She’s doing as well as a person who just broke her hip can be, I typed back, rapid fire, I’m sure shocking the daylights out of him after months of no response. Then, in what was an extremely calculated move, I added,I’m in Raleigh visiting her now.
Any chance I could buy you a cup of coffee?????
In spite of myself, I smiled. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. Flowers, candy, candlelight, poetry, anniversaries, long walks on the beach, chick flicks. I love it all. It is my one greatest downfall. And, though Holden couldn’t get my blood pressure up quite like Ben, he was a master of the romantic gesture. He could whisk you off to Paris at a moment’s notice in a limo filled with champagne and flowers, and organize a surprise party so grand you couldn’t imagine how you didn’t know. It was a very tempting quality for someone seduced by romance.
Mom always accuses me of having a man “waiting in the wings,”of dating one but having my backup plan all lined up and ready for when that relationship inevitably ripped at the creases. That was how I knew Ben was the one. I didn’t have a backup plan. At least, I didn’t think I did.
That propensity to always have another man lined up has earned me some flak in my life. “You need to learn how to be alone,” one friend would say. “You need to find yourself to find happiness.”
All I knew was that myselfwas much happier when she had a man doting on her.
I looked down at my phone. I may have married Ben for love. Mad, passionate, can’t-bear-to-blink-without-you love. I had married for love, and look where it had gotten me. Miserable. Disgusted. Living with a man I knew I had to let go of. But I knew that, once I did let go, all of those Cinderella dreams I had had since childhood would be over. It was in that moment, when I texted back,I think that would be nice, that I realized that, more than rushing home to attend to Lovey in her time of need, I didn’t confront Ben and Laura Anne that day when she was climbing out of the golf bag, because I had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them squirm in their disgusting lie; it was that, if I didn’t have Ben, I didn’t know who I was.
Where?
I could practically taste a latte but realized that I couldn’t drink caffeine. And I certainly couldn’t risk being seen in public with Holden. Of course, my husband didn’t have much of a leg to stand on if he found out, but I didn’t want to embarrass my family by gallivanting around town with an ex when I was, presumably, happily married.
Your house.
His response was so uncharacteristic I laughed out loud:
A few minutes later, lying on my back beside my childhood swing set, wondering if my son or daughter would like playing on it one day, looking up at the clearest blue sky, trying to decide what I wanted to achieve out of this meeting with Holden, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Mom was on a meditation kick, and I knew I shouldn’t interrupt the “oms” floating around in her head. But I couldn’t help it. I was hoping that she knew all about what that adoption box meant and that I wasn’t going to have to live the rest of my life walking around hiding something from her. “Did you ever figure out who made the mistake with the whole blood type thing?” I asked. “That could be kind of a big deal in an emergency.”
She barely turned her head, squinted one eye at me and said, “Momma said I was wrong about Daddy’s.”
She turned back and closed her eyes again, but I had a feeling that I had disrupted her chi with my question. I wanted to keep prodding. But she must have believed Lovey’s lie. And I guessed that was okay.
Sleepy and finally relaxed in the fresh air, I closed my eyes, the sun feeling warm and soothing on my tired skin. As I opened them again, a thin cloud was floating across the acres of blue, a wispy layer that took me back to my childhood, to D-daddy’s office. To the truth.
I was rolling an iron car back and forth in front of the mahogany desk that was hyperbolically huge, reserved for mob men in the movies. A puff of smoke that looked precisely like the cloud floating above my head ascended from D-daddy’s cigar. Perhaps it’s because smell is most closely related to memory, but that warm, woodsy scent of tobacco always relaxes me and puts me back into the safety of D-daddy’s office, into the lap of a man too big and strong to ever fail.
Louise was sitting across from him, her legs up on the desk. Shewas babysitting me that weekend, and we had just finished having lunch with D-daddy and Lovey.
How they got on the topic I couldn’t tell you, but D-daddy was saying, “One of Truman’s advisors made a speech in South Carolina at the end of the war about how the fighting might be over but not to be fooled: We were in the midst of a cold war.” He paused, chewing on the end of that sweet-smelling stick. “It must have been 1946—no, 1947—and our mayor, who had been at the speech, decided then and there that the town had to snap into action.” I remember D-daddy laughing here, his blue eyes gleaming in that way that made you remember how unstoppably good-looking he had been in his youth. “Kooky fellow, that old mayor... Anyway, instead of making emergency kits or building bomb shelters, he used city funds to tattoo blood types onto the entire town. That way, if we were hit, and people were running around in the midst of blown-off arms and burning buildings, the rescue crews would know which transfusions to give right off the bat.”
D-daddy had laughed again here, taking another puff of his cigar, the smoke billowing. Through that hearty chortle he had said, “If the Soviets had decided to nuke us, the cockroaches would’ve been lucky to survive.” Then he’d taken off the suit jacket that I never saw him without, pulled his neatly starched and pressed shirt out of his pants and lifted it two inches to reveal a distinctive “A” on milky white skin that hadn’t seen the sun in decades.
“Why we all agreed to that insanity, I’ll never know. But the horrors of war can make men do strange, strange things.”
I remember learning in science class that the more we remember a memory, the more distorted it becomes in our mind. I’d never thought of that black “A.” It was hidden in the recesses of myconsciousness, waiting for a moment when I would need it. I wasn’t going to say anything to Mom, of course, but my heart sank all the same.
I closed my eyes, going through it again, picturing the piece of paper in the hospital with Lovey’s “A+” on it, D-daddy’s tattoo of the same. And I could see that Punnett square I’d looked up online, burned into my memory. The possible offspring from two A positive parents were A positive, A negative and O negative or O positive. That was it. No B.
But, on the other hand, one A positive parent, with the help of an AB parent or a B parent could create a B offspring. A B. Like my mom.
Everything I had known about Lovey, everything I had thought, how I had revered the way she stood by D-daddy through thick and thin, the way she had taken care of him tirelessly for the years he was confined to that chair had changed now. Because theirs hadn’t been true love at all. It had been a marriage of deception, a relationship filled with lies, affairs and an illegitimate daughter. It hit me all at once that the man I had thought nearest to God wasn’t even my biological grandfather. And, like that tattoo needle, the thought seared into me, making a permanent impression.
Lovey
A Souvenir
August 1951
“Honeymoon” is the most beautiful word in the English language. I figured Momma must have been right when she said that because as Dan and I boarded the plane in New York, where we had stopped over for a couple of days, I could scarcely contain myself.Imagine,I thought,me, on a Pan Am flight to Cuba of all things. We were dressed in our daytime finest for the occasion. I was wearing my best traveling suit complete with a wide-brimmed hat with a thick, satin bow tied around it. I could still practically see in my mind’s eye the beautifully wrapped package with the colorful poster inside. “Fly to Cuba via Pan American World Airways System.” That could only mean one thing: I was officially a world traveler.
I had been on a plane before, I reminded myself, walking a littletaller through the airplane’s corridor, Montaldo’s hatbox firmly in hand, purse draped casually over my arm.But that had been TWA.
“Imagine,” I whispered to Dan. “Getting to fly on a real-life, double-decker airplane.”
