CHAPTER TWENTY
THE CONVERSATION
The Kardashians played on a mindless loop in the background as all the things we had seen in the last week choked the conversation from us. There was more to come, and yet there was no predicting any of it. All we could do was stay away and hope against hope that when the storm came, it would pass us by.
The house phone rang, and my mother’s footsteps sounded in the hallway. I strained to listen, noting the rarity of the phone ever ringing at all these days. A new client? I hoped so. My mother dropped her voice, so I lowered the volume on the TV. Millie was scrolling mindlessly through Instagram on her phone, looking at pictures of someone else’s food.
‘… left it all to me and it’s not fair.’
OK, definitely not a client, then. She was never usually rude to clients. In fact, my mother, interminably polite, was really only rude to one person.
I muted the TV.
‘… just up and leave like it’s nothing!’
Her voice had risen, her pitch rousing Millie from her scrolling. She snapped her head up and I put my finger to my lips.
‘I have to clean this up again, and how am I supposed to do that? There’s no money.’
‘Who’s that?’ Millie mouthed.
I shrugged, keeping my finger at my lips.
My mother dropped her voice again, and the words that reached me this time were disjointed, plucked out of sentences so I couldn’t find their meaning.
‘… since that night … normal … the truth … promise when I thought … any more.’ I got up and crossed to the door, easing it open a notch. I still had to strain, but the words came together now, and I held my breath so I could hear them all.
‘… not fair on either of us. I have to.’
I peeked out. My mother was standing in the hallway. She was leaning against the bathroom door, one hand twined in her hair, the other clutching the phone. ‘Fine!’ she hissed. ‘But it’s not right. I don’t think it’s right!’ She dropped her head and brought her hand to her eyes, rubbing them. ‘I’ll send her,’ she said. ‘But we’re not done talking about this. Not even close.’
By the time she had hung up, I was standing in the hallway, my eyes burning holes in the back of her head. She turned around and instead of surprise, there was defeat in her reaction.
‘Sophie.’ Her arms fell limply to her sides. ‘Oh, Sophie, I’m so tired.’
I took a cautious step towards her. ‘Was that Jack?’
She blinked dumbly. ‘That was your father. He wants you to go see him tomorrow.’
Surprise bubbled in my mind. ‘Why?’
‘Because he knows what happened with the Falcones,’ she answered flatly, frown lines rippling along her forehead as she conceded, ‘I told him.’
‘Why?’ My horror seeped through my voice. Why would she do that, knowing there was nothing he could do to change it? Why worry him needlessly when she was so worried herself? And then I pinched myself as guilt wrapped around me. She wasn’t coping, that was why. And once upon a time, he had been her rock. Maybe he still was, even though animosity lingered between them. Maybe she still needed him just as much as I needed her.
She raked her hair away from her face. Her defences were down and she was too tired to put them back up. ‘Because I wanted to make him see.’
‘See what?’
Her gaze shifted past me to where the sun was pushing through the hall window. ‘That everything isn’t OK,’ she told me plainly. ‘That it hasn’t been OK for a long time.’
‘No,’ I said, quietly, feeling a strange sense of relief at unveiling the truth we had been so carefully avoiding. I didn’t realize how badly I had been craving it. ‘No, everything isn’t OK.’
But, why, I wondered, did he want to see me and not her? I studied my mother’s slumped frame, and saw in her what he probably had heard in her voice – weakness. It’s me, I thought. I’m the one who has to fix this.
As if a switch had flicked inside her, my mother snapped her head up and her gaze became hard and shining. ‘You know, despite everything that’s happened, I love your father very much,’ she said, her words woven through a heavy sigh. ‘I love the life he built for us. I love the daughter he gave me. I love our family.’
‘That’s good …’ I ventured, ineptly. She hadn’t spoken so openly or tenderly about him in a long time. The words were warm, but there was something beneath them … a barb, a sadness.
‘I miss him, Sophie,’ she admitted. ‘I miss him every day.’
Tears spiked behind my eyes, her sudden candour jarring. ‘Me too, Mom. I miss him too.’ I miss us. I miss our family.
‘But sometimes …’ She shook her head, slowly, her gaze drawn to the ground between us, to another time and place, to something I couldn’t access. ‘Sometimes I feel like I might just explode.’
She turned from me abruptly and stalked through the kitchen and into the garden, where she disappeared into her flowers.
I watched her go. I had come to know that feeling all too well.