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Tears rolled down her cheeks. I pictured her as a young girl trying to comfort an older woman, listless on the couch. I thought aboutmy own mother, smiling and making everyone at DeMarco’s Diner laugh.
“I just mean I never wanted to ruin someone’s marriage,” Casey said.
“You didn’t. Kyle did.”
As I rushed toward the parking lot, I heard her calling out to me. “Please, think about it.”
Chapter 41
“I’ve been cooped up inside for days,” Aunt Izzie said. “I thought we could hike up to the waterfall and eat lunch there.” She grabbed a small cooler sitting on the counter, and we headed out the door.
Ninety minutes later we sat on a rock beside Lydia’s Falls. The waterfall always managed to surprise me. I never knew what to expect when I came here. Today, the water merely trickled over the rocks. The local meteorologists had been talking about drought conditions for weeks, but I had been skeptical. To me, every day this summer had seemed like a dismal gray rainy day.
A White couple and a girl about six or seven who looked like she might be Asian meandered past us. “Daddy, why isn’t the water flowing?” the girl asked.
“There hasn’t been any rain, sweetie,” the man answered.
I wondered if the couple had adopted the girl. Had they had trouble conceiving? Would Kyle and I have avoided all our problems if we had adopted?
Maybe the girl wasn’t adopted. Maybe, like Kyle, this man had fathered a child outside his marriage or with a former partner, and now his wife was helping to raise her. If I asked, she could offer me advice on raising Casey’s daughter. Or more likely, I was desperate to believe my and Kyle’s situation was more common than I thought.
“Beautiful day,” the woman said to me, and I realized I had been staring.
Aunt Izzie handed me a bottle of iced tea and a chicken-parm panini wrapped in white butcher paper. She kept the meatball-and-provolone sandwich for herself. A memory of my father trying to teach her how to make meatballs popped into my mind. “You, Izzie, are the only Italian woman on the planet who doesn’t know how to cook,” he’d joked.
Her voice interrupted my memory. “This is delicious.” She swiped her tongue across a smear of tomato sauce above her upper lip.
“Do you remember when my dad taught you how to make meatballs?” I asked.
My aunt flexed her foot. “Right before Hank returned.”
It was the last time I could remember that my aunt and father had gotten along. After that, there was always tension between the two of them.
“What happened between you and my dad?”
Aunt Izzie bit into her sandwich.
“You were so close, and then you weren’t.”
Aunt Izzie took her time chewing, exaggerating the movement of her jaw. An eagle landed in a tree across from us, and she pointed at it. “Would you look at that.” She stood and approached the tree, taking picture after picture with her phone. After the eagle flew off, she examined the photos. “I’m going to send this to ...” She seemed to lose her train of thought, but then she said, “Dana,” and busied herself swiping at her screen.
I took another bite of my sandwich, coming to terms with the fact that I’d never find out what had caused the falling-out between my aunt and father.
“No signal. I’ll have to send this later,” Aunt Izzie said. “I spoke with her last night. She’s making out well with the dog. Her roommate is helping out.”
“She got lucky with that. Imagine if she had to do it all herself.”
“Maybe we don’t give Dana enough credit.”
I rolled my eyes. “She should never have taken Oliver away from me. I still miss him.”
Aunt Izzie wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Well, he was her dog first, Nikki.”
I picked up a stone and threw it toward the waterfall. “Let’s not talk about Oliver.”
“Have you made any decisions about Kyle? Are you going to try to work things out? I won’t pretend to know what you should do, but you should make a decision.”
“From one bad topic to the next. This is a fun lunch.”
