At that time, I truly believed it was. Yes, of course, I had my girls to carry on for. But Carter was the love of my life. Without him, nothing made sense.
I tossed and turned over the decision. I could sell our brownstone, but with the size of the mortgage and the instability of the Manhattan housing market at that moment, I would end up owing a ton of money even to get out of it. And what bank in their right mind would have given me a loan? I would need a job for that, and all I was qualified to do was pick sofa fabric. Even at a big design firm, it would take years to build up a clientele to support us. I felt pure, hot panic. I was on my own. With nothing. Which was when I called my mother and told her we needed to come live with them in Florida for a little bit.
“Mom,” I explained, “Carter left me with nothing.” Actually, he had left me with far less than nothing. Not only would I owe the bank substantially on the brownstone when we sold it, but the debts that Carter owed kept rolling in. And I had no idea how I would pay them.
“Darling,” she said, “you don’t have nothing. You’re beautiful and talented, and you have three amazing girls. In some ways, you are very rich indeed.”
I remember the way my breath caught in my throat, the way I nearly choked when I realized that she wasn’t going to let me come home. “None of those things is going to feed my children right now, Mom. I am seriously panicking here. If we can come to Florida with you and Dad, just for a couple of months, I can figure out how to get our life set up at Grandmother’s house in Peachtree Bluff.”
I was lucky. Even then, I knew that. How many people would have had a house that their dead grandmother had left them just sitting there waiting for them to move right into? Not many. But I was mourning, exhausted, overwhelmed, and terrified. I had never, ever felt so alone.
Fortunately, what felt like a lifetime but was probably more like a couple of days later, help arrived in the form of the Victim Compensation Fund. It wasn’t as much as I would have thought, because Carter hadn’t made as much as I thought over the last few years. I had to pay back what my husband owed to creditors all over the place, which took a huge chunk, but the money gave me hope. We could afford to stay in our house, while it was on the market, until Christmas, when I would move with the girls to Peachtree Bluff. I would sell the house and pay back the bank what we still owed on the brownstone. We would probably even have a tiny bit left to live on while I got back on my feet. We would make it. We would survive.
No thanks to my mother.
Now, needless to say, when Caroline asked me for her money, I felt a little trapped. It was like when Carter and I were trying to have her: there were no great options. I could tell her the money was gone, which would imply that I had either spent it or lost it, neither of which bathed me in a particularly favorable light.
Or I could tell her that her father, whom she loved dearly and thought was completely without reproach, had essentially legally gambled away everything we had spent twenty-one years together building. I couldn’t bear to ruin that image of her father for her. My girls had been through enough. They deserved to have their memories.
On the bright side, I had been, slowly but surely, putting whatever I could away every month for the girls for emergencies. I never wanted them to be in the position that I was in, all alone with no one to help them. But I had hoped that it would be something for them after I was gone. It wouldn’t be quite as much as their father was going to leave for them but when you combined what I had saved with my life insurance, it would be enough to give them a safety net. They were bright, talented, hardworking girls. All they really needed was enough to see them through a rough patch.
“Earth to Ansley,” Jack said.
We were sitting on the floor in my store, each on a colorful striped cotton Dash & Albert rug that would later go in a cabin on Jack’s boat, surrounded by pictures of nautical-looking light fixtures. For a home, I would have immediately declared any of these choices entirely too kitschy. For a boat, they were exactly right. These were the moments I liked. I wished we could have a life like this. I could have my girls and their families in one sphere of my life and Jack in another, and the two would never have to overlap. That would be better. That I could handle. If only it were reality.
I held up a photo of a sconce that looked like it belonged in a submarine. “I like this for the head,” I said.
He fixed his gaze on my face. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I looked at the photo. “Sure, yeah. We can talk about it. What do you think?”
He laughed. “I meant do you want to talk about what’s on your mind? I don’t care about the sconce. Like I said, pick whatever you want. The only reason I’m here at all is to spend time with you.”
I smiled, feeling that warmth wash over me. “For one, my mother broke her ankle last week.”
“Oh, no!” Jack said, looking concerned. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrugged. “I think I’m blocking it out. She got into a wreck—her fault.” I sighed. “Scott thinks there’s something off with her, so I’ll be glad to get her here for a little bit.” This was the tricky part about being a child. Scott and I thought Mom needed to be somewhere that she had a little bit of care—or at least with one of us. I knew my mother wasn’t going to want to leave Florida. I knew she wasn’t going to want to live in a nursing home or move out of her house or lose her independence. But she is the mother and we are the children. Our lives had been about her telling us what to do. When was the right time for those roles to reverse?
“Is your brother John involved?” Jack asked.
I laughed so hard I nearly fell over. “Oh, yeah, right. I don’t think he and Mom have even talked in like five years.” Come to think of it, I didn’t know when I had last talked to John. Sometime last year, I decided to see what would happen if I never called him, if he would ever attempt to contact me if I didn’t initiate it. I got my answer. I felt a sadness creeping in. The three of us had been best friends when we were growing up. And, yes, I wished Scott and I had more time for each other. But, whenever we were back together, it was like nothing had changed. With John, things were so damaged that I felt like they’d never be right again.
“Oh,” Jack said. “That’s not good.” He paused. “Anything else weighing on that pretty mind?”
I shrugged. “I don’t want to stick you with a big secret.”
He laughed heartily. “My darling,” he said, “a good bit of my life has been centered around keeping your secrets.”