Oh God ... why? “Linda, I—”
“If money’s the issue, I’ll find a scholarship. My GPA is perfect, and I’m taking the Cambridge English exam next week. It won’t cost that much.”
“I don’t know if I can be away from you that long,” I admit.
“I’d come back for Christmas, Easter, and all summer,” she insists.
Now the question is: Can I live with the distance to see her happy, or would I rather have her sad and at home with me? “Can I come visit you?” I ask.
Linda gets off the swing and throws her arms around my neck, sending me tumbling onto my back. “Oh, thank you, Mom! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“Now, do you want to tell me why you told Michael about your period?”
“Oh, you heard . . .”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Are you going to stop me from seeing Tommaso now?”
“As tempting as that sounds, I won’t,” I confess with difficulty. “So, how come you elected Michael to be custodian of your secret?”
“It actually happened by chance. But he went to buy me pads.”
I must not have heard her right. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
This strikes me in three ways: It makes me laugh to think about Michael choosing period supplies for a teenager, I feel tenderness at the idea of him being so thoughtful, and finally I’m overwhelmed with sadness that that particular Michael no longer exists.
“Mom,” my daughter snaps me out of my thoughts.
“What is it?”
“Now that you and Michael have fought, are you going to make up?”
“I don’t think so, darling,” I murmur, my throat dry.
“But weren’t you in love?”
“We thought so, but we were wrong.”
51
Michael
“Linda’s your niece?” Bingley asks in a voice that’s far too loud for the standards of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. We’re sitting in one of the lounges at the bar, waiting for our annual reunion dinner.
I’ve been back in London for ten days, but I’ve been waiting for him to come back so I could talk to him.
“They can hear you all the way to Trafalgar Square,” I say. I told him what happened with Elisa, what I discovered, and how it ended, all accompanied by massive doses of alcohol, not least the glass of Glenmorangie in my hand.
“Sorry, but it’s upsetting.”
“How do you think I feel, Bing?”
“So, you cut all ties, just like that?”
“With whom have you cut ties?” asks Ashford, the first of our former classmates to arrive and sit on the free sofa.
