“I can’t wait for Dad to meet the baby,” she said. “I’m hoping Louise can cheer him up. He’s been having such a hard time, since Coco left. It’s such a crummy thing what she did, cheating on him like that behind his back. I don’t think I can ever forgive her.”
Eleanor wrapped her arms tighter around the baby. She had some things to say about a person being unfaithful in a marriage. She knew she should keep them to herself.
Look at Louise,she told herself. What else mattered, but that she was in the home of her daughter, holding this baby? All she needed was here: those rosebud lips, the nose that even now resembled Ursula’s, the feel of her chest rising up and down, the wonderful smell on the top of her head that every newborn baby she’d ever met had, but only briefly, the feel of Louise’s quick little heartbeat under the flannel blanket, her fingers wrapped around Eleanor’s as she slept.
“I just can’t believe Coco would do something like that to Dad,” Ursula said. Maybe it was having given birth so recently that allowed her to speak of her father as she was doing, when normally she’d been so careful never to bring up his name. Maybe she just thought things were so much more comfortable with Eleanor now that the subject of Cam was no longer off-limits.
“One day he thinks everything is good,” she said, “and the next day, Coco’s telling him she’s fallen in love with some guy.”
Eleanor could feel the old familiar tightness in her chest, her heartbeat accelerating. She remembered what Ursula used to say—Ursulaat age six, age eight, always the peacemaker. Trying to keep everyone happy.Take a deep breath, Mama. Count to ten.
“I always loved it, how Dad and Coco got together the way they did,” Ursula was saying. “After all those years of being our friend, helping out with us, coming over and cheering us all up after you two split up. Then finally one day it hit them, they’d fallen in love.”
Not quite. But look at the baby. All that mattered here, her granddaughter.
Jake reached across the table to Eleanor, holding the wine bottle. “We might as well finish this off, El,” he said, refilling her glass.
“It always seemed like the most beautiful story. Coco coming back from Hawaii and the two of them suddenly looking at each other and realizing they were in love.”
“It was a little different than that,” Eleanor said. She looked at her precious daughter. She could still see, in Ursula’s face, at twenty-eight, the child she’d been at seven, the day they’d sat down to tell the children they were getting a divorce. Ursula, thinking they were about to learn their parents had agreed to get baby goats.
Eleanor reached for the wine. Just one more sip. That didn’t mean she was headed to Crazyland.
“Your dad’s going to be okay,” Jake said to Ursula. “We don’t know the whole story, either. Maybe he wasn’t into her anymore, either, by the time Coco hooked up with this other guy. For all we know, it was mutual.”
Ursula wasn’t having it. “You don’t know my dad like I do,” she told Jake. “It was bad enough, seeing how broken up he was after my mom left,” she said. “Now here he goes, all over again.”
“It wasn’t like that exactly,” Eleanor said. With the baby in her arms this way, she said the words quietly. “With your father and me. I didn’t leave him. He left me.”
The minute she spoke the words, she knew it was a mistake. Across the table, Ursula shot her a look. This was the Ursula Eleanor remembered, from all those years of being the object of her younger daughter’s quiet, carefully disguised anger. That harsh, judging gaze. But worse.
“What are you talking about? You’re the one who moved out.”
Eleanor took a deep breath, as if she were about to go underwater for a very long time. A dive to the bottom. She had passed the point of no return.
“I moved out because your father had fallen in love with someone else,” Eleanor said. “If someone in that story had their heart broken, it wasn’t your father.”
“You left us. You left him to take care of everything. I remember how he was then. Even after Toby’s accident, Dad wasn’t as sad as he was when you left. I don’t know how he would have survived if Phyllis and Coco hadn’t helped out.”
Coco helped out. You bet she did.Eleanor was no longer sure if she thought the words or said them.
“Your father...” Eleanor said.
Don’t go there.
She did.
Later, what she would remember was Ursula across the table, taking in her words. Three days earlier, she’d given birth, but there may have been no expression on her face, in labor, to equal the pain Eleanor saw in the way Ursula looked at her now.
It was too late. Eleanor was in Crazyland.
“All this time, you actually thought that your father lived like some kind of sad monk after your heartless mother abandoned him? And Coco, the loyal family friend, was just coming by to make popcorn balls and play Monopoly? And then finally, when she turned twenty-one, the two of them suddenly looked at each other and slapped their hands on their foreheads and said, ‘What do you know? We’re in love.’ You really think that’s how it happened?”
Jake had gotten up from his chair now, heading in Eleanor’s direction. He lifted their daughter from Eleanor’s arms. Returned to his place beside his wife.
“Your father was fucking the babysitter, Ursula,” Eleanor said.
Whatever it was that happened after she said that, Eleanor no longer remembered. Only that Ursula was rising from her chair, no trace of love in her eyes. Jake was standing there holding Louise.
