Her hair and her skin and her lips and her clothes were different—even her voice. New textures and smells and pitches. Every part of her that I’d once known had become glossy and coated and smelled like a department store. I later saw piles of tissue and fancy shopping bags folded in her closet from stores I hadn’t heard of before. She’d given me a haphazard tour of the house, after which we lingered in the bedroom. There weren’t any pills on her bedside table. I noticed she had a small suitcase in the corner, open, her things strewn on top. She saw me staring at it.

“I haven’t had a chance to unpack. We stay in the city a lot. Richard has business there. We lived there for a while, actually.” She took off her stained silk blouse and looked through her closet for something else to wear. She sighed. “I hate it here, but—”

But what? I wondered. Her bra was black and lacy. I had a humiliating urge to put my face between her breasts, just to smell her skin, as if that crevice could possibly have reminded me of childhood.

Later that afternoon, after I came down quietly from the bathroom, I watched from the hallway as Richard grabbed her waist from behind and pulled her into him. She reached up and put her fingers in his waxy, graying hair.

“I missed you. Don’t disappear like that again,” he said. She pulled her hand away from his.

“I wish you hadn’t called him.”

“Well, it worked to get you home, didn’t it?”

Richard had invited me over, not my mother. I was a ploy to get her back from the city. But there must have been a small part of her that wanted to see me, that still cared what my father and I thought of her.

I counted to ten and walked into the kitchen. My father would be back soon. I thanked them for lunch and watched for his car from the window. I waited for her to say something—Come back soon. I’m glad you came. I’ve missed you.

She waved good-bye to me from outside the doorway, making sure to give my father a chance to have a good look at her.

He never asked me about the visit—not the house, not Richard, not what she served for lunch. But at dinner, as we did the last of the dishes together in silence, I said to him: “It wasn’t you who made her unhappy.” I needed him to know. He didn’t reply—he folded the damp dish towel on the counter and he left the kitchen.

That was the last time I saw my mother.

68

When Violet was with me, it was like living in the house with a ghost. She rarely spoke to me, but she made her presence felt. She left lights on, taps dripping. She seemed to change the air in the room. I knew the feeling of resentment well by then, enough to recognize it in the thickness of the space around her.

Who did she blame for the separation? The obvious answer would be me, if she blamed anyone at all. I think she liked the splitting of our family into two. She seemed to flourish in her new role as a child of divorce, quietly delighting in the amnesty she’d been given from me. We hadn’t heard from her teachers in a while. I wondered if we were in the calm before the storm.

On the way to school one morning I reached back and handed her a muffin. She was fishing for something under her scarf but stopped to take it from my hand. When I turned back around she pulled out a delicate gold chain with a small round pendant, similar to the one you’d given me years before that I never wore anymore. I watched her touch it tenderly in the rearview mirror.

“Where did you get that?”

“Gemma.”

She hadn’t said her name aloud to me since that first lunch at your office. I desperately wanted to keep up my secret relationship with Gemma, so I never asked Violet about her. I could not incite any possible reason to be mentioned in your household.

* * *

? ? ?

It didn’t take me long to establish a connection with Gemma. She was chipper and high energy and enjoyed being asked about herself. She had a habit of going into long talks and then, midthought, squeezing her eyes closed to say, “I’ve really gone on, haven’t I. What about you?” and then touching both of my wrists in the most delicate way, as though she were patting the paws of a bunny. The gesture was charming, and I understood the reprieve you found in her while we were standing inside the quietly crumbling walls of our marriage.

We began sitting together during the weekly presentations and then mingling with the women afterward. I stayed as close to Gemma as I could so that I never missed a chance to hear something new. She was a puzzle I was putting together slowly, week by week. My heart raced the entire time I was with her, eager, desperate to learn more about her. I often found myself staring at her, visualizing what you looked like next to her. How you touched her. How you fucked her. How you watched her nurse your baby and soothe him to sleep and tickle him in the morning and how utterly happy she made you.

“I love it actually—I love being a stepmom.”

I snapped out of my fantasy and saw her clearly again. She had never mentioned Violet before. I had been waiting.

“She’s eleven, which can be a tough age for some girls. But she seems to like me. I’m lucky. I mean you hear the horror stories of stepchildren . . .”

Someone else jumped in and changed the topic. Later, when we were alone, I asked her about what she’d said.

“I didn’t know you had a stepdaughter.”