“A popular philosophical question, yes.”
Her mother patted her hand. “You should go back home. You should go home and talk to him, figure this out.”
Joanna shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You think this ex-girlfriend is better for him? That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard. It just sounds like you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
Catherine grabbed Joanna’s wrist hard. “Did you marry this man because I wanted you to? Because of those silly pictures in the newspaper?”
She thought for a moment. Maybe at first she did. But there was more to it now, too. “No,” she answered honestly.
“Do you really want to end things with him?”
She looked away. “I don’t know.”
“Come on.”
Joanna bit down on her lip. She had no idea what the right choice was. She had no idea how things would play out. No one did.
“Just answer,” Catherine encouraged. “Say the first thing that comes to mind.”
Joanna’s mouth wobbled. Her mother’s nails dug into her skin. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t want things to end.”
Catherine released her grip. “There you go.”
“It’s not as easy as that.”
“With Charles, maybe it is.”
Joanna snorted. “You don’t really know Charles, Mom.”
Catherine turned her head from side to side. “Charles called me once. Back in December. You’d been married for a few months. He asked me what you’d like for Christmas.”
Joanna lifted her hands from the bed.
“I told him that I had no idea what you’d like for Christmas and that he probably had a much better idea of what to get you than I did. But he was persistent. He asked me what I would have wanted for Christmas my first year of marriage. ‘My marriage didn’t work out,’ I reminded him. And he said, ‘Well, pretend that it had.’ ”
Joanna stared at her. Charles hadn’t told her any of this. “He got me lingerie,” she said.
Catherine’s eyes lit up. “That’s what I told him to get you! I wanted your father to get me fancy lingerie for our first Christmas together. It sounded so sexy. Not that he did. He got me a vacuum.”
But it wasn’t what I wanted, Joanna wanted to protest. Charles didn’t know her at all. And instead of asking his mother, who was no doubt an expert at choosing the right gifts for everyone, he’d called Catherine.
“Isn’t that funny,” Joanna said in a faraway voice. A heavy gloom came over her suddenly, and every cell in her body felt immensely tired. When had people become so confusing? When had things suddenly shifted from Joanna knowing everything to knowing absolutely nothing?
She sat on the edge of Catherine’s bed for a while longer. Catherine turned on the television and flipped around until they found a reality show about four very wealthy women living in Southern California. The show featured a lot of shots that panned over the women’s mansions, their jewelry collections, their cars, their asses, and the two of them watched silently for at least three minutes until there was a commercial break. Catherine was leaning forward a little, taking it all in. Joanna could see her mind at work. Even if Catherine had discovered that status would never fulfill her, her hunger for it hadn’t abated. It probably never would, not entirely.
The following day, after the doctors started Catherine on proper medicine and scared the shit out of her some more about how if she drank one more drop, she’d go into liver failure, and after Robert arrived at Catherine’s bedside, looking concerned—it was obvious, Joanna realized, that he was in love with her—and after Catherine told Joanna she should go back home now, Joanna would gather her things and drive back up I-95.
She would call Charles’s cell phone on the drive and tell him she was coming home. He would sound relieved and say That’s good. He would also say that something happened while she was away. Something he needed to talk to her about. Joanna would clench her stomach and wish they could just bypass all this, but then she would say she needed to talk to him about some things, too. Okay, he would say. There would be a twinge to his voice, a worried desperation she’d never heard before. She would wonder, after hanging up, whether he knew she knew. She would wonder, too, if he knew she’d brought Scott along, all the things she’d said to Scott, even that she’d kissed him. It seemed doubtful Scott would have told him, but anything was possible.