20
“THEY DID THEIR best,” Margaret says. “The truth is, I think all my mother ever really wanted was to make her art. And I think all my father ever wanted was to be my mother’s husband. When either of them felt like those things were being challenged…well, they never really learned to compromise. Not until they split up.”
“I’ve read some old articles,” I say. “About the divorce.”
She winces, and I can guess why. The tabloids—and Dove Franklin— had all positioned Bernie Ives as an uptight nag who’d never been worthy of the rich, charming, handsome Freddy Ives.
“I remember my grandmother Rosalind trying to convince them to stay married,” she says. “She loved my mother, and she knew the world would be unkind to her. Or…less kind than it already was. But my parents weren’t ever invested in controlling the narrative the way my grandparents had been. And besides that, as long as I’ve been alive, there was a strict rule against any tabloids in the house. Laura and I were young and secluded enough not to be exposed to the worst of it, but I would occasionally hear Rosalind talking about it with my aunt Francine and great-aunt Gigi.
“She convinced my parents to take us up to the mountains, to stay at…”
She considers for a second, like the name is just barely evading her. “The Nicollet. One last long weekend, to remind them what they were giving
up.”
“How’d it go?” I ask.
“It was bliss,” she says. “And then we got home, and the next morning, they sat us down in Laura’s room and told us Mom was moving out. Years later, she told me she wanted to leave while she still loved him. For us. I think it broke her heart to do it though. I’m not sure she ever got over it.
Even after she remarried.”
I stay quiet, half expecting her to clam up again, but she doesn’t.
“You know, my mother was ahead of her time. The kind of woman who wanted to have it all,” she says. “She knew she deserved it too. But the problem is, once you love someone, you can’t have it all anymore. Love comes with sacrifice. That’s how it works. Lawrence left his little sister in Dillon Springs thinking he could help her, and instead he never saw her again. Gerald loved Nina, but he had to give her up to take care of Ruth.
Rosalind loved Gerald, but she had to accept his secret as her own, had to believe the story until it was true.”
“You mean about Ruth?” I ask. “You think your grandmother knew the truth? That Ruth was her husband’s daughter, not Gigi’s?”
Margaret nods. “She never said, but I’m sure of it. She loved her family too much to cause a scandal by bringing it up, and besides that, I think she came to genuinely love Ruth. Everyone who ever met her did. She had a spark.
“Anyway, my parents’ divorce was highly publicized, and it didn’t help that my father’s reaction to losing the love of his life was to throw himself back into public womanizing with a vengeance.”
The Playboy and the Shrew Part Ways, I remember one article declaring.
“We barely saw our mother that first year they were divorced, but we saw even less of him. It was an incredibly lonely time.”
“When did things thaw out between them?” I ask. “How, after all that?”
“My mother had a movie release,” Margaret says simply. “And my father hadn’t missed a single one since they’d met. So he went, by himself, the same way he had done years earlier. He couldn’t keep being her husband, but he couldn’t stop being her fan.”
I feel myself smile even as my chest aches for her.
She shakes her head as if dispelling a cloud of dust. “Anyway, he sent her potted daisies the next day. She called him. They had one short, civil conversation, but a couple of weeks later, something funny happened—I don’t remember what, though I’m sure she told me at some point—and she wanted to tell him. So she called him. Soon they were talking every day, going on walks every once in a while.
“She started coming by for dinners occasionally. We had her over for Christmas. Eventually we were happy again, even if things were never the same.”
“You were fifteen when she married Roy?” I say, checking my notes.
“That’s right,” she says. “And Dad married Linda a year later, but they split up when I was twenty-one.”
“And after that,” I say, trying to sound as even and nonjudgmental as possible.
“Carol for about…six years?” she says. “Does that sound right?”
“It does,” I agree. “Were you close with either of them?”
“Close enough,” she says. “It was a big house, and it wasn’t uncommon for Great-Aunt Gigi’s latest beau to be hanging around too. We’d see everyone for dinners, but if anything, Dad’s wives after Mom were like… like distant cousins. We knew each other, but we didn’t spend much time
together.”
“And Roy?” I ask.
“We loved Roy,” she says. “Laura and I both. He was a good man. And he let us be a family. He did what our father couldn’t.”
“And what was that?” I ask.
Her narrow shoulders hitch upward. “He shared her.” She pauses for a long moment, and I watch her weigh her next words, deciding whether she can trust me with them.
I don’t rush forward to comfort or to cajole. The next couple of weeks are likely going to feel a lot harder for her than the first two, and as eager as I am to prove myself, I can’t force her to be ready.
“Roy and my mother were married for thirty years, you know,” she says.
“I do,” I confirm. “Until he died.”
“Afterward…” She pauses again, still unsure.
I reach forward and turn off the recorder, stopping the one on my phone as well.
“She loved him,” she says, a sideways lurch in the conversation, or perhaps a detour that will lead us to the same place. “She loved him, and he loved us, and I think she appreciated him every day of their life together.
Dad went first, from liver failure, and then a few years after that, Roy died from heart disease. Mom had him buried in the family cemetery, because Roy was family.”
Her lips quiver. “After his funeral, after everyone had left but Mom and me, she went over to my dad’s headstone, and she started weeping. You know, she’d held it together all that time. She was never an easy crack, my mother. But she lost it, slumped down at his headstone and coiled her arms around it. And she said something I won’t ever forget. Something I still hear, in her voice if I try, like I’m replaying it on film.
“Why couldn’t it have been you? Why couldn’t you be who you were supposed to be?”
Shivers crawl down my arms, and my chest feels too small for my beating heart. “What do you make of that?”
“I don’t make anything of it,” she murmurs. “I know exactly what she meant.” She sets her mug down. “He was the love of her life, and he let the world make him too small for her.
“The world Freddy Ives lived in was built around him. There wasn’t room for her.”
I swallow a knot. “What do you think he should have done?”
She turns the full force of those shining blue eyes on me. “For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”
• • • “YOU’RE STRANGELY QUIET,” Hayden says.
“Hm?” I look up from the road, nearly startling at the sight of him hunched in the passenger seat of my slightly too-small rental car.
“Are you regretting this?” he asks. “It’s not too late to turn around.”
“No,” I say. “No. That’s not what this is about.”
On my next glance, I see his skepticism.
“It’s about…work,” I say, as vaguely and innocuously as possible.
His features tighten and he turns his gaze forward again. “Ah.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I know we can’t talk about it.”
There’s a long silence before he says, “We can’t talk about her. But we can talk about you. If there’s a way to do that, without…” He trails off, but I know what he’s saying.
The problem is, I’m not sure there is a way to separate the two: what Margaret’s saying and how I’m feeling. It’s all braided tightly together.
The thing that’s gripping me right now, the part of Margaret’s and my last conversation that I can’t shake, isn’t just her sadness, her melancholy, her air of loneliness, or even the way the poised, confident octogenarian had become almost childlike in front of me, but the fact that, for the first time, I felt sure she was telling me the truth.
The whole truth, not a modified version with select bits and pieces tweaked or dodged.
It’s interesting, how this part of her family’s history—the part most firmly planted in her point of view—is also the most honest.
It’s nearly the opposite of what that famous quote suggests. There might be three versions of any story, but does that mean that hers is any less true?
Maybe truth is less about a compromise of conflicting viewpoints and more about an integration of them. The thought discomfits me. I’ve always wanted to make my interview subjects feel seen and heard, but there’s also been a comfort in believing I’m nothing more than a conduit, a funnel, for the truth to pour through, a sieve catching and dispelling any unnecessary bits.
It changes things, to think that maybe everything is necessary. Maybe truth can’t be whittled out of a pile of research but instead has to be built from all of it, no spare pieces left behind, absolutely nothing discarded.
And if that’s the case, how can I possibly succeed—at this job, or any other?
From the passenger seat, Hayden sighs and scrubs a hand over his face.
“I wish I could help you.”
“I’m okay, really,” I promise him. “I guess I’m just…do you ever doubt the job?”
One inky eyebrow curves up. “Doubt the job? How so?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Forget I said anything.”
There’s a long pause, no sound but the highway whirring under our tires as the sun beats down on the glass and the kudzu-covered trees whip past us on either side of the road.
“I haven’t seen you like this before,” he says with a small, tight frown.
“What? Mopey?” I say. “It doesn’t happen much.”
“Is it because you’re going to see your mother?” he asks.
My stomach clenches and relaxes. “I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe.” It hadn’t occurred to me, but it feels true.
When I’m with my mom and sister, no matter how many times I promise myself I’ll handle things differently, I always catch myself sliding into the defensive when it comes to my job. Trying to legitimize it in their eyes.
“It’s not like she’s rude about my work,” I clarify. “She really isn’t. It’s
more just…what she doesn’t say.”
“That she’s proud of you?” he guesses.
My cheeks flame. “I’m thirty-three. Why do I care?”
“Everyone cares,” he says.
I give him a look.
“Fine,” he says. “The vast majority of people care.”
“When do you think you stop?” I ask. “When you’re forty? When they die?” I shoot him a teasing look. “When you win a Pulitzer?”
He scoffs quietly. “No, not then. Because then, suddenly, they’re incredibly proud, but they’re proud of the accomplishment, not of the work.
So you feel like you have to keep accomplishing instead of just creating. It affirms the idea that the value in what you do is how people react to it, and
not just in the making of it. I’ve written stuff I’m really proud of that hardly anyone read. I’ve written stuff I’m proud of that no one liked. That doesn’t mean it didn’t deserve to be written.”
Now I’m genuinely smiling, my mood lifting almost instantly. “That’s a nice thought.”
His huge shoulders lift in a shrug. “It’s true. How many of your favorite shows got canceled? How many of the best albums barely sold when they came out? I mean, It’s a Wonderful Life was a box office flop in its time. If everyone who worked on that movie had known, could see how things were going to pan out in the short term, would they have even bothered to make it? And then the world would’ve lost out on something beautiful. Just because something doesn’t make money or win awards doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Or doesn’t deserve to exist. The job is alchemy. You take a hunk of rock and you try to turn it into gold, and the gold isn’t even really the point.”
“Right, because the goal is immortality,” I joke.
“It’s permanence,” he says. “Not, like, having your name on the side of a fucking airplane or skyscraper, or some shit like that. But bringing something intangible into the world that can live on without you.
Something bigger than the person who made it. And even then, the goal is secondary to the process. The process is for us. It changes us in ways that can’t be measured. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought.”
My grin is getting bigger by the second.
“What?” he says, an edge of oh, here we go to his voice.
“Nothing,” I say. “I just…didn’t expect you to be so…”
“Whimsical?” he says, reticent.
“Optimistic,” I correct him.
His brow furrows, his expression somewhat dour, but I’m not falling for it anymore. Below that stony face and beneath that equally stony chest, there’s a soft, thrumming, hopeful heart.
He clears his throat. “Are you sure your mom’s okay with me coming?”
“She’s excited,” I tell him.
It’s a classic example of the slippery nature of truth: Did my mother say she was excited when I told her I was bringing a friend?
No, she absolutely did not.
She said, and this is a direct quote, Okay.
But is she excited?
Certainly. There are two places my mother is most alive, most herself.
The first is in her garden, with mud up to her shins and Dad’s hideous wide- brimmed hat atop her head, the chin strap tight and her cheeks red from digging.
The other place is more of a state of being. When she’s caring for visitors, when she can be a good steward of her little plot of land, she’s happy.
“Excited,” Hayden repeats to himself. “Not sure I can live up to that.”
“Just eat whatever she puts in front of you, and she’ll be happy,” I say.
“And offer to help with the dishes.”
His knee jogs up and down, his jaw stern as he gazes out the window.
“Are you…nervous?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, then, “No. Should I be?”
“Definitely not,” I say. “She’s easy.”
Another example of the amorphous nature of the truth: She really is easy. Simultaneously, there are knots in my stomach.
Hayden nods but doesn’t say anything else.
I turn on the radio and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” fills the car.
• • • THE SUN IS setting by the time we pull into the long driveway to the single-story home where I grew up.
I try, as always, to see it how an outsider must, and as always, I fail.
This place is just home to me, the same way the opulent House of Ives was to Margaret.
There’s a chicken coop built out of repurposed boards and plywood, and at least one kitchen cupboard Dad had found years ago on a neighbor’s curb after a renovation, and a little fenced-in area surrounding it for the birds to wander as they so choose. There’s a shed that’s similarly haphazard in appearance and, I know, sturdy in construction.
Along the edge of the property on our right, a split-rail fence, repaired piecemeal as needed, runs through overgrown grass, a couple of blue rain barrels gathered together in a row, while to our left, garden beds in various states of growth spread out, a thicket of peach trees beyond the shed, the coop, the huge compost bins, and the outhouse Audrey and I helped Dad build around his and Mom’s prized possession (slash the bane of our adolescent existence): the composting toilet.
The house itself appears to slightly lean, but that’s only because of the strange grade of the ground. The paint on the shutters is peeling off in chunks, but the roof is fairly new, covered in solar panels.
“Wow,” Hayden says. An impressed wow, I think, and not a mortified one.
I can’t help but feel like he just passed a test, albeit one I hadn’t meant to set up.
As we rumble closer, I see Mom unfold from where she was crouched in the garden. Just as I predicted, Dad’s green khaki hat sits snug against her head, the chin strap all the way tightened, her worn-out and too-large overalls stuffed into her wellies and her bare arms disappearing at the elbow into her thick green gloves.
She waves one arm over her head as I pull up, squinting against the
light.
“Oh,” Hayden says beside me. “She’s…”
I save him the trouble of finishing the sentence. “Beautiful, yeah.” I shoot him a teasing look as I put the car in park. “Don’t act so surprised, or I might finally start taking things personally.”
“It’s not like that,” he says.
“I know,” I promise, but the truth—the other version of it—is that I’m feeling a little raw and vulnerable.
My mom raised Audrey and me not to care about appearances. She and Dad never talked about how we looked. And I know why she did it—and for my sister, I think it even worked—but the truth is, without makeup and hair dye and nice clothes, my mom has always been stunningly pretty. And my sister looks just like her: big green eyes, gold hair, little pointed chin, petite with curves.
I’ve always taken more after Dad. Tall, lanky, with only the faintest strawberry undertone to my generally mousy hair.
Maybe it’s easier to say looks don’t matter when you look like Hollywood’s version of a hardworking, outdoorsy woman with a heart of gold.
Mom peels her gloves off as she comes toward us, and I unlock the doors and get out.
“How was the trip?” she asks, giving me a firm hug and one quick pat on the back before pulling away and wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her wrist.
“Great!” I pop open the back door to grab my bag, while Hayden does the same on the other side of the car. “This is my friend Hayden.”
Mom flashes a naturally perfect, if slightly yellowed, smile across the top of the car. “Nice to meet you,” she says, then adds simply, “Angela.”
“Nice to meet you too.” Hayden hoists his duffel out of the back seat and comes around to shake her hand.
“Oh, we’re huggers,” she says, bypassing the hand and going straight for the kill, the same kind of firm grip and single hit between his shoulder blades, over before it even began.
“Thanks so much for having me,” he says as they separate.
“Oh, it’s nothing.” She flicks the glove in her hand. “I’m still not used to cooking for one, honestly, so this is better. Come on in, and Alice will get you settled while I clean myself up.”
“What are you working on?” I ask as we follow her to the front door.
“Well, mostly the strawberries and peaches, of course,” she says.
“What about the beans and peas?” I ask. “Are they ready yet?”
She nods. “Yep, and the cucumbers this year are incredible. I mean, you wouldn’t believe! Well, you will believe. Figured we’d have them in a salad tonight.”
She kicks open the squeaky screen door—the door behind it is never shut—and steps aside to let us pass.
Inside, Mom and I kick off our shoes, and Hayden follows our lead.
Luckily, he’s not any more of a sandals person than he is a shorts person, so he’s wearing socks, which I didn’t think to warn him is a bit of a necessity in our house.
Even though we’re a no-shoes-inside family, when you spend as much time outside as Angela Scott, the dirt finds its way into the old floorboards.
I watch him scan the entryway: the tidy rows of boots, clogs, and sandals coated in varying degrees of dried mud, the reusable grocery bags and totes dangling from the hooks drilled into the wall over them, the pencil marks where Dad documented Audrey’s and my growth spurts on the doorjamb on the left, which leads into a dining room that’s long been treated more as an extended pantry.
“You want to show Hayden to his room?” Mom asks me, draping her gloves across the mouth of a bucket sitting in the corner.
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen after you shower?”
“Sounds like a plan.” She leans in and plants a firm kiss on my forehead. “Glad you’re here, kid,” she says.
“Me too,” I say. The truth, and not the truth.
Then she pats my shoulder and ambles down the hall toward her bedroom. When I face Hayden again, he’s leaning in to study the Polaroid pinned to the wall beside the front door. Mom and Dad, back in the seventies, standing in front of a newer and less rambling version of this house, their arms wrapped around each other, both proudly beaming, the day they moved in.
Hayden feels my eyes and looks over to me. “You lived here all your
life.”
“I did, yeah,” I say.
“You must miss it,” he says.
“Sometimes,” I admit. “Come on, I’ll show you where you’re staying.”
