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“He never, ever got over her, Pete. He loved her until the day she died. He married my mother knowing that he was still in love with another woman. Can you imagine how this makes me feel about him? Even when he was with my mother, it was all a lie. I am the product of a lie. You know what else I found in that drawer of letters and photos? I found my mother’s statement on why she was asking for the divorce. It was because he was in love with your mother. She was still a presence, even if she was a state away and married to someone else, raising her own family.”
I tried to reach for her, and she pulled away, standing up and going to the door.
“This can’t happen, Pete. There’s too much here. This is too much bad blood between us and I can’t. You should have told me. You knew, and you should have told me.”
She was crying again as she slipped out of the trailer and back toward her house. I watched her go but didn’t follow. And then I saw Emma standing at the corner of the trailer, watching me with wide eyes.
“Hey, sweetheart, did you forget something?”
She nodded her head and approached the trailer, stepping inside.
“What was that about, Dad?”
“What did you hear?” I asked her. There was no way I was going to talk to her about her grandmother’s indiscretions, but if she had heard enough, then she already knew.
“Honey, sometimes there are just things that even adults can’t understand. There’s some stuff right now that both Sara and I are having trouble wrapping our minds around.”
Emma looked out the trailer window. “I think you need to go after her.”
“What?” I asked as I looked at my daughter.
“Dad, I know you don’t think you did anything wrong. But Sara is upset. That’s pretty easy to see. So, if there is something you can do to make it better, you should. Are you going to date her?”
“I thought I might,” I answered sheepishly.
“Then I think you need to follow her and tell her you are sorry. No matter what it was, even if it’s not all your fault. You need to do what you can to make her feel better so that she can learn to trust you.”
I shook my head as a half smile grew on my face. “Where are you picking this stuff up, kid?”
She smiled. “I told you. I watch stuff, and I read a lot. And Dad, you’ve got to keep in mind that I’m a young woman and I know how women’s minds work.”
“Oh, is that so?” I knew I had trouble on my hands with this one, but I wouldn’t trade her for the world.
“Yup. And I like Sara. I don’t want you to let her run away from you. Whatever has upset her is something you can help her with, isn’t it?”
“Well, to be honest with you, it’s a lot about her feelings. And I’m not sure I can fix her feelings.”
“Did you do something that made her feel worse?”
I thought about it for the moment. Even though I stood by my belief that it was in no way my business to tell Sara about what had gone on between her father and my mother for a couple of weeks over thirty years earlier, finding out through a pile of letters and photos couldn’t have been much better.
“I’ll say this—I didn’t do anything to make it better.”
Emma came over and put her hand on my shoulder. “Dad, I think you’ve got to do something to make it better if you ever want Sara to speak to you again. If you want to have a chance at dating her, you’re going to have to apologize.”
I smiled and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. You’re getting too smart for your own good.”
I left Emma at the trailer and went to find Sara, but that proved to be a task that I wasn’t up to for most of the day. There was no telling where she had run off to, and it wasn’t exactly like I could go up to the front door of the big house and just ask to be allowed inside. I couldn’t risk running into Ken and what might happen. I hadn’t seen the man in years, and with the conversation, Sara and I had just shared there was too much on my mind. Even though I knew that my mother was a willing participant in all that had occurred over thirty years ago, it didn’t change the way I felt about the man. He had done something that no one should ever do. He had slept with his best friend’s fiancée. For as long as my parents had been together at that point, they might as well have been married.
It wasn’t until later in the evening, after another of the nightly events was over, that I was able to find Sara as she was saying goodbye to guests as they were leaving the house.
“Can we talk?” I asked, as I moved to stand beside her there on the porch. She kept a smile on her face and waved at some guests, but she shook her head at my question.
“Sara, we need to talk. There’s something I need to say to you. Please, just give me the courtesy of a moment or two. That’s all I ask.”
She glared at me, but finally turned to go inside and gestured for me to follow her, her skirt swishing as she walked. She was dressed in something even finer tonight than she had been in the night before and she was breathtakingly beautiful. I thought about what she had looked like naked in the moonlight the night before. I was already aroused. I wanted her…of course, I did, but now wasn’t the time to think about that.
She led me to another wing of the house, her wing as I found out.
