“But this other man—he was in New York?”
“He was. He was one of the people I met when my first book came out.”
“And is that why you stopped…” Sarah almost said writing and, at the last minute, corrected herself. “… publishing?”
“That’s one of the reasons,” said her mom. She tilted her head. “Part of it was about punishing myself for what I’d done. And avoiding temptation, of course. I knew that I wanted to be married to your dad. I wanted to be a mother.” She gave Sarah a wry look. “Even though you don’t remember it that way.”
Sarah bit her lip, flushed at the memory of how she’d complained about the babysitters and the mother’s helpers who’d cared for her and Sam while her mom worked. She pulled off the elastic band securing her hair in a ponytail and wrapped it around her index finger, so tightly that the flesh at her fingertip turned red, then white. “Do you remember Owen?” she asked.
“Owen Lassiter,” Ronnie said in a dry voice. “How could I forget?” Her mother, of course, knew Sarah’s whole history with Owen. How desperately, foolishly in love she’d been; how they’d planned to stay together in college, and how he’d dumped her. Sarah waited, braced for questions, or sardonic commentary on the Pond People, but, again, her mother surprised her. “Poor Owen.”
“Poor Owen?” Sarah’s voice rang out, loud and indignant. “He dumped me, remember?”
Ronnie drummed her fingers on the railing. “You probably don’t remember this, but for a while, twice a year the local paper would print a list of who was in arrears for their property taxes. And how much they owed.”
“So you knew.” Sarah tried to keep her voice expressionless, but she still sounded like she’d been punched, her voice breathless and faint. “You knew his family was broke.”
Ronnie nodded, looking a little surprised. “I did. But how did you know?”
Sarah felt her face get hot. She curled her bare toes into the deck. “I ran into Owen recently, in the city,” she said. “We had coffee. He told me he hadn’t been honest with me about—well, a lot of things.”
“About how he wasn’t at Duke?”
Sarah stared at her mother, once again shocked into silence. Ronnie gave a small, shamefaced shrug. “One of my former colleagues was in their English department. I asked her to keep an eye out for him. She was the one who told me he wasn’t enrolled.”
“And when were you going to tell me?” Sarah asked.
“I wasn’t,” said Ronnie. “It was his story to tell. I didn’t see the point.”
“You didn’t think I deserved to know he was lying to me?”
“I figured he had his reasons. I didn’t want you thinking I was spying on your boyfriend.” Ronnie’s voice was maddeningly serene. Sarah scraped her hair back into its ponytail, twisting the elastic punishingly tight. She found herself wishing, pointlessly, that her mother had told her more: told her which path to follow when she couldn’t decide whether or not to pursue her music. Told her the truth about Owen. Told her that her own marriage hadn’t always been perfect, hadn’t always been easy. But that would have made Veronica Levy a different kind of person; certainly a different kind of mother. A mother who hovered and directed and micromanaged; a mother who cleared every obstacle out of the way before her child could come close to stumbling, who’d never let her kid struggle to figure it out for herself. A mother very much like Sarah herself.
Through her guilt and confusion, it was hard to form a question; hard to speak. “Why’d you feel sorry for Owen?” Sarah made herself ask.
Her mother’s expression was hard to read in the dark. “I remember the way he looked, every time he was over, like he’d never seen people eating at a table or speaking kindly to each other. I know he hurt you, in the end, but he always made me feel sad. Sad, and lucky.” Her voice cracked, and Sarah looked and saw a tear sliding down her mother’s seamed face.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
Ronnie wiped her face, shaking her head. “Oh, it’s just that weddings make me cry. And I love having all of you here. I just wish—” Her voice cracked again, and she pressed her hands to her eyes.
“What?” Sarah asked. “You wish what?”
“Nothing.” Ronnie shook her head and straightened her spine. “I just want you to know that, as long as I’m here, you and the boys are welcome, for as long as you want to be here.” And Sarah, still stunned by her mother’s revelation, and relieved that Owen was no longer the topic of discussion, that she hadn’t blurted out a confession she wouldn’t be able to unspeak, found herself promising that she’d look at their schedule, and see if she and the boys could stay for another few weeks, once the wedding was through.