“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Lorraine is the counselor who helped us with Jonathan. You didn’t know? I gave you her card!”
“No, I didn’t know. I, uh, sorry. I didn’t really look at it yet.” I turned to Lorraine. “You’re a therapist? I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“That’s how you know Shay.”
“I really can’t say yes or no.”
“Why do you work as my cousin Maggie’s caretaker if you’re a therapist?” I half expected that to be the answer. That cousin Maggie needed a psychologist, not a companion.
Just then someone poked me in the back between my shoulder blades. “Because she likes me.”
I turned around to see Cousin Maggie.
“I didn’t mean anything by that, I just didn’t think—”
“That I’d want to be around someone well read and educated who didn’t treat me like an invalid?”
“No, that makes perfect sense.” It actually didn’t really make sense to me at all, but I didn’t want to be chastised by Cousin Maggie. She harrumphed and walked to the other side of Perk with her librarian friends.
“I’m going to leave you two to chat some more. Call me later?” Josie tapped my shoulder and gathered her bags.
“Sure.”
Josie walked out of earshot. “It’s none of my business why you’re working with Maggie,” I said to Lorraine. Had she been trying to hide something from me? “Like my mother used to say, ‘Grown-ups get to make their own decisions.’ I hated when she said that, but it’s true.”
“Chance is the place you ran away from.”
“Uh-huh.” I gulped.
“Chance is the place I ran to.”
Lorraine replenished her tea. She talked about the private practice she’d built and the daughters she’d raised with her husband in Shaker Heights.
“We had everything but the picket fence. And that was next on the list.”
“Sounds too good to be true.”
“It was. Vincent had always had a temper but it got out of control when the girls went away to college. I took on more patients and worked longer hours, just to be out of the house. He accused me of having an affair.”
“Did you?”
“I could have, but I never did. I filed for divorce without telling him, and maybe I shouldn’t have done it that way. There was just no reasoning with that man. I knew I’d need a plan to minimize the fallout, so I had everything ready. He was never physically abusive but he was making me question my sanity. Me! There’s no one saner than me.” Lorraine wrung her hands. Time was still working to heal her wounds. “His whole family was born and raised in Cleveland, and with them, Vincent would always be the good guy they thought he was.”
My phone buzzed. “Answer it, it might be Shay,” Lorraine said.
I glanced at my phone. A call from Annie. I tapped Decline. Another call came through almost immediately. Annie again. I tapped Decline and shut off my phone. “I am so sorry. It’s work and they don’t know when to leave me alone. I shut it off. Continue.”
“What if Shay calls?”
“She’ll call back. Please continue.”
“Thank you,” Lorraine said. “My mother-in-law was not loving like you might think a mother-in-law might be if she’s never had a daughter. But when the girls were in elementary school, she said something to me while we were cooking Thanksgiving dinner. She’d continued peeling potatoes and then turned on the faucet and said, ‘If Vincent gets out of hand, you leave his ass, you hear me? You go far away. He won’t follow you. He’s not motivated enough for that. But you are.’ Then she turned off the water and never mentioned it again until right before she died, about eight years ago. ‘You go if you need to go.’ I thought she wanted me to leave the hospital room but she grabbed my hand and looked me in the eyes, which she never had, not in the more than twenty years I’d known her. I thought maybe she’d finally decided to thank me for taking care of her, since Vincent did nothing at all, but then like a smack in the head, I remembered the first time she’d said it. My whole body got cold and I started shaking, even though the temperature in the hospital room had been turned up to almost tropical. She’d known it wasn’t going to stop, that he wasn’t going to stop, that it was only going to get worse.”
“So you left.”
“The day after she died.”
I shivered. “And you chose Chance?”
“Chance chose me. I took a position as a psychologist at Union County Hospital for a year. About six months in, I found a house I loved here in town; it’s the small Victorian on the corner of Grand and McGuffy. I moved in right before Celia was diagnosed. I only met her once in passing.”
Lorraine and Celia had been neighbors. They would still be neighbors. They would have been friends. I was sure of it.
“I bet your mother-in-law would be happy that you have a nice life here.”
“I think she would. And I think Celia would be happy you have a nice life away from here.”
*
The sun warmed the top of my head, the line of my nose, and the apples of my cheeks, but I didn’t seek shade. Sometimes I needed to feel the sting of the sun, to close my eyes and still see light, to warm myself from the outside in. Sometimes I was on a beach. Sometimes I was on a mountain. Today I was on the sidewalk outside Nettie’s. I wouldn’t burn, but I’d slathered ample sunscreen anyway, to be safe.
Like Lorraine, I calculated my risks when I could manage it.
Chapter 17
“AUNT TEE, YOU DON’T really seem like the bowling type.”
“What? These red-and-blue-striped shoes aren’t my style for a night out on the town?” Shay chuckled while she tied her shoes. “Well, I am! It’ll be fun. Did you know your mom and I used to come here all the time when we were your age? They’ve renovated it and renamed it a few times, but it’ll always be Big Top Alley to me.”
“Big Top Alley? That’s lame.”
“There is nothing lame about a circus tent logo and a poor excuse for Bozo as the mascot for all the bowling teams.”
“What’s a Bozo?”
I was officially old, and all because of a clown.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we didn’t have gourmet food or neon lights or electronic scoring. Everything was old-fashioned. But it wasn’t fake old-fashioned.” I motioned to the retro-chic bar and soda counter. “It was fun because we were here together and with our friends.”
“So my mom was like, perfect, and she bowled.”
I lifted the ball from Shay’s hand and placed it on the rack. “Your mom wasn’t perfect, but she was the perfect friend for me. I’ll tell you a secret, okay? We didn’t really bowl so much as distract the boys who were bowling.”
“Aunt Tee!”
“It’s true, but don’t worry. It was before she started to like your dad.”
Shay laughed and bowled a gutter ball. “So my mom thought this was fun when she was my age?”
“You’re not having fun?”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I’m kidding, Shay. It isn’t always about the what, it’s about the who. This would be fun with Rebecca and Chloe, right?”
“I guess.”