“Is it a mother and her babies?” she whispered.
“It must be.”
They watched for a long time. This was one of the things he loved about Clementine. She never tired of doing things like staring at snakes. Effie and Simon could be counted on for a ramble, but after a while they grew bored, or cold, or started talking so much and at such volume that they scared away everything alive.
“I miss my mother,” Clementine said suddenly, quietly, still watching the snakes. “Even though I believe I was something of a mystery to her, she loved me, and I miss that. I miss the fact of her love.”
Something in Archie’s chest folded over, crumpled beneath the force of a powerful fondness that was almost painful. Clementine Morgan was the only lady in the world—nay, the onlypersonin the world—who could attach such a sentiment to snakes.
“I miss my mother, too,” he said, as a gesture of unity but also because it was true, and because Clementine Morgan was the only person in the world to whom he could say that.
To his shock, she grabbed his hand. He thought it would be a quick squeeze, her way of sending some understanding back to him. She kept it, though, and straightened, done with the snakes.
“What would you tell her, if you could?” she asked, as if that were an ordinary sort of query. As if it were unremarkable to ask such a question while holding his hand.
Itfeltunremarkable, was the thing.
And it was agoodquestion. Most people who asked after his mother, even Effie and Simon, who did so with true care and interest, asked how she was faring, or sometimes how Archie was faring with respect to her. They never asked anything specific, though, anything that would require him to respond unambiguously. “Well,” he said, considering, wanting to do Clementine’s question justice, “if I had known our last conversation was going tobeour last, I would have handled it differently. I’d’ve said things.”
“What things?”
The answer that rose through him was, initially, surprising. Yet he recognized it. It was rather like hearing one of Effie’s poems, and thinking,Oh, yes, that’s how it is, isn’t it?
“Love,” he said decisively. “So notthings, plural. Just one thing. Love.”
“The only thing, in the end.”
“Yes.” He had never thought of it like that, but she was right.
“You have to believe that she knew you loved her.”
“Do I? Do people know things we don’t tell them?”
“Mmm.” She looked off to the horizon. Had she forgotten they were holding hands? “What would you tell yours?” he asked, because he knew that was what she was thinking about.
“I would tell her not to issue that blasted deathbed order to my father to see me married!” she exclaimed, though it was a good-natured outburst. It was also forceful enough for her to yank her hand from his and do a little dance of frustration down the path ahead of him.
Well, she had to let go sometime, and the dance made him smile. Outdoor Clem, Wild Clem, dancing among the trees.
“It seems odd,” he said, “that your mother would consign you to such an unhappy fate.” His memory of Mrs. Morgan was of a kind woman who was liberal with her affection, even if she and her daughter were very different sorts of people.
“I’ve wondered if she said that because she wanted me to be happy, and she couldn’t imagine a woman being happy without a husband and children.” Her brow furrowed, as if she were trying to make sense of something very puzzling. “Something Olive said recently has made me reevaluate much of what I thought I knew about my parents’ marriage. Apparently it was never the love match I’d always believed it to be. But I do think—I hope—that my mother was happy with her life, in the end.”
“For what my observation is worth, your mother seemed to be made very happy by her husband.”
“And yet your mother was not made such by hers.”
He sucked in a breath. It wasn’t that he disagreed, or that she was telling him anything he didn’t already know. Still, he was set back on his heels by the simple statement of truth. He wasn’t accustomed to people knowing about Mother. But of course Archie himself had told Clem all about her, had split open his heart if that were something he did.
“That is true,” he ventured once he’d got hold of himself. “Though it is difficult to parse. I have come to believe she did love my father, at least initially. If I am to believe her conversations with Miss Brown playing the part of her own mother, she went against her parents’ wishes to marry him. So I am not sure why, by the time I came along, she and my father had grown so chilly with one another. I am left to ponder whether it wasmotherhoodthat did not agree with her. I have always wondered why she never had another child after me—she had the heir but no spare. Perhapsthatis the question I would ask her if I could.”
“Oh, Arch, it was always apparent to me that your mother adored you. The pair of you always seemed to have a special bond.”
It cheered him to hear her say that. He’d been wondering, these recent years, if he’d been imagining the degree of his mother’s regard, or even the fact of it. “We did, didn’t we?”
“You did. And I didn’t mean to cause distress. I merely meant to point out that each person is different.”
“I know, and I am not distressed. It is curious, though, isn’t it, that your parents apparently did not marry for love but ended up, so far as we can tell, loving each other? Whereas mine, it seems, started out with love, but it faded.”
