“Oh, I don’t believe that.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m happy now,” she assured him. The babies and her classes kept her busy. She loved her husband. She’d had her adventures—or, rather, Veronica had. Now Ronnie was relatively fulfilled; mostly content. She couldn’t go back in time and change what she’d done. She couldn’t make it up to Lee, because she couldn’t tell him what had happened, not ever. What she could do was make a sacrifice. She could give up something that she loved and, in doing so, renounce the last vestiges of that other woman she’d been. She would stop being a novelist and be, instead, a wife, a mother, a professor of literature, a secret scribbler, accumulating stacks of pages that reposed in plastic storage boxes on the top shelf of her closet. She could refocus her energy and her ambition on her home life, and on teaching, and she could suffer, quietly, for the sin only she knew she’d committed. She would be like a medieval penitent with a girdle of thorns under her clothing. No one would know but her.
For almost forty years, Ronnie wore her thorns and wrote in private, and believed herself safe, trusting that what she’d done would stay, forever, between her and God. She’d written eight novels, each in its own plastic box, high on a shelf in the guest room, with instructions as to their disposal in the will she’d written years ago. Her kids had grown up; and Lee had died, without suspecting that Ronnie had ever been untrue. She’d had no reason to think that anyone would learn her secret. And now, thanks to faddish DNA kits and her idiot sister, her children, and their children, were all going to know.
She and Paul each had a second glass of wine as the sun went down and the darkness gathered and the wind rose, making conversation with the tall grasses, the rosebushes, the pine trees. They settled on a price, and Ronnie said she’d let him know when she was ready for the listing to go live. “We’re having a wedding,” she said, and Paul congratulated her and said, “I hope it’s a beautiful day.” She saw him out, and, instead of going to bed, she walked back upstairs slowly, standing in front of the big windows that looked out over the water, for once without noticing the waves or the starry sky. After the wedding, she told herself. If Sam and Sarah find out beforehand, if they have questions, I’ll get them to wait; I’ll tell them we can’t ruin Ruby’s big day. We’ll get through it, and then, when it’s over, I’ll tell them everything.
Part Two
MAY 2021
The Course of True Love
Interlude
A wedding, thought the house, with a small shudder that made her roof joists groan. A wedding! It should be one of her happiest occasions, but over the previous week, she’d heard what was coming after the last of the confetti was cleared. Too much house indeed! She was just the right amount of house, for a grandmother, and parents, and children and stepchildren; for cocktail parties and birthday cakes and rainy days of puzzle-solving and Scrabble. You have hurt my feelings, she wanted to tell the lady of the house, but she could sense that the lady would soon be having enough troubles of her own.
So: a wedding. The boy and the girl who’d grown up here were a man and a woman now. They would come. They’d see the problem with their mother. They would help. And then, she hoped, they would change her mind. They would realize all that she was, and all she had to give them, and they would decide that there was no better house in the world; that there was nothing to do but stay.
But first, she’d have to help them. Maybe help their children, too. Whatever obstacles they’d encountered, whatever kept them from being happy—and, by extension, from being here, with her—she would fix it. She’d clear the path; she’d smooth the way. She’d figure out how, and she’d fix it all.
Ronnie
Ronnie started off in the laundry room, gathering a basket of sheets and pillowcases and holding it against her midsection as she set off, with a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream bouncing around in her head: I am sent with broom before / To sweep the dust behind the door. The wedding was still over a month away, but she knew, from experience, that setting the big house in order would take time, and she wasn’t moving as fast as she used to these days. Better to start early, she’d decided. Her plan was to begin at the bottom of the house and work her way up to the top, determining who would go where. Once she had the sleeping arrangements figured out, she could start to think about meals, and pre-wedding activities, and, most important, the thing that she was dreading: what she’d say to Sam and Sarah when the wedding was over.