Let me repeat. My mother and Donna were kissing.
“Holy shit,” I said, and they broke apart.
“Aw, damn it,” Mom said. Her neck and face turned bright red.
“Donna,” I said. “How are you?”
She smiled. “Fine, sweethaht. Have a seat. There’s something your mother wants to tell you.”
“Now that you mention it, I think I might know what it is.” The chair was good, though, because my legs were a little wobbly. “There’s a bottle of wine in my bike basket,” I said. “I highly suggest we open it. Right now. I parked in the back.”
Donna went outside.
My mother leaned against the counter, not looking at me, arms across her chest. The clock ticked. In the distance, a crow screamed (not really, but it felt that way).
“Here we go,” Donna said, bustling back in. When we all three had glasses, I chugged mine, then held it up for a refill. Donna obliged.
“To love,” I said.
Mom glanced at Donna, who smiled. “To love,” she echoed. My mother had apparently been struck mute.
“How long have you been together?” I asked.
“Coming up on ten years,” Mom said, causing me to sputter up wine.
I blotted my mouth with a napkin. “And you never said anything because...”
Mom shrugged. “Wasn’t any of your business.”
“I practically have a stepmother. That’s sort of my business.”
She sighed.
“Are you guys out, or is this a secret?”
“We’re mostly out,” Donna said when Mom failed to answer. “I think just about everyone knows.”
“Bob Dobbins doesn’t,” I said.
“Yeah, well, just about every smaht person knows,” Mom said.
“I take offense at that.”
Mom straightened out the napkins, still held in the plastic fruit holder from my youth. “We, uh, cooled things off a little when Poe came. Didn’t want her to feel... I don’t know.”
“Like she wasn’t wanted,” Donna supplied. “She needed to be your mother’s first priority.”
I nodded. “So my mother is gay. Go figure. Well, Mom, you couldn’t have picked anyone nicer than Mrs. Krazinski. Well done.”
Donna beamed and squeezed my shoulder. Mom just blinked. “Is that all you got?” she asked.
“Um...should there be more?”
She thought for a minute. “No.”
“Good. Let’s eat. I’m starving.”
* * *
Dinner lasted longer than our usual seventeen-minute eat-to-survive mode. With Donna here, it was almost like a party.
I could see that they were an established couple (sure, I could see it now). Donna got Mom water without ice, the way she liked it, and Mom got out a container of sour cream for Donna’s baked potato, a pleasantry denied to me my entire life. Love and sour cream. Might make a good song.
Donna’s house was up for rent because they’d been planning to move in together. I asked Mom when she’d realized Donna was the one for her, and Mom blushed and said it was when she’d had to give Donna a ride home in a snowstorm, and they got stuck and had to wait in the car for an hour until Jake Ferriman came to tow them out.
I couldn’t fault her for not telling me. I really couldn’t. “You should tell Poe,” I said.
“Ayuh. Just wanted to tell you first. Been tryin’ like crazy to get you alone.”
Ah. The dinner when I killed Tweety, her readiness to accept my invitation at Jitters today.
“I guess I have to stop fixing you up,” I said.
“Thank the Christ,” she answered and told Donna about meeting Richard today, making Donna laugh till tears flowed down her cheeks.
“You have a good heart, Nora,” she said, squeezing my hand, and suddenly, my eyes overflowed.
“I’m glad you have someone, Mom,” I said into a paper napkin. “I’m really glad.”
But those pictures... God, here I was, thirty-five years old, trying to accept the fact that my parents weren’t going to get back together, even if they’d been apart for twenty-four of those years.
“Donner, I need some time with my daughter,” Mom said, because yes, I was weeping it up good now.
“I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you for being so wonderful about this, Nora,” she said, bending down to hug me.
“I’m really thrilled. Don’t let these tears fool you. Hey, does Lizzy know?”
“Oh, sure. She’s known since forever.”
Right. Because they were a normal family.
Donna left, and Mom and I cleaned up the kitchen without talking. She made her sludgy coffee, and we sat back down at the kitchen table, where all really important conversations took place.
“Why the tears?” Mom asked.
I took a deep breath. “I found the pictures of Dad today.”
She nodded, not even bothering to chastise me for rooting around in her closet.
“What happened, Mom? What happened with Daddy?”
“I guess it’s time you knew,” she said, her tone weary. No, not weary.
Sad.
Ever since she first met him, my mother said, Bill Stuart was the most wonderful man she knew. Life of the party. Full of energy. “He could charm the pants off anyone,” she said. “Charmed them right off me, that’s for sure.”
“Skip that part,” I said.
“We were married five years before you came along, and Lily right on your heels,” she said. “Those were five good years. I mean, they weren’t perfect, but they were just fine.” She took a deep breath. “But your father, he had these dark moods once in a while. He’d just sit there and...and do nothing. Wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t get outta the chair, wouldn’t even take a shower. I’d leave a sandwich next to him and go to bed, and the next morning, it’d still be there, him sittin’ like a statue in the chair like he hadn’t even moved.”
I pictured that, how confusing it would be to a pragmatic person like my mother.
“Then he’d just be done,” she continued. “Back to normal, and if I asked what the hell that had been, he’d just say he was having one of his moods. And the flip side of that was he’d get wound up. That’s how I thought of it. He’d be wound up, talkin’ nonstop, laughin’, makin’ me laugh. At first, I thought it was fun—he’d stay up for two days, paintin’ the living room—two days straight, no sleep. Guess I thought he just had a lot of energy.”
“Bipolar disorder,” I said.
“Ayuh. He wouldn’t go see a doctor, though.” She took a deep breath. “Most of the time, he was fantastic, Nora. You remember, don’t you?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I do.”
“Having you girls was the best thing evah. God, he loved you! He was good for a long time after you were born. Maybe he was takin’ his medication. He never would tell me. Then when you were about five or six, the moods came back. He quit his job, wanted to write that novel. And I was all right with that, more or less. But then he started all that with you girls, takin’ you with him at all hours, doin’ all sorts of nonsense...” She shook her head.
All that adventuring. The wild bike rides, the swims in the icy ocean, the dares and thrills, the lack of rules and order.
More memories began flooding back in—my father’s grandiose ideas about how successful he would be as an author, how we’d have servants and live in a mansion. The time he took Lily and me to Portland and bought us brand-new clothes until the credit card was denied. Mom took all those clothes back the next day, and Lily and I had cried and cried. Dad would get so annoyed at Mom for not going along with his ideas—tear down the house and build a tree house we could live in, sell the house and move to Africa.