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She nodded.
“Jesus, Mom.”
“I was eighteen,” she said in protest. “My sister had stolen the only man I ever loved, so I slept with his brother. It wasn’t smart but . . .”
“He was married,” I said. “Also, they have these things called condoms.”
“He was married to Faye,” she said, as if that made it all right. “And then I got pregnant and Cleve paid Jack to marry me even though I thought you were Day’s. Jack knew the baby wasn’t his but he needed the money and we’d been kind of seeing each other off and on, so . . .”
“How many people were you sleeping with back then?” I asked.
Mom straightened her silverware. “Not that many.”
I felt tired. “You know that would have been good information to have, who my father was.”
“I really thought it was Day,” Mom protested.
“And he thought I was his?” I said.
She nodded.
“So, he pretended to be my uncle pretending to be my father whenever I needed one instead of telling me he was my dad, not knowing he really was my uncle and his brother was my father.”
Mom blinked again trying to wrap her brain around that. That was fair. I was still having trouble with it, and I’d known for a while.
“Then how did Cleve know?” I asked.
Mom shook her head. “I don’t think he did. How could he? I didn’t know.”
“He knew.”
“I don’t see how—”
“He deeded the factory to me. He gave me the factory and painted yellow magnolias on the ceiling with the symbols for his other three kids. He knew.”
My mother blinked again, trying to process. “You were Lavender’s sister?”
And not for the first time, I thought of the last thing Lavender had said to me: “I would very much have liked a friend like you.”Imagine if we’d known we were sisters.
Actually, I couldn’t imagine. We were so different. But still, to have had a big brother, even if he was that asshole Navy. To Navy’s credit, he’d always looked out for Lavender and Skye. Until he embezzled their trusts. Hell. My gene pool was a predator-filled swamp full of toxic waste.
Still, I would have liked a younger sister like Lavender, somebody I could talk to because we did have that. And now I had a younger sister named Skye. Well, half sister. Faye had cheated, too. But. Wait. There was no blood connection at all. So half-step-sister? And Lavender would have been my half-sister, like I had thought Molly was.
“You people have the morals of minks,” I said, giving up on trying to figure out the correct relationships.
“Lizzie!”
“My head hurts,” I told her, almost as overwhelmed as she was.
“No wonder,” she said, and then Sun brought us our lunches.
My mother had nothing to say, so I dug in. Yes, I was using food to soothe me, but who wouldn’t under these circumstances?
My mother changed the subject to her bears, and I went along with it because what else was there to say? I told her the sprinkler system had gotten all the ones we’d taken from her so far, but Peri was working to bring them back, and Vince had Big Red because Veronica had peed on it but he was going to get Crys at the fire station to clean it, and that I was sorry the rest had burned in the house fire that Mickey Pitts had set that had completely destroyed my childhood home (good riddance). She told me that she’d already had packed them up in garbage bags and in the car to give to me, even the ones she’d thought she was going to keep, because Day had told her that all the little beady eyes gave him the creeps, so no bears had been lost to the flames.
I was actually kind of glad. There was something about a bunch of teddies burning that had made me sad, especially since they were the ones she’d loved best.
“Are you sure you want to give them up?” I said, and she shook her head.
