“What happened between you and Chappy. This morning. In the dawn’s early light.”
Cissy jolts. She would’ve dropped her highball if she wasn’t holding on to it with such a fierce grip.
“I haven’t a clue what you’re…”
“Can it, Cis. You’ve been catting around with Chappy for the better part of two decades.”
“Wherever you got that ridiculous notion…”
“Evan confirmed it and he always tells the truth.”
Bess thinks of the Book of Summer.
“Okay, not always,” she adds. “Usually. Eventually. Anyway, he’d have no reason to lie about this.”
Cissy nods wearily and sets down her glass, the weight of fifteen years, the weight of ninety-nine, at once heavy upon her. She gazes out toward the horizon as thunder rumbles in the distance. The forecast calls for heavy rains.
“Well, now you know,” Cissy says. “There’s not much else to say.”
“Oh, there’s plenty to say.” Bess walks under the overhang and out of the drizzle. She glances toward the box, half expecting rats and mice to come leaping out. “Like, what the hell, Mom?”
“Bess, be constructive.”
“Fine. Why cheat on Dad? Why maintain such a sham of a marriage?”
“Because of you. And Clay and Lala. Even your dad. Sometimes keeping the family together under one roof is the best option. By the way, I find the word ‘sham’ unnecessarily harsh.”
Bess makes a dramatic show of looking upward at the ceiling above them. She takes several large steps backward, out into the weather, letting her eyes travel the full height of the house.
“Hmmm,” Bess says. “There’s a roof. For now. But I don’t see our family under it. No Dad. No Clay. And definitely no Lala. We are right now at only forty percent.”
She steps back beneath the covering.
“You know very well that ‘under one roof’ is metaphorical,” Cissy says. “And, really, I was referring to your childhood. I did what I needed to and I don’t regret it.” She inhales, taking a shaky, quivery breath down with her. “If it makes you feel any better, Chappy and I are done for good.”
“Of course it doesn’t make me feel better,” Bess says. “Plus you’re not ‘done.’ I’ve heard the two of you are quite prone to the back-and-forth.”
“Not like this. I mean, yes, we’ve, um, severed relations before,” Cis says, starting to tear. “But I’ve instigated it. I’ve been the one to declare ‘enough.’ Never Chappy. That is, until today.”
“Why?” Bess asks as an unexpected surge of protectiveness courses through her. It’s like she wants to go all Cissy Codman on the man and tell him to fuck off. “What’d he say?”
“That he’s too old for this shit.”
Bess fights a hard smirk. Indeed they are both too old for this shit.
“So there’s nothing to get riled up about,” Cissy says. “Because it’s over. Done. All the way finished.”
“I’m sorry you’re upset,” Bess tells her. “I really am. But you’re going to have to give me a minute here. It’s like someone’s pushed me into a wall but, hey, no big, because I don’t have an actual concussion.”
“For goodness’ sake, Bess.”
“My parents’ marriage. Fake.”
“It’s not fake,” Cissy says, and grits her teeth. “It never has been. We know what we are to each other. And that is our concern, not yours.”
“It’s a little bit mine. I did live with you for a good portion of my life.”
“Oh, Bess, don’t be such a baby,” Cissy says, sounding so much like Grandma Ruby it’s like a ghost tickling the back of Bess’s neck. “It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“Why do people keep saying that?”
“This sort of thing happens all the time. We’ve always done what we believed was best for our children, and each other.”
“You stayed together ‘for the children’?” Bess says. “I guess that sort of thing does ‘happen all the time’ but I thought our family was different.”
“Elisabeth, your father is difficult,” Cissy says. “I recognize that I am, too, but in a completely different way. Dudley and I started in the same place but moved too quickly in opposite directions. I tried with him, even when my own mother said to let him go.”
“Grandma Ruby? She would never!”
“It’s true. I almost left him. I was so close.” She shakes her head. “Then my mom died and I just … couldn’t. You were still in high school and Lala was so young. The loss of your grandmother was hard enough and I didn’t want this family to suffer another blow.”
“I get why you felt that way then,” Bess says. “But we’re adults now and she died twenty years ago. Why not get divorced fifteen years ago? Seven? Last week?”
“Darling, I tell you this with great love—”
“Oh, no, here we go.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Cissy says.
“Right. Because I’ve never been divorced.”
“You’re lucky, Bess. You don’t have kids. In your case, a divorce—not such a big deal.”
“Ha!” Bess laughs, breathless in shock, as if someone’s just punched her in the chest. “Too true. No big deal. What an accurate way to describe it. In fact, we’ve conducted all proceedings via text messages and Facebook chats. As they say in a physician’s office, you’ll only feel a pinch.…”
“I didn’t mean you wouldn’t understand about a divorce in general,” Cissy says. “It’s merely that you seem so sure of yourself. So utterly confident that a permanent split is the best course. I promise it’d be different if kids were involved. If a whole lifetime was.”
“If kids were involved.” Bess snorts. “Well, surprise, Cis, because—”
Bess freezes. There is a kid involved, sort of. For now. But even though Cissy is a lifelong Democrat, the ultimate bleeding heart and a women’s rights drum-pounder to the core, there’s no decent way to explain a proposed abortion. Not even Cissy would understand.
“Because what?” Cissy asks, pink spreading across both cheeks.
Bless it, the woman can hear the patter of potential grandbabies a mile away.
“The decision to get divorced,” Bess stutters. She sniffs but then gets ahold of herself. “The decision is clear-cut, but not because we were child-free. Brandon was … he is … abusive?”
It still sounds strange, not right, like it doesn’t exactly fit. No bruises, no bumps. All the bad stuff that a person cannot see.
“Abusive … question mark?” Cissy says, jacking both eyebrows way up into her hairline. “That doesn’t sound like something you should be on the fence about.”
“He was,” Bess says with a nod.
Was he? He was.
“Oh, Bessie,” her mother says with a sigh.
“Verbally,” Bess adds. “He never hit me, though at times he seemed close. It’s good that I work so much. I stayed out of the cross fire. And who knows, it could’ve gotten physical, eventually, if not for the hookers, who saved me in the end.”
“The hookers?!”
It takes a lot to shock Cissy. A whole hell of a lot. But Bess has surprised her in a way no one else ever has.
“It’s a long story,” she says.