“Duncan was your mom’s boyfriend?” Edie tried to keep her tone light. Crushy feelings aside, she liked this woman. She wanted to give her the space she needed to deal with how her life had been upended. From the self-recrimination in her tone, it sounded like her life had been upended a lot.
Cosima pulled the gels from underneath her eyes, thenleaned back and looked out the window. “‘Companion,’ everyone says, though they ought to say ‘fiancé.’ There was a press release after he gave her the engagement ring, a beautiful emerald, and she said yes. She wore it for years and years. But she didn’t marry him.”
“Is that what he wanted?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it’s not whatyouwanted,” Edie guessed.
Cosima’s lack of response was an answer in itself. Edie knew a little something about yearning for a family even when everyone said you already had one.
“My Duncan’s name was Mike,” she offered. “He had a mustache that I thought was horrifying, but I would’ve cried if he shaved it off.”
Cosima didn’t look away from the window. Edie couldn’t tell if she wanted to hear more, but she was definitely the sort of person who’d stop Edie’s talking if it got to be too much.
“I was fourteen, which is the worst age to be alive,” Edie continued. “I fought with my mom constantly. We’re way too much alike. But Mike understood that I needed to be doing something all the time. He’d take me to the garage where he worked and show me how to change the oil in a car, or the tire. He taught me to drive manual transmission, even though I didn’t have a permit. He piled up pillows on the driver’s seat and zip-tied a chunk of two-by-four to each of the pedals, and we’d bomb around the back roads. He fostered animals with me from the shelter. My mom and him never got married, but I wouldn’t have survived sophomore and junior year without Mike.”
Cosima pulled her long, shiny legs underneath her, her forget-me-not eyes serious. “What happened to him?”
“My mom and him broke up when she met another guy atwork. This was the same month I was graduating from high school. Mike tried to stay close, but he’d turned down an opportunity to manage a factory in Pennsylvania several years in a row so he could be there for us, and then he didn’t have to be.”
“He didn’thaveto be.”
Edie could guess why Cosima picked at her fingernail when she repeated this phrase. She would be thinking of Duncan, who was not her father. She would be wondering whether it was only her mother he’d stayed around for.
Edie knew. Sheknewwhat it was like when a Mike walked away, and no matter how spiky and imperious Cosima was, she should get to keep her Mike. “What happened to your dad?” she asked.
“He died when I was three. Phoebe always said he was the love of her life, and maybe that’s true. What I remember about him is that I was always a little… scared isn’t the right word. Is there a word for feeling both anxious and exhilarated at the same time? I remember he would pick me up and hold me up high above his head and spin around.”
“Your body remembers him.”
“I suppose.” Cosima picked at a hole in the upholstery of the chair. “He’s why I’m here, in a way. My mom had a list. Things she wanted to do with me. She called it her ‘au revoir list.’ The only thing we didn’t do on her list was stay at Gregory Place. This inn is where my parents met.”
Phoebe Frank’s bucket list. That was why Cosima had come here.
On the surface, it made a nice fairy tale—the daughter helps a mother with a terrible diagnosis see her last dreams through—but Edie strongly felt that kind of thing was not really what daughters werefor.
It had long been a point of contention with her own mom.Edie only wanted to be loved and wildly approved of without qualification. She wanted the freedom to love her mom in all of her own weathers. She wanted to be able to shop for grown-up things with her mom, things like a car or a mattress, and also to stay at her mom’s house after a breakup and sleep in her bed while her mom played with her hair. Tanya Hoberg loved her—Edie didn’t doubt it—but she did seem to feel that her children were there to take care ofher, and watch out for and managehermoods.
It was impossible for a child to really know what their parent needed and to fulfill that need.
But that did not mean the child wouldn’t try.
“I’m sorry—” Edie began, her thoughts racing as she attempted to piece together a way to say this that met the bare minimum of courtesy.
“No.” Cosima laughed. “No, never mind. Obviously I’m trying to win your game again.”
“Good. Keeps me on my toes.” It was a banal thing to say, but she’d been caught off guard by Cosima’s quick reversal, and by hearing her laugh. Her laugh wasn’t refined. It matched her wild hair and her mean little tricks, like walking too fast for Edie to keep up with. Like changing the subject and claiming to be trying to win the game. “I was coming down to make myself tea. Do you want some? A package of biscuits? I’m afraid to make anything more. Morag will know, and then I’ll find a jar under my pillow filled with nails and crow beaks.”
“Yes. I could go for some Jammie Dodgers.” Cosima lifted that one corner of her mouth again, almost smiling.
Edie tried not to oversubscribe her heart to that half smile. “Just the cookies? No tea?”
“Maybe a glass of water.”
Edie stood up. “I’m on it.”
Cosima stood, too, and made a slow circle. She took in the piano heaped with figurines, the stacks of magazines and newspapers, the three pale-pink wing chairs and two mauve love seats and five small mirrored tables. Her gaze stopped on the reception area. Edie watched her take note of the forbidden guest book—the one in olive-colored leather, as big as the surface of a school desk.
