For one, when I was small, he would let me sit on his lap while he sped around the house in his power wheelchair, spinning in circles until I shrieked with laughter. The chair moved at the touch of a button, and he controlled it with a joystick, which he gave me license to use at far too young an age. Together, we caused all sorts of havoc when I drove us into tables and knocked over lamps and teetering piles of books. Oops was his favorite word back then, and we both knew it rankled my mother, who had to clean up the messes we made, and that was before we had full-time caregivers. Mom did everything for him, and her devotion rubbed off on me. Until the age of eighteen, I’d believed we were the closest family on earth because of the challenges we faced every day, especially when Dad was in and out of the hospital for any number of infections that could have killed him. He was very vulnerable then. He still was.
But then Mom died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm, and I learned about secrets and lies. That’s when I discovered that people weren’t always what they pretended to be. Except for my dad, of course. He was always real with me. All I ever wanted to do, after Mom died, was protect him and keep him happy and healthy. I couldn’t lose him too.
Hence the keeping of my mother’s secret.
“So about that phone call . . . ,” I said to Dottie as she dropped a slice of bread into the toaster for me.
“What in the world did your boss want?” she asked. “I hope it was important.”
“It was,” I replied. “She asked if I could fill in for her at a sales conference in London this week. She was supposed to give a presentation, but she came down with a stomach bug, so she asked if I could go in her place.”
Dottie faced me. “Seriously? To London? England? Where the queen lives?”
I chuckled. “Yes, that’s the place. I’ll have to take a red-eye tonight or tomorrow.”
“And you said yes?”
“Of course. What kind of idiot would I be to turn down a free trip to London?”
I had considered the invention of a fictional conference in Italy, which would have been closer to the truth, but I was afraid to mention Italy to Dad because that was where he had his accident. It was the worst trauma of his life, so it might make him uncomfortable to talk about it or imagine me traveling there. London was a far better fabrication to avoid the subject of Tuscany altogether.
“You guys will be okay while I’m gone?” I asked, facing the toaster, keeping my back to Dottie.
“Of course. What an amazing opportunity. Any room in your suitcase for a stowaway? I could curl up very small, teensy tiny.”
I smiled as I waited for my toast to pop. “That would be fun.”
“Your father will be thrilled for you.”
“I hope so,” I said as I buttered my toast, “because I’ll feel terrible leaving him.”
Dottie spoke firmly. “Don’t say that, Fiona. You deserve to get away, and you’re not allowed to feel guilty about it. If anyone feels guilty, it’s him for making you feel as if you need to keep watch over him every minute of the day. We were perfectly fine when you moved out last year. He was happy for you, remember?”
I found a jar of strawberry jam in the refrigerator and carried it to the breakfast bar, where I sat down beside Dottie. “Yes, he was happy for me in a way, but we both know he never really liked Jamie.”
“No, he didn’t,” she replied, “but I told him that you needed to live your own life and that he had to let you do that. It took some convincing, but he agreed in the end.”
“Thanks for that,” I said, giving her a warm and grateful smile. “Even though it didn’t work out.”
Dottie sipped her tea. “I’m sorry that it didn’t.”
“Me too,” I replied. “I wish it could have turned out differently, but Jamie was just too . . . I don’t know . . . materialistic, I guess. It’s better that I realized that before the wedding and not after. I’d hate to be paying for a divorce lawyer right now.”
It was money that had become the main source of tension between Jamie and me. He hated it when I helped Dad out financially, but what else could I do? Money was tight. The proceeds from Mom’s life insurance policy were nearly exhausted, and Dad’s novels were all out of print. They stopped paying royalties years ago. He had some income from his disability insurance and other government assistance, but that alone wouldn’t cover three full-time caregivers and the payments on the new van and wheelchair we bought for him last year.