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Wayne drove down Mom’s street just as Ronnie drove off, a megawatt smile wreathing her beautiful face.
“Where’d she go?” I asked Mom as I stepped into the living room.
Mom was sitting at her dining room table, which also served as her home office desk. With dollar store reading glasses perched on her nose, she had her laptop open and was reading Ronnie’s blog. Her sprained wrist was folded against her stomach. She pushed a stray gray hair off her face and frowned. “Don’t act like you don’t know.”
“Okay, I know.”
“Simon thinks he can buy the world, doesn’t he?”
Here we go, I thought. “He likes to make decisions easier for some people.”
She snorted. “Everyone seems to have a price. Thinking of which, how was your nooner?”
“Nice talk. You’re spending way too much time with Ronnie.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Simon and I had business to discuss, which we did in his room because we didn’t want curious people eavesdropping.”
“Sit down,” Mom said and yanked off her glasses. She rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. “I really need to talk to you.”
“You should be resting,” I offered.
“Not until you and I have had this talk.”
I slumped into the seat across from her and the duct tape holding the upholstery together snagged my skirt. She was so frugal. The chair had been repaired that way after one of D2’s old cats had shredded it. That was about fifteen years ago, and she hadn’t fixed it or replaced it since then.
“Humor me here.” She closed the clamshell of her laptop. “If you truly love Simon for himself, why don’t you hand back that sweetheart contract he gave you? Ask him for a market salary for your so-called PA duties and negotiate from that level. Make yourself truly vulnerable to the corporate life so that he can fire you when you finally get tired of his bossy ways and start telling him off. I bet he wouldn’t seem half as attractive if he didn’t come with a platinum-plated lifestyle and a no-fault clause that lets you walk away rich no matter what you do.”
She pressed her lips into a tight line and waited. For one insane second, I considered opening up, telling her how magical it was to be with a man who made me feel safe and protected, whose skillful hands both inflicted terrible punishment and delivered indescribable pleasures. Simon was an alchemist who turned pain into poetry. Only certain people could appreciate his type of magic. Mom wasn’t one of them. She only saw someone she thought of as one-percenter waltzing into my life. That rankled her proud, working-class identity.
Mom and D2 loved me without question. I had no doubt about that. But they had their comfortable Montreal lives that I just never enjoyed that much. They ice fished in winter, went to ball games in summer. I’d never caught their love of deep freeze winters or spectator sports. D2 had his vintage cars and motorcycles. Mom led dance fitness classes in her spare time. Those things didn’t interest me either.
When I was a toddler, Mom’s friend, Jacques Sauveterre, hung around so much I started calling him Daddy all on my own. Simon knew that story of course. But it was a lie, a lie I’d told myself so many times I almost believed it.
One of my earliest memories was of Jacques and his two sisters taking me to the lake in the summer. We stayed at their cottage, and I swam and played with their pack of small dogs, as happy as if I’d been born a Sauveterre, which in fact I had.
I was the daughter of the third sister, Francine, who died when I was an infant.
Francine was Mom’s best friend in high school. After my grandmother died, she became D2’s lover.
Mom was only eighteen years old when my grandmother died and both she and D2 were devastated by her loss. Francine became a pillar of strength for both Mom and D2 during their crippling period of grief. According to Mom, Francine had had a crush on D2 for years which paved the way for what followed: D2’s grief collided with Francine’s youthful passion and the two of them connected with a burning need. Their short but fiery love affair produced me.
When Francine was killed in a car accident, I was only two months old.
For the second time in a few years, D2 had been gutted by loss and never trusted himself in a relationship again. Mom, who was really my sister, eventually adopted me and, for the first twelve years of my life, I didn’t know anything different. We lived that version of events for years. Not that the technicality mattered much because she was the only mother I’d known. Everyone assumed Jacques was my father, because no one had ever refuted that story. And so the lie was born.
The year we all moved in together Mom and D2 sat me down and told me the truth. I laughed and said that the D2 nickname worked even better then. He was mom’s dad and he was my dad too. D2.
By then Jacques Sauveterre and his two sisters were all married with families of their own. They’d scattered on the winds, Jacques to Florida, one sister to Australia and the other to France. I hadn’t seen or thought of any of them, outside their annual Christmas cards, for years.
After Francine died, Jacques had asked Mom to marry him. She’d laughed at his declarations of love. According to her, the more she pushed him away, the stronger he came back. She told him that she didn’t need any man to make her life complete, I’d heard innumerable times over the years. I didn’t know if Mom even believed her feminist stance any longer, but she’d held onto it for so long, she couldn’t renounce it now. She’d become more entrenched with that stubborn thinking with every passing year. She had to stick with it or admit that her lifelong beliefs had been wrong and had cost her the chance for a fuller life, possibly with a long-term partner.
When I started dating in my teens, she said I’d outgrow my romantic dreams, my Disney fantasy. She lectured me, often, on how a strong woman didn’t need a man. My hope for a partner, someone who was friend and lover, continued to mystify her. I held onto it all through my twenties, but my prince didn’t come. When I turned thirty without hope on the horizon, Mom declared I was on the shelf and that was just fine.
Fast forward and Simon appeared on the scene. No wonder she was challenging my relationship with him. No wonder she was asking me to hand back the contract with its golden handcuffs. She wanted me to prove that even without the lure of money, I’d be happy to stand at Simon’s side.
“I could do that,” I said and hugged myself.
