“No, absolutely not.”
“Did you tell Grandma and Grandpa?”
“Not yet. I’ll share this with them when the time is right.”
Will he resent her for telling him all this? Is this too much for him to carry? Like those stories she heard in that support group had been too much for her?
Maybe she’ll ask him when this is over, when Duncan is grown, if she should have told him a different story about his father, not the truth.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It’s Phoebe who next brings up Tom. That evening, after dinner, she sits on the window bench on their second-floor landing, waiting for Duncan to come out of the shower. Diana is around the corner in her bedroom, changing the linens on her bed. Her mother, with her strict rules for hosting, stripped the bed that morning, but wasn’t able to remake it before she left for her Garden Club meeting. Vivian was more put out by her inability to fully complete that task than she was by Diana’s delayed arrival home from Vermont.
“You appear to be behind in your laundry, Diana, so I washed all of your sheets,” Vivian explained before she departed. “I took care of the towels your father and I used as well. You’ll find everything in the dryer. Please be sure to put everything in the linen closet so I can find it next time.”
Diana, grateful for her parents’ help, responded to her mother’s comment with a heartfelt hug and let the criticism wash over her, understanding The General’s need for control is her way of managing life’s uncertainties.
As Diana tucks the crisp sheet around her bed, the bathroom door opens. “You were in there a long time,” Phoebe says to Duncan.
“Timing me?”
“I was waiting for you,” Phoebe says. “I wanted to show you this.”
Duncan’s footsteps thump across the wooden floor. “What’s that?”
“Daddy’s photo album from when he was a kid. I asked Mama if she’d brought me back a present from Vermont. She gave me this.”
“Move over.”
Diana picks up a pillow and its case from her bed and creeps across her room to stand behind her partially open door. She spies Duncan’s leg through the gap between the door and its frame.
“Is that Dad?” he asks.
“And Chris,” Phoebe answers. “They’re my age in this photo, don’t you think?”
“Maybe.”
“It would be better to look at this with Daddy. He could tell us who these people are and what was happening when the photo was taken. I wish he was here.”
Diana crushes the pillow against her belly and leans against her bedroom wall. Tom should be sitting with Duncan and Phoebe, telling them about his childhood. He should have shown his children this book years ago. He shouldn’t have hidden who he was from the three of them.
Especially not from me.
Duncan and Phoebe are silent for several minutes, as they turn the album’s pages, the plastic covering crinkling with each movement.
“Who’s that?” Phoebe asks.
“Our grandparents, I think.” Duncan disappears from Diana’s sight line, and his footsteps start back up again as he moves across the landing to the wall of photos. “See here? In this old wedding photo? These were Dad’s parents.”
“Did you meet them when you were little? When I was a baby?”
“No,” Duncan says, returning to the window seat. “They died a long time ago. Mom didn’t even meet them.”
Sadness washes over Diana. She misses Tom’s parents, Gary and Martha. What a strange kind of loss it is to mourn these people she never had the opportunity to know.
“Look, Duncan, here’s Daddy playing basketball.” Phoebe leans over to her brother, and Diana can make out the corner of the photoalbum, the top of Phoebe’s head, her daughter’s graceful hand pointing at the page. “He looks like you!”
“Or maybe I look like him,” he says.
