“But not you,” she said. It was not a question.
“Not me,” he said. “You were his wife. I think he should have always been honest with you and you with him. You probably have a right to know. But he should be able to have a private life from his children. If that’s what he wanted and needed.”
She rested her chin on raised folded hands. “I think that’s just an extension of refusing to open that sealed envelope. You’re afraid of what might be inside.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
“Yes,” she said. “What if there’s something inside that causes you to lose respect for your father? What if you don’t admire him as much? Missing him and grieving him is hard enough, why add another dimension to that?”
“I guess,” he said with a shrug.
“What we all have to get through this process is the reality that none of us is perfect and it’s okay, even admirable, to love an imperfect soul deeply. Right now, snatched from us, he appears perfect. Remember that old saying—the good die young? It should be the young die good. Live long enough and there’s plenty of time to screw up. At the end of the day, we are all human. And imperfect.” She paused, thinking about that long-ago affair she’d never told her children about. “We all have secrets.”
Michael pushed his plate away. “Remember that pot you found in my backpack? That I said was Matt’s?”
“Yes,” she said, remembering it clearly.
“It was mine,” he said.
“I know,” she said, laughing.
Anna loved Mike best. That was the thing a mother was never supposed to say, so she kept it her shameful secret. But they sat in the great room after spaghetti casserole and talked until eleven and it was a bit like coming home. She tried to ignore the fact that Mike was like Chad in his sensitivity, his perceptiveness. His empathy. He asked her pertinent questions: Did you feel he understood you? Do you miss him or the idea of him?
And Michael said profound things. He was really just a goofball who liked playing with kids, that’s where we bonded. In his own way he was charismatic and knew how to make people follow him—not only was that his gift, it was the thing most important to him. I think what he really wanted was to be most popular. Anna thought that was entirely true.
That was it, of course. Chad knew how to make people follow him, lean on him, need him—her, Joe, a mistress some time ago, clients, perhaps other women along the way. Chad was their guru.
She was filled with her son’s spirit all the next day. Mike came back to finish chores around her house, but while he let her make him a sandwich, they didn’t share a meal or sit up late talking. He had plans and off he went.
The next day was Monday and because her colleagues were still giving her plenty of support and covering for her quite a bit, Anna took a long lunch despite the fact that the cases were piling up in her office. For the first time in her memory she was having trouble staying focused. Instead of working, she dwelled on her grown children, starting with Mike. She grabbed a sandwich and sat on a bench in a small park near her office and thought about her son.
He was a gift. A joy. He made her feel she’d mastered motherhood; he was that wonderful.
Jessie was hard on her, often critical and difficult to please. Jessie filled her with nervousness because Anna was always afraid of saying the wrong thing and being the victim of Jessie’s sudden and impossible anger. Jessie, like her brother and sister, was very attractive and smart. All three kids had dark hair and amazing blue eyes, like Chad’s, and had excelled in school. Yet they were as different as night and day.
Bess, the reward for putting a fractured marriage back together, was an enigma. She was solitary, introverted, brilliant in school, even skipping a grade, but she didn’t always play well with other children. Three seemed to be her limit and then only if the spirit moved her. Crowds, even a normal-size classroom, made her anxious. She never seemed to be lonely when her older brother and sister ignored her; she was independent and self-oriented but she could be convinced to share nicely. She was absolutely no trouble at all and there might lie a problem—she didn’t seem to need anyone. No one. There were times she seemed withdrawn but it would turn out she was only entertaining herself with a book or experiment. One of Anna’s friends asked if it was possible she was on the spectrum, but by the time the question came they had already concluded she might be, and she was high-functioning and a happy child. Bess was incredibly literal. You said I wasn’t to go out but you didn’t say out of what, so I didn’t go out of the yard but I did go out of the house because, frankly, I was feeling stuffed inside. That was when she was eight.