“I’m serious. Look at my calendar.” Dayana handed her phone over. Maggie saw tasks scheduled between meetings and luncheons and playdates.
Check in with Maggie.
Send Maggie’s birthday card.
Ask Maggie about Thanksgiving plans.
“This looks like effort to me.”
As she held the phone, a call came through. The caller ID read DAD. Hastily, she handed the phone back.
Her sister glanced at it, hit ignore, and put the phone down. “You had no reason to feel obligated to take me in. And I am grateful that you were still willing to do it.”
“If you’re beating yourself up, then I’m going to have to start beating myself up for not making the effort at all. Let’s just leave it at you had no reason to come to me,” Maggie pointed out. “I wasn’t a last resort. You’ve got resources. You could have kicked Donald out or rented yourself a nice house with full-time help. But you came here because you wanted to. Now, as long as you can handle living in a construction zone, we can see what happens.”
She was “seeing what happened” in a lot of areas of her life.
“A clean slate,” Dayana said.
“A renovation.”
Her sister gave her a wry smile. “I didn’t want to share my father with you. It took me a long time before I started to understand that, to my mother, you represented a permanent reminder of the fact that she wasn’t enough for my dad. Our dad.”
“You know better than anyone that it had very little to do with her and everything to do with him,” Maggie pointed out. She added the cheese-and-olive tray to the table. She was getting pretty good at panic shopping for last-minute get-togethers.
Dayana’s mother was a beautiful, intimidating woman who didn’t hesitate to label someone an enemy. Maggie had been stamped with that title at age twelve.
“She needed us to be a unit bonded against you and your mother. I never bothered picking it apart until years later. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for working against you and making sure you couldn’t develop a relationship with our dad.”
“You’re not responsible for anyone else’s choices. He could have tried harder,” Maggie said lamely as she arranged a stack of napkins. Maybe she could have tried, too. But things still would have ended up the way they did. Accepting that her father couldn’t love her the way she’d needed to be loved as a little girl was easier than fighting for that love.
“Why haven’t you told Silas who Dad is?” Dayana asked, plucking an olive off the tray and popping it into her mouth. Her phone rang again. This time the screen said DONALD. Her sister flipped the phone over.
Maggie shook her head. “Technically, I’m not allowed to tell anyone, since I signed the NDA.”
“What? When? Why?” The genuine horror on her sister’s face did something to loosen the knots that had taken up permanent residence in Maggie’s chest.
“I thought you knew.”
“I most certainly did not know,” Dayana said.
“It’s a long story, and I think our reinforcements are here,” she said, hearing Kevin let out a happy bark.
“We will talk about it.”
Maggie blew out a breath and tried not to think of all the uncomfortable conversations she had to look forward to. This was why she liked her life the way it had been. Simple. Quiet. No one demanding to talk to her all the time.
It was nice having the house full of women for a change, Maggie decided two glasses of wine later. Mama B had shown up with a Crock-Pot full of pierogies and immediately turned on some girl power music on her Bluetooth speaker. Blaire brought four bottles of wine and a huge tossed salad. Kayla and Niri brought margaritas and cookies, respectively.
The occasion felt both festive and solemn as Dayana walked them through the ending of what was supposed to be a fairy-tale life.
“It’s okay to want more for yourself,” Blaire said, scooping a piece of fresh bread through the olive dip.
Dayana glanced at Maggie. Neither of them had mentioned their family name or how one sister had grown up in luxury. “What if I’ve always had everything I could have ever wanted? Maybe this is the price I have to pay.”
“That’s bullshit, sweetheart,” Mama B announced. Her fiery, homegrown wisdom was the perfect complement to Blaire’s careful, clinical observations. “It doesn’t matter if you have a gold-plated toilet. It’s not wrong to want a faithful husband.”
“I think what the moms are saying,” Kayla said, “is that it doesn’t matter how much you have, if it’s not what you want. You can’t just decide to be happy with less than.”