Daughters (30 page)

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow.” Marie heaved a healthy amount of air out of her lungs. “He was like a totally different person.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. It almost seems like when he finally realized there wasn’t any way I would be coming back to him—and that took three and a half years, I might add—he saw that he didn’t control me, and I don’t know…it was like there was this other person inside who took over.”

“Like a broken soul?”

“No, more like he conceded, and once he did that, he could take off his game face.” She stared past Karen, out the window.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m curious about who that other person is.”

“Marie, you aren’t…”

“No, I’m not thinking of finding out.”
I’m not, am I?
“I’m just curious, that’s all. I lived with the man for over two years, and I never saw that side of him.” She looked at Karen. “I know you’re probably not going to understand this, but deep down, he’s not a bad person.”

Karen gave Marie a disparaging look.

“And you know what I hope for him?” Marie went on.

“What?”

“I hope he figures out someday how to live his life without that game face.”

“To thine own self be true?”

Marie nodded. “Something like that.”

After Marie returned home, she thought about why she cried so hard back in the hotel room. It unnerved her to think it was because of the finality of their relationship. She didn’t want that to be the reason after all she had gone through to get to that point. But her mind kept going back to Richard’s words after the trial, his demeanor, his compassion.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been compassionate when they were together, she thought. But this compassion was different somehow. She thought back to when they were together, before he’d gotten in so deep with the unsavory cast of characters he referred to as his business associates. She went back to the good times. He had compassion back then, lots of it. Or had he?
No, that wasn’t compassion. It was passion. He lacked compassion.
She wondered why she had never realized that about him before.

She was pretty sure her crying jag had nothing to do with Richard, but it had everything to do with now being totally free to pursue other love interests…and confront her ethnicity head-on.

To thine own self be true? Marie knew she would have to figure that out completely before she could ever have a meaningful relationship with anyone.

CHAPTER 21

Champions

Karen came over to help Marie pack for her six-week visit at Jonathan’s.

“How are you going to pack six week’s worth of clothes into one suitcase?”

“I’m not. I’ve got two.”

“Isn’t that kind of hard, managing two suitcases on the plane?”

Marie turned to Karen and smiled. “I didn’t tell you. Rachael talked her dad and Jonathan into having Jonathan’s driver pick me up, and…”

“And she’s coming with.”

“You guessed it.”

“She’s a little hustler.”

“She is so excited about my being there for six whole weeks, she can’t stand it. I talked to her yesterday, and she must have said the word ‘crazy’ a hundred times.”

Marie put the last of her things in the second suitcase and poured them each another glass of wine before relaxing in the living room.

“I’m going to miss you,” Karen said.

“Aw…you’ve got Maurice.”

Karen looked at Marie with a deadpan face.

“What?”

“I haven’t talked to him all week.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Found out his daughter Hannah isn’t his only child.”

“What?”

“Apparently he had an affair with another woman when Hannah was just two, and she had a baby.”

“
What?
Did
he
just find this out?”

“No.” Karen teared up. “He’s been sending her money for years.”

“Karen, I am so sorry.” Marie put her arms around her as she sobbed.

“But I loved him,” she wailed into Marie’s shoulder.

“I know you did, hon.” Marie left the embrace and looked into Karen’s eyes. “And you still do, right?”

Karen sighed. “I don’t know.” She swiped the tears from her face. “It was one thing to not tell me he was Jewish, and then of course there’s his insane mother he could have told me about sooner, but this…this is something else. He should have told me about her long before this.”

“Karen, you still love him.”

“He may as well as have lied to me.”

“How did you end it with him?”

“Told him I never wanted to see him again…ever.”

“Karen, his office is two doors down from your shop. How are you going to help but see him occasionally?”

“I’ll move. I hate him.”

“No you don’t. Has he tried to contact you?”

“Yeah. He calls me every day, both at home and at my shop. He’s come to my house several times, but I don’t answer the door. I keep my door locked at the shop and let customers in only when I see who they are. He knocked on the door once. I ignored him.”

“You can’t go on like that. He’s a good man, Karen, and he still loves you, and I know you still love him. Have you given any thought to forgiving him?”

“Do you have any chocolate?”

“Promise me something. Promise me you’ll give serious consideration to forgiving him. And if you can’t, that’s fine, but just remember…”

“Remember what?”

“I was trying to think of one of your mother’s sayings that fit, but…”

“It’s okay to make mistakes, but you don’t want to make one that follows you the rest of your life.”

“Yes, like that one.”

When Rachael arrived, Marie took her to a new Italian restaurant that had recently opened. Karen joined them. Rachael talked nonstop about…well, everything. Marie had to interrupt her several times to ask her to slow down so she could appreciate everything she had to say.

“He’s okay, I guess.” Rachael’s face took on a frown whenever she talked about her father. “He’s still a geezer though.”

“He let you miss two days of school to come here.”

She rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t dig my friends, or anything I do, for that matter. He’s always hounding me about something.”

“Tell me about your friends.”

“Okay, so they’re not from rich families that go on vacations and have summer homes and shit like that.”

“I don’t want to hear you use that kind of language, young lady.”

“Sorry.” Another eye roll.

“So he’s met your friends?”

“One or two. But when they come over, he drills them about their families. He’s so hung up on good families. I don’t come from a good family. I wish he’d get that.”

“First of all, you are part of his family now. Maybe he wishes you’d get that.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

“Well, I think he cares about you very much, and he just wants what’s best for you.”

“I guess. And he has no respect for my privacy. Can you believe this? I came home from school one day, and he was in my dresser drawer, actually in it.”

“Why do you think he was in it?”

“He
said
he was putting away clean clothes, but I
know
the cleaning lady does that.”

“How did you react to that?”

Rachael looked away. “Bad.”

“Badly.”

“He treats me like a stupid child. One day he gave me the royal shaft for not coming home from school right afterward. I’m fifteen!”

“Not quite.”

“Close enough.” A smile slowly crept across her mouth.

“C’mon. Let’s go home.”

Marie hoped she wasn’t getting in too deep with Rachael. She wanted to help her get through this difficult period in her life, but she was also aware if Rachael got too attached to her, Marie may not be able to fulfill all that Rachael needed. And she wasn’t sure exactly what that was. Being only eleven years older than her, Marie was too young to be her mother, but too old to be a close sister.

The one thing Marie clearly understood was that according to Ben and Claire, Rachael looked up to Marie like no one else, and she couldn’t wait to be around her.

Walter picked up Marie and Rachael the following morning. They arrived at the Brookses in time for dinner. Ben greeted them at the door. “I hope she behaved herself,” he told Marie. With that Rachael stomped her way to the kitchen. “Did she act that way the whole time she was with you? Because if she did…”

“No, Ben. She behaved beautifully.” She searched Ben’s face for a clue as to how much she could say to him without interfering. “I think she just took the way you greeted us the wrong way.”

“That child takes pretty much everything I say the wrong way,” he said as he headed toward the living room to join Jonathan and Rachael’s grandfather, Greg.

After Ben and Rachael left, Marie spent the rest of the evening helping Claire prepare for the next day’s holiday meal. Marie filled Claire in on her observations of Rachael and Rachael’s tumultuous relationship with her father.

“It’s hard to know what to do in your case, I know,” Claire said. “You want to be there for her, but you don’t want to interfere. I understand that. And Ben has told us it has gotten so bad at times with her, he wonders if he should try to find her mother.”

“Rachael has a lot of resentment toward her mother, and I can’t say I blame her. The way she feels is that it doesn’t matter what her mother’s reason was, she still deserted her.”

“She has a point…unfortunately.”

They joined Jonathan in the living room. “So how did it really go with Rachael?” he asked.

“It went fine. It was a pleasure having her with me.”

“To hear Ben talk, she’s impossible to live with.”

“I think that feeling is pretty much mutual,” Marie responded.

“Are you still going to go ahead with your plans with her for spring break?”

Marie had talked to Ben about letting Rachael spend spring break in Atchison with her. “As it stands now, yes. But given her rocky relationship with Ben, anything could happen between now and her birthday, when I plan to tell her about it.”

“What plans do you have spending time with her while you’re here?”

“Well, if I go along with Rachael’s thoughts, we’ll be doing something every weekend.”

Claire smiled. “I was afraid of that. She told her grandmother we could have you during the week when she’s in school.”