“Ellen.”
“My stepbrothers could be page boys. Giant page boys.”
“We broke up.”
“Oh, no!” The one time Ellen was enjoying being a bitch and it was entirely inappropriate and hurtful. (And, in fact, she would have been perfectly happy for her parents to be married! Their wedding would have been moving and lovely. What was wrong with her?)
“What happened?” she asked. He went back to his wife, of course. Or he moved on to a younger model. Or was it somehow Ellen’s fault? Did he not like Ellen? (Ah, listen to the Inner Child piping up for attention.)
“I broke it off,” said Anne. She sat down at the kitchen table and extracted a cherry tomato from the salad bowl.
“But why?” Ellen pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her mother. “You seemed—well, you seemed completely besotted.”
“I know,” said her mother. She looked at Ellen and gave a little half smile and shrug. “I was. Look, I’m utterly mortified.”
Ellen was momentarily distracted by the sound of Patrick’s voice rising in the dining room. “Can we please talk about something else other than Saskia? Like, I don’t know, Armageddon? Who wants to talk about Armageddon?”
“You don’t need to feel embarrassed,” she said to her mother.
“I’ve been such a twit,” said Anne. “With everything you’ve got going on in your life at the moment.” She inclined her head toward the dining room. “Getting married, new stepson, baby on the way, deranged stalker and what have you—and I decide to throw your father into the mix!”
“Mum, I’m a grown-up,” said Ellen gravely, and extremely fraudulently, seeing as she’d thought exactly the same thing. “Tell me why you broke it off.”
“I’ve spent the last thirty-five years being in love with a memory,” said Anne. “It’s crazy, and I would have denied it, but every time I went out with anyone, I was comparing him to your father. Your father, whom I had never actually dated, whom I really didn’t even know that well. So of course, every man came up short.” She giggled. “In more ways than one.”
“Mother.” Ellen recoiled. “Please.”
“Sorry. So when David and I started dating again, I was deliriously happy. He was every bit as lovely as I recalled. Actually, let me make this clear. He is lovely. He still qualifies as the loveliest man I’ve ever met.”
“So? What’s the problem?” said Ellen.
“Well, I started noticing this feeling creeping over me after we’d spent more than an hour together. At first I couldn’t put a name to it, and then last week it hit me. I was bored.”
“Bored,” said Ellen. She was suddenly feeling very sorry for her father.
“Bored out of my mind,” confirmed Anne.
“Well, but that can happen—”
“No,” said Anne decidedly. “He’s not right for me. He never was right for me. He doesn’t have enough to say! And he has these periods of time where he literally does nothing. The other morning he sat in an armchair for twenty minutes, literally twenty minutes, without doing anything. Not reading. Not talking. Just staring at a tree. What’s that about?”
“Perhaps he was silently contemplating the beauty of nature,” offered Ellen. “Or just taking a few moments to meditate and be thankful for his life. Or he was practicing mindfulness—”
“It was a rhetorical question, Ellen. Honestly, I thought he’d lost brain function. Anyway, as the young people say so eloquently: whatever. I don’t care what he’s doing, I just know it drives me nuts. We will be friends, of course. It’s all perfectly amicable. And he says that he would love to see you again, if you’d like that.”
“That would be nice,” said Ellen. Actually, the thought of meeting up with her father now seemed perfectly acceptable, even quite soothing. She thought of rainy Sunday afternoons as a child, when she would lie on a rug on the floor mesmerized by the raindrops sliding down the windowpane, and her mother would keep walking in and out of the room saying, “Ellen, what are you doing? Let’s go out! Let’s talk! Let’s do something.”
Perhaps she and her father could linger together, without the need to say a word. No need for awkward “getting to know you” conversations. They could just be. Father and daughter. And if they didn’t feel a thing for each other except a mild friendliness, then that would be perfectly fine.
“So, at the tender age of sixty-six,” said Anne, “I might be finally ready for a real relationship, now that I can let go of my silly obsession with a romance that never really was. I might even do a little online shopping for a new man. Apparently it’s the latest thing for the over-sixties. And look how successful it’s been for you!”
“Yes!” said Ellen. He would never love another woman as much as he loved Colleen. Maybe not that successful.
“Speaking of which”—Anne lowered her voice—“I’ve been meaning for a while to say that I’ve become very fond of Patrick. Really. Very fond. I took some time to warm to him—”
“He’s right there!” hissed Ellen.
“Well, that’s OK, I’m saying nice things about him. I like the way he looks at you. You’re right. Jon was entertaining, but he didn’t look at you the way Patrick looks at you.”
“How does Patrick look at me?” asked Ellen.
“And he’s a good father.”
“Am I interrupting?”
Ellen and her mother turned to see Maureen at the door, with her arms full of plates.
“I was just saying what a good father your son is.” Anne stood up and took some of the plates from her.
Maureen beamed. There was a sound of running footsteps and they heard Jack scream, “I hate you!”
“Fine!” shouted back Patrick. “Break your other arm for all I care!”
Maureen’s beam wavered. She got it back under control and began scraping leftover food from the plates with the edge of a knife.
“This windy weather really puts people on edge, doesn’t it? I wonder, is there a medical reason for that, Anne?”
I must have fallen asleep because it seemed like I just blinked my eyes and Tammy had materialized. She and Lance and Kate were sitting in a little semicircle of chairs next to my bed, eating chocolates.