My mother nodded. She was a cautious driver, both hands on the wheel. “What did Eddie tell you?”
“He took me to Skip and Polly’s fiftieth wedding anniversaryparty at the Century Club.”
Now her eyes did leave the road. “Those awful people are still married?”
“Fifty years.”
“How did that happen?” How had she had three husbands while Polly Hotalling had gotten by with one?
“They sit on the opposite sides of the table. I’m guessing that’s part of it.”
“So Eddie just runs into you, just happens to run into you in a museum, and the first thing he thinks to do is drag you off to see the Hotallings?”
I found the fact that my mother was mad infinitely preferable to her being bored or buoyant or sarcastic. Mad I could deal with. Mad made sense. “Eddie didn’t drag me anywhere. He was going to the party and his date got sick. He needed someone to go with him.”
“So now you’re his default date?”
“Not his date,” I said. “His stepdaughter. Actually, he introduced me as his daughter.”
My mother looked at me once more. “Had I had a child with Eddie, I would have remembered it, or maybe not. I’m getting old.” She stopped the car and turned on the hazard lights,tick-tick-ticklike a metronome. She opened the door.
“Mom?” I leaned in the direction of her open door.
“You’re driving.” She walked around to my side and opened the passenger door. “I’m serious, get out of the car. This isn’t safe.”
I undid my seat belt and walked around. I had never driven my mother’s Audi. A navy blue Camry came up behind us, slowed, then stopped. That we were two women in distress was aself-evident truth. I nodded and waved him on.
“It would have been kind of you to suggest that we go for a late lunch, order a bottle of wine,” she said.
“We can do that later.” I clicked the hazards off and put the car in drive.
“What did Eddie tell you?”
“He told me about Skip. He told me that you knew.” I scrolled through the information he had given me, which now seemed like less than it had at the time. “Honestly, he said nothing but nice things about you.”
She ignored this last part. “Are he and Skip still ...” She paused. She had no idea what word to use.
“I think it’s still going on, and I don’t know what ‘going on’ entails for the two of them.” The heavy leaves trimmed the light in the forest, letting less and less of it onto the floor. The turns in the road came without warning. I could see how easy it would have been to sail right off the edge of the world.
“Skip Hotalling was a waste of time,” my mother said. “Eddie’s friend, Eddie’s lover, either way, Skip wasn’t good enough for him. As for my knowing that Eddie was gay, can we take a minute to think about how stupid I was in 1978? I was divorced with two children. I had found the one man who wanted to be my friend, who didn’t try to jump me from behind when I took my coat off. There were the girls who were waiting until they were married, and then there were the girls who were already married, and then there were thedivorcées.” My mother gave every syllable its due. She made the word swing. “Divorcées were the cows who gave the milk for free, or so went the wisdom of the day. Into that equation came handsome Eddie Triplett, funny, well-read Eddie Triplett, who knew how to listen and kept hishands to himself and loved my kids and had my back at work. Eddie Triplett, who made me laugh so hard I once spit my coffee all over my desk. Go to the offices of Houghton Mifflin in 1978 and show me a woman who wasn’t in love with Eddie. Probably a woman or a man.”
The steering wheel of my mother’s car was made of actual wood, polished to satin. Jonathan and I had a nice life, but the steering wheel on our car was not wood. “So what happened?”
“We went around together, that’s all. We kept company. We were friends. Nothing ever happened and we never talked about it. I’m sure we were both grateful for the break. That’s the sad thing about Eddie and me. We liked each other so much. I’ll even say we loved each other, not with all the bells and whistles, but in our way we did.”
The road to the raspberry farm was longer than I remembered, and I wasn’t exactly sure where we had gone off the road. On this side of the hill? The other side? “So how did you go from there to being married?”
“It was those awful Hotallings. We had gotten together with them a few times. Polly was from Boston, you know, big money. I expect she was always anxious to get out of their roach-infested walk-up and go home to her parents’ house, sleep in her childhood bed for the weekend. They lived on Marlborough Street. I’d never been in such a fancy house in all my life. She had a brass canopy bed. Do you remember that? We took you girls over once, and she showed you the bed and all her dolls. You and your sister about lost your minds.”
And then I did remember, though not until this exact moment. My stomach twisted to think of it now, the same woman who had put the fear of God in me two nights before, a youngbride coming back to sleep in her parents’ house with her cohort of dolls.
“Even I knew there was something fishy going on. The charming part was I thought it had to do with Polly. Was Eddie meeting up with his best friend’s child-sized wife on the sly? I’ll tell you, there was enough electricity between the three of them to power up the Citgo sign. Eddie was always holding my hand when they were around. He would whisper to me, try to make me laugh, order one piece of cake with two forks, one more glass of wine for us to split. He may as well have been trying out for the lead in a Broadway show calledThis Is My Girlfriend. Then one night you and Leda were on a rare sleepover at your father’s and the Hotallings were in town again, so the four of us went out to dinner. Skip, god, but I hated that smug son of a bitch, Skip was bending over backwards to grind Eddie into the ground, asking Eddie to remind him why didn’t he go to law school, not that he could have gotten into law school. Why would he spend his life fiddling with the commas in some book that no one was ever going to read? What kind of a job was that? And I sat there thinking, Oh, Eddie must be sleeping with your wife. This is the moment it’s all going to come out and Skip is going to beat him to death in a restaurant. Then Skip says, ‘If you were going to waste your life like that, you should have gone to Vietnam, gotten it over with.’”
Now I looked at her. “What?”
“It was a bad night,” my mother said. “I was holding Eddie’s hand under the table. We were drinking too much, and Skip was drinking more than the rest of us. Polly kept putting her hand on his wrist and saying, ‘Skippy,’ real quiet. I’ll tell you, even thinking about it all these years later makes me want to go andfind them.”
I had missed it, the place where the accident happened. Not that I thought I’d be able to find it. Suddenly the road had ended and we had arrived at the gravel parking lot of the raspberry farm. I put the windows down and turned off the car.
