I drew in my breath sharply. As much as I wanted to tell him he was crazy, I somehow knew he was telling the truth. In fact, it made so much sense, I almost felt like I’d already known this. “How did you find out?”
He shifted in his seat. “My dad had surgery on his heart in March, and they had to put a stent in. He doesn’t do well with anesthesia, which I didn’t know because he’s never had surgery before. I went to see him in the recovery area afterward, and he kept calling, ‘Sally, Sally,’ over and over.” Ben looked incredibly sheepish for someone who’d always been nearly impossible to ruffle. “So, you know. That was awkward. When he was finally with it again, I told him what he’d been doing, and he admitted that they’d been together. I don’t know all the details, but . . .”
It was horrible to hear him say this. And yet I could see it all clearly—the way my mother and Reggie barely ever looked at me and Ben when they’d sat on the park bench, supposedly watching us. How Reggie would come get Ben from our house when he could have called or hollered for him or given him a curfew. Of course they’d been more than friends. Had my father known, though? Was that why he’d been so distant from my mother? “How long?” I asked.
“They were apparently, uh—” He looked down and cleared his throat. “Lovers for a long time. Like, more than a decade. And then they broke it off when we were in high school. Right around the time your mom started seeming kind of weird to me. She was probably uncomfortable about the idea of us being together because it would have meant she’d have to interact with my dad even more.”
There was a lump in my throat that wouldn’t go away. More than a decade. That meant it wasn’t accidental, nor was it some sort of midlife crisis. It had been entirely intentional.
It had been . . . love.
“Would you ever have told me this if we hadn’t run into each other?” I asked quietly.
“Actually, yeah. I wrote you a long email and couldn’t bring myself to hit send. Then I ran into Hadley and . . .” He shot me a pained smile. “When I found out you were going to be in town, I somehow knew I’d end up seeing you. Then, sure enough—there you were, right on Smith Street, like I’d conjured you. I’m sorry, Laine. I kind of wish I’d never found out, so I’d never have to tell you. But here we are.”
“I’m glad you did. All those years, I racked my brain trying to figure out why she wouldn’t want me and you to be together. I . . .” I grimaced. “I kept coming back to the idea that she was secretly racist.” For a few years after my fight with Ben, every time I saw my mother interact with someone who was Black—whether it was a shopkeeper, or a stranger, or her friend Mary, who’d been her confidante for five decades—I’d looked for signs of prejudice. While I was relieved that I’d come up empty, I still couldn’t help but wonder why—if not that, then what was wrong with Ben that made her encourage me not to date him? Never once had I imagined that the real reason would make me rethink everything I thought I knew about my family.
“That crossed my mind, too, but it didn’t add up—not with how nice she’d been to me all those years,” said Ben.
As relieved as I was to hear him say this, I was still in pain. I must have looked it, too, because he touched my arm lightly and said, “Laine? You going to be okay?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Probably not. But I’m glad you told me.”
And I was. My parents’ marriage had been a lie. My mother had lied to me. To all of us.
But what hurt even more was realizing that my mother hadn’t been pulling my puppet strings to protect me. She didn’t care at all about whether or not my friendship with Ben went the distance.
No, the truth was that she’d put her own needs—her own heart—before my own. And as horrible as learning that was, it was a good thing I’d found out now.
NINETEEN
LAINE
As Ben and I walked back from the coffee shop, I couldn’t help but notice how many of the brownstones were decorated the same as they’d been when we were kids—this one with metal patio furniture that had been rusty since before the dawn of time; that one with a yard full of garish garden gnomes. They may have been exactly like they used to be, but Ben and I weren’t. I guess that’s why I was surprised at how normal it felt to be walking with him. Especially in light of the conversation we’d just had.
“I never answered your question about my marriage,” I said. “I asked Josh—that’s my husband’s name—for a divorce last week.”
“Damn.” He didn’t say anything else for nearly a minute, and I didn’t try to fill the space the way I would’ve with someone else. “I’m really sorry. Divorce sucks,” he finally said, shaking his head. “I’ve been on the other side of it for six years, and it still gets to me sometimes. Feels like a big failure, even when it was absolutely the right decision. Which it was, in my case.”
As I looked at him, I realized I wanted to know everything that happened. But I wasn’t sure I had a right to. “If you don’t want to talk about it, I totally get it,” I said.
He shook his head. “No, it’s okay. My ex, Celeste, she just never really got me.”
Goose bumps pricked my skin, and I glanced away, embarrassed. Why should I be happy to hear that?
Without breaking his stride, Ben added, “I guess I never got her, either, and one day, we sort of looked at each other and admitted that it wasn’t working for us. What’s going on with you and Josh?”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“I have time,” he said, but then he held up a hand. “Actually, I’m sorry—I don’t mean to push. If it’s new, I can totally get why you wouldn’t want to get into it.”
The strange thing was that I actually did. “It’s okay,” I said. “The truth is, I want to have kids. I have for a while, and the window for that is closing. But every time I’d mention kids to Josh, he’d tell me he wasn’t ready.”
“Did he know how important it was to you?”
I’d last seen Ben three presidents, one dog, and a handful of gray hairs ago. And yet here he was. Calling it like he saw it—and not being wrong.
“He does now,” I said. “I just told him the other day. And he says he’s almost ready. So . . .”
We’d been walking more and more slowly as we approached our block, and now Ben stopped walking for a second and cocked his head. “Will you move forward with the divorce, now that you’ve talked and he’s considering having children?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “My family loves Josh. He doesn’t want a divorce. And he’s willing to move here to help me care for my mother. We’d take the upstairs apartment.”
“Way to bury the lede, Laine,” said Ben, pretending to stumble backward. “Are you really thinking of moving back?”
“Yeah.” I wrinkled my nose. “But—don’t take this the wrong way—I’m not sure I want to. It seemed like the right thing to do, but now . . . I feel really unsettled.”
“Because of what I told you,” he said apologetically.
“Yes, and also no. I needed to hear the truth. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.” Bad enough that my mother cheated on my father. But why had she dashed my chances for happiness for her own convenience? Granted, my getting romantically involved with Ben probably would have been messy. Still, it would have been our own mess to deal with—not hers.
“Will you say anything to her?” he asked.
“Repeatedly hitting my thumb with a hammer sounds more fun than that, but I think I probably should,” I confessed, and he chuckled. “Still, she’s losing her mind, you know? So how fair is it for me to confront her about something that happened ages ago?”
“You can love her and still speak your mind.” He was peering at me with concern, and yes, some affection, and maybe that’s why my stomach felt kind of strange and fluttery. “I know it’s been a long time, but you seem like the same Laine I used to know. And that Laine can handle this.”
“Laine the people pleaser?” I said, only half-joking.