“He’s evasive.”
“There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” I set down the towel. “Because Chloe says she’s watched him turn south on Franklin twice now. And he supposedly lives twenty minutes north.“
Her shoulders came up. She set a plate down in the rack with a small sharp clink.
“I trust him, Avery.”
“I want to trust him too. God, I want that for you more than I want almost anything. But a grown man with no wife, no kids, no roommate, and no reason on earth to be somewhere at seven-thirty on a Sunday night—”
“Maybe he has reasons I don’t need to know yet.”
“Mom, that’s exactly the problem.”
And she looked at me.
And underneath the defensiveness, for about a half second, I saw it. She knew. My mother is seventy-two years old and she has been reading people since before I was born, and she absolutely knew something didn’t add up.
She just wasn’t ready to hold it in her hands yet.
“Please,” she said quietly. “Let me have this. Even if it turns out badly — let me have the part where I still get to hope.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
So I dried a plate.
What My Daughter Said on the Porch That I Should Have Taken More Seriously
Later I found Chloe on the top step with her knees pulled up under her chin. I sat down next to her.
“Grandma knows something’s up,” she said. “She’s just scared.”
“Chloe. Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“You’re always thinking something. Your face has a setting for it and it’s on right now.”
She almost smiled.
Then she said: “He’s got another woman. Doesn’t he.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Or another family. A whole other family in a house with a plumber who only works at night.”
“Chloe.”
“What? I’m just saying the thing everybody’s already saying inside their head. Grandma’s saying it too. She just won’t say it out loud, because if she says it out loud it might be true.”
I put my arm around her shoulders.
“Her birthday’s next Sunday,” I said. “I’m asking you — as your mother and, honestly, as a coward — to let us get through dessert. We’ll deal with Richard after.”
She was quiet for such a long time that I thought I’d won.
