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Don’t jump in and bury him with it, Elsa, ask about him, give it some time, my mind advised.
“They’re things,” I pushed out. “How are things with you?”
“What’s going on?”
God. I had to get better at holding it together. I said a few words, and he still heard it.
“I sat down with Mom for dinner last night.”
“Shit. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe I was in denial it had to happen until it happened.”
“I take it it didn’t go well,” he surmised.
No.
It hadn’t gone well.
I launched in. “At first, she was nervous. I actually felt bad for her.”
“Okay,” he prompted, when that was all I said.
“And then she…”
God!
I threw myself on my new couch, thankful that Hale had a practical as well as aesthetic way of looking at things, because it was so comfy and I needed comfy right then, not to mention a physical reminder of Hale.
“She didn’t try to explain anything or rationalize anything. Instead, she was surprised I was angry at her for cheating on my father.”
He sounded a mixture of pissed and perplexed when he asked, “How’s that go?”
“She told me I couldn’t miss that she and Dad didn’t get along to the point they disagreed on vital things. I told her she was right, I didn’t miss it. So she asked why I didn’t understand, because of that, the reasons she strayed. And I told her that I might understand, if it was a thing that got out of hand because she was unhappy and unexpectedly ran into someone who made her happy. What I didn’t understand was how it went on for twenty years. Her response to that was cagey. I pressed, and she informed me this wasn’t one of my interviews. I was her child, and she didn’t owe me an explanation.”
“Fuck,” Hale muttered somewhat forcefully, and I knew part of what was behind that.
“It isn’t the same,” I assured him. “You have boundaries because of a life you led that wasn’t your choice, and something tragic that happened with the way you lost your dad. We worked that out. You hit me with the Elsa’s Exchange thing to guard your boundaries. Mom’s using it as a way to hide she really has no excuse for what she did. I mean, am I wrong? If she was unhappy, and Adam was unhappy, and they found happiness together, shouldn’t they have just come clean and done this decades ago?”
“Yes.”
“Hale, he has an eighteen-year-old son with Naomi. This means he had a child with his wife years into an affair with his best friend’s wife.”
“Jesus. This just gets more and more fucked up.”
“So I’m not out of line to think I deserve an explanation? Dad does? We all do?”
“No. You’re not out of line.”
Okay.
Good.
“Now, get this,” I went on. “She told me Adam cares a great deal about me, he’s upset that he might lose me, so she ordered me to come over and have dinner with them one night this week.”
“Fuck,” Hale repeated.
“That was part of my initial response to her demand, but there was another word after it. I didn’t say it out loud to Mom, but I did decline, which really pissed her off.”
