“Okay,” she said, and it made me jump. I wasn’t expecting anything in the way of words. “You told me your long story. So I guess I might as well tell you mine. My husband was dead set against having kids.”
“Oh,” I said. I thought about it for a minute, and then I added, “That’s really not a very long story.”
“Right,” she said. “It’s not. I know.”
“Well, long or short, you told it, anyway.”
I thought she was done, but then she started up again.
“I should have looked it right in the eye. Asked for a divorce so I could move on to a marriage with someone who wanted what I wanted. Or even so I could have children on my own, like I more or less ended up doing anyway. I shouldn’t have stayed and stayed and stayed and somehow convinced myself that something would change. Looking back, any fool could see that nothing would ever change. But you know how it is when you love somebody.”
I could feel myself smile a little when she said that, and wow, I really hadn’t seen any smiles coming.
“I really do know how that is,” I said.
“I just thought you might want to know that you’re not the only person who looks back and thinks they were very stupid about love. I just thought it might do you some good to know that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It totally does.”
It totally did—I wasn’t just saying that. And it was the second time it had happened to me. That lady cop had been nice enough to tell me that grown-ups mess up and make mistakes just like me, and now Brooke was nice enough to say it, too. When you hear something a couple of different times in a couple of different places, you start thinking there must be something to it.
“What was his name?” I asked her.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Why did you ask me my person’s name?”
She never exactly answered that one. She just said, “David. His name was David.”
“That’s a nice name.”
“I used to think so, too. Now I just get a little sick to my stomach every time I hear it.”
“Oh,” I said. “So you know exactly how I feel.”
But the funny thing was, after that I took my finger off the power button for the window, because I wasn’t feeling so queasy anymore.
I felt like it was nice that she was talking to me and I really didn’t want her to stop, so I started asking questions that I thought maybe I shouldn’t ask. But I did anyway, maybe because I was a little nervous. I tend to talk when I get nervous.
“So why did you move in with your mother? Since your mother is so . . . you know . . .”
She sighed, but I didn’t really get a feeling like she minded my asking. More like thinking about the whole thing just made her sigh.
“I guess I figured I didn’t have any other choice.”
“You didn’t have friends?”
“Well . . . once upon a time I did, of course. But I just sort of . . . After I got married I stopped paying attention to those friendships. I guess part of me didn’t realize how much you can’t just stop taking care of them and expect them to keep being there. I guess I made the mistake of letting David fill all those roles after we got married. And then, after I had Etta, I let Etta be my whole world. And when I left David, I started paying the price for it. I thought about asking my friend Caroline if I could stay with her. She was somebody I’d known since high school. But I felt guilty about ignoring her. And . . . I don’t know. In the end I just couldn’t bring myself to ask.”
I watched the scenery go by for a minute, even though it wasn’t much to look at.
Then I asked her, “Why is she so terrible?”
“Caroline’s not terrible.”
“No. Your mother.”
“Oh. A lot of ways, I guess. She’s loud and controlling, and she just criticizes everything I—”
“No, that’s how. That’s how she’s terrible. I wanted to know why.”
That just sat there in the car for a minute, and it was weird, because I could sort of almost literally feel it sitting there. I guess it was a thing she didn’t know quite what to do with.
“How would I know?” she said at last. “Why is anybody the way they are?”
“You’ve known her all your life.”
“And she’s been this way as long as I’ve known her.”
“You don’t know anything about how her life was when she was growing up?”
I could see her hands flexing and relaxing on the steering wheel. Flexing and letting go. So I guess the conversation was making her a little uneasy.
“I do and I don’t,” she said. Her voice sounded kind of tight and squashed, like somebody was sitting on it. “To hear her tell it, her childhood was all just fine. But I knew my grandparents, and it couldn’t possibly have been. They were terrible, terrible people. Angry and critical and abusive. Really bad.”
“So being a terrible person sort of . . . runs in the family.”
That was the first time I thought I saw her get mad at anything I was saying.
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“I didn’t mean it like . . . I didn’t mean you were terrible. Not at all. I guess I just meant, like . . . now you know what your big job is in life. It’s like life has given you this huge challenge to make sure that what was running in your family stops with you and doesn’t go on any more than it has. You know. Like, to
