Maeve covered her face. She remembered doing that as a kid, thinking if she couldn’t see her dad, he couldn’t see her. His hand pulled her wrist down, exposing her. She clucked her tongue. “Oh, Daddy. I’m no ray of sunshine, that’s for sure.”
And she told her father, who she revered above all others, about having feelings for someone else and that someone else was a classmate from high school and that they’d reconnected and that one thing led to another.
“How long?”
“More than a year.”
William puffed, straightened his ball cap. “Jesus, Maeve. How did Sam find out?”
She didn’t say anything, just stared him down.
“Oh, no. Poor guy. Well, I know Sam well enough to know he didn’t throw any punches. Not exactly his style. How bad was it, with the other guy?”
A van pulled up behind them, and lookie-loos parked up the street. “We’d better go in,” Maeve said. “We can talk later.”
“Maeve. Come on. It’s me. What happened with the other guy? You’re not still seeing him, I hope. No way you and Sam can make this work if you’re running around with—Jeez, at least it’s not your boss! Who is it? Do I know him?”
Maeve’s skin prickled, and she rubbed her arms like she’d caught a chill. She was not trying to be dramatic, but she couldn’t make herself speak. Once it was out, they could never go back. “It’s Wendy, Dad.”
“What about Wendy? Sam’s not with Wendy! No way. C’mon. He’s no match for her.”
“No. Dad. It’s Wendy. Wendy’s the other guy. Just not, you know, a guy.”
William shifted his attention forward, so Maeve did too. “We better get in that line. Don’t want to miss out on something good.” His voice was low and even.
Maeve’s heart sank. She didn’t know what she’d expected to happen, though she’d run through every scenario. He couldn’t leave her here. He wouldn’t. It wasn’t like him to shout, especially not with so many people around. “Dad. Say something.”
He stared. “Does Mom know?”
The question was a simple one, but the answer was far more complicated. Maeve thought about that night, years ago, her mother’s expression. And then when she and Wendy rekindled their friendship, the way her mother had said she didn’t like her, didn’t trust her. “No. She doesn’t know. I’ll tell her when we get home. Daddy, if Wendy didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t have bothered telling you. I know this is hard. She ...” Maeve choked on the words, thrilled at the thought of saying them out loud. Pride bloomed like a sprout caught in a time-lapse. “I love her. I want to be with her. I want you to understand.”
Color rose in William’s cheeks, flushing his hairline. Flustered, he reached for the door handle. “We gotta get in there.”
Maeve followed him up the walk like a chastised child. At the top step of the brick house, he paused. Maeve halted, braced herself. “A lot’s going to change,” her father said. “But not the way I feel about you. Not ever. You understand? Now let’s go hunt treasures.”
After they unloaded the estate sale haul into the barn—a primitive apple cart, a box of depression glass, an oak secretary desk—Maeve begged off. “You mind if I go find Mom? May as well do this now since never isn’t an option anymore.”
The conversation on the way back had been mostly a diversion, though her father had asked about Wendy’s job, whether it was stable. “You think she’ll be around after the summer?”
“I hope so,” Maeve had replied. “Would that be okay with you?”
“Not gonna say it won’t take some getting used to—the idea and all. But I would never turn you away, so I would never turn her away. Easy as that.”
Maeve left her father to sort his antiques and thoughts. Her mother would be anything but easy, never one for airing dirty laundry, not metaphorically or literally. Buttercups creeped along the lattice under the back steps. Glass clanked in the kitchen. Her body told her to run.
Faye sat at the kitchen table, twisted in her chair, bent over a scrap of paper taped to a cutting board. A child’s watercolor tray in front of her, she dipped a red brush into the muddy water. “Let me guess,” Maeve said, surprising her mother. “A seascape. For a woman who’s not fond of boats, you sure do like painting them.”
“Prettier from the shore to me.”
“A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not where ships are meant to sail,” Maeve said, reciting words from a poster that hung in Opal’s kindergarten classroom.
“So, I hear. Lucky me. I’m not a ship.”
“You want to take a break, sit on the porch with me for a second?” Maeve asked, pushing away from the safety of the dock.
They sat facing each other on the porch in her parents’ wicker chairs, the table between them a growing chasm. Faye went white, stiffened like a stoic. “You didn’t tell him about before, about back in high school?” she asked. “I never did, you know. I kept your secret.”
Maeve couldn’t understand why her mother focused on that detail above all the others as if she deserved a medal for keeping a secret Maeve never asked her to keep in the first place.
