Solana touched her nose to my knee, and I reflexively reached down to pet her head.
“Grampa’s in his den working,” Madeline said. “We sent everybody else home. We’ll have a proper party later after you’re settled in.”
“Thanks,” I said, relieved.
Diego slid the roll of plastic wrap into a drawer with a little click. “What did Tom have to say?” he asked.
I studied Diego coolly. “He says he’ll be a good father,” I said.
Diego’s mouth set in a grim line “A good father,” he echoed. “Over my dead body.”
“Diego,” Madeline said calmly.
“Is he gone?” Diego asked.
“Yes,” I said. “You didn’t have to hit him.”
Diego left the casserole on the table and stalked over to the door. Solana followed. Diego put his fists on his hips, radiating fury. “Arrogant prick,” he said. “Stay, Solana.” He banged out the back door.
I turned to Madeline, who rinsed the pot in steaming water.
“Why does Dad hate him so much?” I asked. “Does he think Tom turned me away from you or something?”
“Let’s not start, Althea.”
“Why didn’t you and Dad go with me to put Gizmo down?”
She turned and wiped her hair back with a damp hand. “Did you remember that, or did Tom tell you?”
“Tom told me.”
“Of course,” she said. “That was the night he first took advantage, when your guard was down.”
He could have taken advantage, but he didn’t, I thought. “That doesn’t explain why you didn’t go to the vet with me,” I said.
“We were going to go to the vet the next morning together as a family, but you decided it couldn’t wait,” Madeline said. “Gizmo was perfectly comfortable. Your father and I had obligations we couldn’t get out of that night. We trusted you to stay home, but you took Gizmo and went without us. Imagine how we felt when we came home and discovered what you’d done.”
Her version was close enough to Tom’s to make them both believable. I sank into a chair and set my cane aside.
“So I was disobedient,” I said.
“No, you weren’t normally. You had your rough spells like many kids, but you were a good kid. Gizmo’s death was hard for you. It brought up some stuff.”
“What stuff?”
She opened a bag of apples and started picking off the labels. “I’d rather leave it in the past.”
“It’s part of who I am. It might help for me to know.”
She shook her head. “If there’s one good thing about your brain injury, it’s that you’ve been freed from your bad memories. Besides, there are too many things in your past for me to tell you about them all. How am I supposed to know which ones matter?”
“You could try for the major ones. Did you know Tom proposed to me last summer?” I asked.
Her voice dropped. “No.”
“He did today, too. I turned him down.”
She visibly relaxed. “Of course.”
“People ought to know each other before they get married, I think.” I slumped across the table and fingered a checked placemat. “He is cute, though,” I added. “But is he really my type? That’s the question.”
“Funny. Very funny.”
I felt a subtle shift happening in me. Even though we were talking about history I didn’t know and some of it was strained, Madeline treated me like I really was her daughter. Like I belonged. It felt a little disloyal to my own mother, but I kind of liked it.
“How did you meet Dad?” I asked.
She began washing the apples. “I was in graduate school at UT Austin, and I wanted to talk to your grandfather about his helium research at NASA. He agreed to meet me, but he asked me to come here instead of Houston. He’d just had knee surgery so he couldn’t travel. I wasn’t going to say no. Your father was here looking after him, and that’s when we met.”
I took a critical look at her little figure and graceful hands. Madeline must have been pretty as a young graduate student. Smart, too, obviously.
“And?” I prodded her.
“Your father made us lemonade from scratch.” She shook her head slightly and smiled. “I’d never met a smarter, nicer guy.”
I hadn’t ever seen Madeline blush before.
“Aww,” I said.
“It wasn’t all clear sailing,” she said. “I wasn’t Latina, and it took a while for all of his family to come around. His ex-girlfriend was a handful, too, but that’s long ago.”
“Do you think Grampa set you up?”
She nodded. “He said he just had a feeling, when he heard my voice on the phone, that I was right for his son.”
Sweet. It mattered that Diego’s father had approved of her. Bumping down a generation, I wondered if Diego felt he deserved some say in who Althea dated. Maybe that was why he was outraged when Althea defied him by dating Tom. I tried to think how my own parents would react to me dating, and I shuddered.
Madeline turned off the water and put the apples in a wooden bowl. “I have to believe things work out the way they should,” she said.
“Like with you and Dad?”
“And you being home with us again,” she said, turning to me. “I know your father can be difficult, but it’s only because he cares. He’s noticed you’ve started calling him ‘Dad.’ That means a lot to him.”
It was more of a courtesy than anything else. “It seems simplest,” I say.
“Even so. It shows you’re trying, and we appreciate that. I understand that you don’t feel like Althea anymore. I know you have this other girl’s memories.” She spoke calmly, but her voice carried an undercurrent of emotion. “But I can’t help hoping you’ll return to yourself now that you’re home. That’s what moms do. We hope.” She set the bowl of apples in the center of the table. Then she brushed her hands back through her soft white hair so that it stood out on both sides of her head. “I mean, just look at you,” she said with a shaky smile. “I barely dared to dream, but now you’re right here, in our own kitchen, and your baby’s fine, too. It’s just—” She broke off, waving a hand.
“Oh, Mom,” I said.
I stood awkwardly from my chair, and she came over to hug me.
“You’re such a child yourself,” she said in a tight voice. “And now you’re going to be a mother, too. I don’t know if I can stand it.”
I laughed over a lump in my throat and patted her back. “You’ll stand it. You’ve stood worse.”
“I guess that’s true,” she said, and kissed my cheek before she let me go.
*
My jetlag kicked in, and I had to head upstairs. Althea’s bedroom was easy to identify, decorated as it was in white and creamy blue, with a row of pristine, miniature dolls evenly spaced in a white case, and exactly enough books to fill three shelves. On her dresser was a little tree of earrings. Uneasy, I fingered a pair of dangly ones of hammered silver. To pick and choose items from Althea’s life felt wrong, like I was sifting through a dead girl’s tag sale.