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Her sister would rub her back and tell her to be quiet. Don’t worry. Don’t think about it. Be quiet and sleep, Allie.
They weren’t the kind of trips a parent brought souvenirs home from. They were the kind Allie wasn’t supposed to ask about, because May said if they asked about it, it made their dad feel sad. May said her and Allie’s job was to be good and make it easier for him.
All of this she’d told Winston.
She’d told him how in high school she’d watched a Lifetime movie about a dad who had a secret life—two wives, two sets of kids, two entire houses in two different states—and right after that she’d started opening her mother’s mail. Credit card statements, bills, letters. Looking for clues about where she went and what she needed that she couldn’t get from her husband and her kids.
How she’d helped her mom on the computer often enough to know she always used the same password.
How the next time her mom was gone, she had logged into her bank account and drilled down into the pending transactions.
Nancy Fredericks went to Kohler, Wisconsin. On those trips, there would be hotel charges, restaurant meals, gas, shopping. Those were the trips she came home from with a new blouse or a pair of earrings, and a brightness to her that hurt Allie’s heart.
But the long trips—the bad ones, the ones she came home from with bitterness as her souvenir, the ones that led to long showers and burned dinners and endless criticism of her and her life and her choices—on those trips, she went to New York.
On those trips, there were only the plane tickets. No hotel. No restaurant bills. No gas, no shopping, nothing.
And when her mom came home from those trips, dad always slept in the basement for a long time afterward.
It was the summer she’d turned eighteen that Allie learned who her mom was meeting in New York. A guy she’d dated once when she was on-again, off-again with her dad. He was an artist who’d eventually moved to the city and talked Nancy into leaving her husband and infant daughter to be with him.
The man who was Allie’s real father.
That part, she hadn’t told Winston. He didn’t need to know everything, and she didn’t want to ruin the way he was watching her. She liked how he watched her. It had been such a long time since anyone watched her like she was important, like she meant something.
“Whatever you want to know, mailman,” she said.
For a long moment he just looked at
her, his face half-shadowed, his eyes too dark to make out their color.
Her hand rose to her throat, resting on bare skin where she’d unbuttoned her blouse. She could feel her heart beating there.
“Your mother’s a grown woman,” he said. “She’s here of her own free will, with another man who’s not your father—a man she’s presumably been in some sort of relationship with all these years. And you’ve followed her here. For the first time, after watching where she went and wondering, you’ve followed her.”
He’d told her he worked in finance. He spoke as though his mind was a vault, each sentence carefully withdrawn, checked, and counted before he handed it over.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Why.
As if she knew why. As if she’d made a plan, worked out the steps, and executed them, when in fact all that had happened was she’d dropped by to talk to her mom about some of the details of her parents’ upcoming anniversary party and found her dad in the kitchen, silently flipping through the pages of his wedding album.
Where’s mom?
She’s taking some time for herself.
And she’d known she couldn’t be good, and quiet, and stay home in Manitowoc anymore.
“I have to make her stop doing this,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”
He sipped his drink, eyes still on her.
She couldn’t be authentic, not truly, not even with this stranger.
She couldn’t tell him, My mom has to come home. Because I dumped Matt, and my sister moved to New York, and I can’t bear for even one more thing in my life to change.
