but they didn’t, so I couldn’t very well ask to bring ours. We’re guests. It wouldn’t have been right.”
“But you lied. You said one thing and did another.”
“Flo, that was completely out of my control. That’s not a lie.”
“All right, here’s a better one,” and this is something she’s wanted to mention for a while now. “You told me that you and Daddy separated suddenly, that you were both in love all those years when I was little. You always told us that, Mom, that we were born out of love.”
“That’s true. It’s absolutely true. We loved each other very, very much.” There was no day happier in all her life than the day Tristan was born. They were living in Paris then. That morning at the market is still so vivid: the wet stalls, the bag of peaches, the young face of the vendor, the train of pimples across his neck. She was reaching over the cherries to squeeze an avocado when she felt the warmth on her legs, when she finally made the distinction between her own water and the rain. And in the afternoon, Robert brought Flo to the hospital. They climbed up on the bed with her and Tristan and pretended they didn’t understand French when the nurse scolded them. That day was just a culmination of the happiness that had been pooling inside her from the moment she met Robert, yet afterward there was only more, a peaceful, languorous bliss. They had jokes about it, about how so much happiness was depressing. “All those years, Flo, right up until last year, we were happy. You were born and raised in a tremendous amount of love.”
“And then something just happened, just like that?”
“I don’t know.” Marie-Claude can’t bear to play the unknowing victim, to actually reveal how bewildered she still is. But her daughter wants the truth. “I just don’t know. Whatever happened, it didn’t happen to me.” She looks at Flo in the rearview mirror and says softly, with no edge, “Maybe Daddy can explain it better.”
“He says it happened slowly. He said it wasn’t a big clap of thunder like you always say but a wave that gets bigger and bigger until it breaks.”
Marie-Claude knows Flo is not making this up to hurt her; she recognizes her husband’s similes, stolen from a world entirely alien to him.
“He said he’d been unhappy since before Tristan. He said he hadn’t known anything about real love before he met Abigail. He says he always knows when witnesses are lying because they remind him of himself when he was—”
“Please, Flo. Please stop.”
Marie-Claude slows to the speed limit. Her eyes have been on the road, but she has not been watching. All the windows in the car are open, even hers, which she doesn’t remember rolling down. Warm air, much warmer than an hour ago, blows through, and she leans forward to let the wind unstick the shirt from her back. The steering wheel feels loose in her hands, unrelated to guiding the car. And the road, even at fifty-five, is disappearing far too fast beneath them.
She thinks of what she could remind her daughter of. She could tell the story of Flo’s last birthday in September, which fell on a weekend she went to her father’s alone, without Tristan, and how at first Flo thought he was teasing, not singing at the breakfast table, not alluding to a present hidden somewhere—behind a curtain or in the freezer—and how on the way to check the Saturday mail at his office she expected a surprise party; at lunch she waited for a cake. When he returned her on Sunday, Marie-Claude read the whole story in the raised rash on Flo’s neck.
When she feels a bit more in control of the car, Marie-Claude turns to look at the outlet stores beside the highway. She wishes they were driving through France, passing cows spread flat out on a hill. In France they might come across something extraordinary, like a burning barn or a ewe giving birth. Flo might see it first and, even before she could ask, Marie-Claude would pull over. They would get out of the car noiselessly so as not to disturb Tristan and witness together the hot collapse of a building or the equally overwhelming spectacle of new life dropping onto the grass. They might squeeze each other’s fingers in anticipation. But barns in France, she remembers, are made of stone.
From the slice she can see of her mother’s face in the mirror, Flo knows she is mad. She decides she will just have Marie-Claude let her off at a bus station before going on to the house. There would be northbound buses every few hours. Her father will be jubilant, even more pleased than if she’d decided on New York from the start.