He pulled away from me, and his face fell. “Oh. Right.” His posture shifted from confident and happy to distraught. “So that’s it, then? I’ve done my duty, and now we’re over.”
“Jack,” I whispered.
He shook his head and ventured a smile. “I’m not angry,” he said. “I knew this was the deal. I knew you would get pregnant and you would be gone.”
I had planned to go back home to New York, tell Carter I was pregnant, and have the celebration to end all celebrations. We were going to have the life we had always dreamed of: strolling through Central Park with our baby, holding hands walking to preschool, Carter parading his son or daughter around his office.
“Maybe we have this one last weekend?” I whispered. “Maybe we can pretend we don’t know.”
“Know what?” he asked, winking at me.
My head was screaming that this was wrong. But, hell, the whole thing had been wrong, hadn’t it? Of course it had. I knew that. It’s amazing how convoluted your thoughts can become, how a seemingly reasonable mind can convince itself that the worst things are right, that, in between the very clearly black and white, there might be shades of gray.
But even I couldn’t convince myself there were shades of gray in what I was doing now. The baby was made. This was cheating on my husband. Yet, I couldn’t break away from Jack’s arms. Not yet.
As day turned to night, the light drifting away, slipping from the sky like this love from our fingers, the sadness started to creep in between us. Our banter shifted to serious conversation about what the future could hold. But I never expected Jack to say, “Stay.”
“What do you mean?”
I rolled over on my side, suddenly chilled, covering myself with a sheet, our faces inches from each other. “You know what I mean, Ansley. Leave Carter. Leave New York. Come home. We’ll get married and raise our baby together.”
I shook my head. “You never wanted children, Jack.”
He shook his head. “I know what I said, but if it’s you and me and the baby, I think it could be kind of great.” He paused and looked at me again. “Stay, Ansley.”
Another chill ran through me, a dread that this was not what we had agreed to, a horror that I had made a colossal mistake. But, in that, I realized: I was thinking about it. And that was what scared me most of all.
It took only a few minutes of considering leaving Carter, bringing this baby back to Peachtree Bluff, and living with Jack for me to realize that if I was meant to be with Jack, I would have been. But I wasn’t. I was meant to be with Carter.
And now I felt like I was where I was meant to be once again. The girls were home. I was going to decorate Jack’s house. I wasn’t even nervous about leaving everyone for Mom’s doctor’s appointment. She had fought me tooth and nail on this for weeks. But after the episode a couple of days ago, that feeling in my gut that this was more than just normal, old-age forgetfulness kept nagging me. We were going to a neurologist in Athens late that afternoon, and I wouldn’t hear another word about it.
“Hey, Mom,” I said nonchalantly, walking into her room. She was making her bed. I had hated it when she arrived in Peachtree Bluff in that cast and was so reliant on us. Her independent streak was one of my favorite things about her, and even at eighty-three, she was going strong. That same independent streak was, of course, the thing that had driven this deep, seemingly impenetrable wedge between us. But so many of the things in our lives are a bit of a double-edged sword. The mere thought of her losing her mind was too much for me to take.
“Let’s go out to lunch,” I said.
She looked at me suspiciously. “Your three daughters just got home from six days at sea and you want to take me out to lunch?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.” Then I winked at her. “If I’m gone I don’t have to help with the laundry.” I paused. “Plus, we’ve had practically no quality time together since you got here.”
She perched herself at the end of her freshly made bed and said, “Speaking of, I wanted to talk to you about that. I’m as good as new, and I think it’s time for me to go home.”
I could feel the shock on my face, though I wasn’t sure why. Of course my mom was going to want to go back to Florida, to her friends and her life. But as my brother Scott and I had discussed many times, her age was starting to show, and she needed to be here where I could keep an eye on her. Scott’s travel reporting kept him on the road or in the sky all the time, and it wasn’t like my brother John even spoke to any of us. This was the only option. Only, none of us had had the nerve to break it to Mom yet. And, quite frankly, if I was going to play caregiver for the rest of her days, I didn’t feel like it was my responsibility to break that news to her.
I gave Mom my most pitiful look. “Couldn’t you stay a couple more weeks? Until I get Sloane back on her feet? There’s so much going on here, and I could really use your help.”
Mom took the two steps to her walker, patted my shoulder, and said, “Sure, sweetheart. Whatever you need.”
I couldn’t believe that worked.
I helped Mom into the car, and she said, “Why don’t we go to one of those divine waterfront restaurants? My treat.”
Eighty-three-year-olds and three-year-olds are essentially the same. Slow. Stubborn. Extremely opinionated. But eighty-three-year-olds generally have better table manners, so, overall, they’re better lunch companions.
Verbena
