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ChapterTwelve
Georgia fell asleep soundly that night and left Carmella in the silence of herself, her head stirring with questions about her mother’s past. In the next room, Cody read quietly, sipping tea and eating a cookie as a soft rain flattened across the windowpanes. Both petrified and eager to learn more, Carmella grabbed her mother’s diary and flipped to the next page, prepared to read.
August 20, 1978
I tried to tell Neal today. We sat together peacefully on the back porch, watching the sun drop into the western horizon. Carmella was sound asleep in her crib, and Elsa was asleep in her bedroom. For a moment, as Neal looked at me across the table, I remembered how we’d once been with one another: genuinely happy and excited to build a future together. At this moment, I thought, “I need to be honest with him.” But the moment passed very quickly. Neal jumped up to grab himself a beer, and then he began to talk about the Lodge again (there’s always something to say about the Lodge). I spent the next two hours nodding along, my head swimming with thoughts of Oliver.
August 21, 1978
Oliver is beginning to lose patience. I can feel it when he holds me, as though he’s at the edge of his rope and is preparing to leave me if I can’t find it within myself to leave my husband. I feel too weak for him. A part of me wants to ask him why he doesn’t leave the island and go off and find someone else— someone who isn’t married with two little children. But then, when we make love, I know in my heart that he’s the only one for me. He’s the man I want to change my life for.
This afternoon, we’re at our house by the sea. Oliver is making pasta while I write this, and he’s whistling to himself as, on the radio, someone is talking about the weather. Miraculously, I don’t have Elsa or Carmella today, and there’s such freedom in being alone with Oliver without any sense of obligation.
Cody appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, smiling sweetly. “Do you want some popcorn?”
Carmella closed her mother’s diary and followed Cody into the kitchen, her head humming with thoughts of her mother, who seemed on the brink of telling Carmella’s father she was going to leave. It hadn’t worked out. What then had transpired?
As Carmella watched Cody prepare the popcorn and melt butter on the stovetop, she allowed herself a moment to consider what it would feel like to learn that Cody had had an affair.Would she find a way to forgive him? Or would she tell him to leave her and their baby forever?The thought felt alien to her, especially given how in love they were, but she wasn’t naive. People cheated on people all the time. People fell out of love.
“Have you ever had a friend who cheated on their partner?” Carmella asked.
Cody gave her a look. “Should I be worried?”
Carmella laughed and waved her hand. “Not in the slightest. I’m just thinking.”
Cody shook the popcorn kernels on the stovetop as the first few burst at the bottom. “A guy at work cheated on his wife with another woman at work. It was a terrible scandal. The new relationship didn’t work out, and their marriages broke up.”
Carmella frowned. “Did they seem happy during the affair?”
“Everyone knew about it,” Cody answered. “Some women at the office considered telling the wronged partners about the affair. I think they saw their lack of honesty as a direct attack against their relationships.”
“That’s a bit selfish, isn’t it? I mean, not everyone else’s decision is about you,” Carmella said.
“I thought the same,” Cody affirmed. “I don’t condone cheating. But I never thought for a second that because Billy at work was cheating on his wife, that had anything to do with me, you, or anything in my life.”
Carmella nodded, her head stirring with questions.
“What’s on your mind?” Cody asked, frowning.
Carmella gestured vaguely toward the living room. After a dramatic pause, she said, “My mother was cheating on my father.”
Cody’s eyes widened. “Really? You read that in the diary?”
“The entire diary is basically a record of how much my mother loved her therapist,” Carmella continued. “She used to take Elsa and I to a seaside cottage to see him. It’s hard to wrap my mind around it, especially because I know the affair doesn’t work out. I just don’t know how it falls apart yet.”
“It’s a ticking time bomb,” Cody agreed. “Does it hurt to read these stories?”
“No,” Carmella answered honestly. “It seems like my father was not the easiest man to live with, and Oliver offered my mother a great deal of kindness and love. It seems natural that she would open her heart to that.”
“I imagine Elsa doesn’t feel the same.”
Carmella grimaced. “I haven’t told her.”
“Are you going to?”
“I have no idea.” Carmella sighed, watching as the popcorn kernels burst and bounced against the glass lid of the pot. “She loved Dad so much, and I know that memories of him help her through her grief. The truth could be a detriment to that.”
Carmella returned to the couch with a bowl of popcorn, eager to keep reading. But the next entry in the diary came a week after the previous, a gap that wasn’t normal for Tina Remington at the height of her affair.
