The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [117]
Pretending to be happy takes enormous energy. For all their quick smiles, they often seem weary, drained, trying to protect what's left. She remembers one of her first interviews with an exhausted but plucky family, parents and children, working through the night to sandbag their besieged home against rising spring floodwaters. No human effort was going to stop the river's crest, but still, they had to do something, they said. And do it together. Nora notices how at night now Drew finds reasons to stay downstairs with her until she goes to bed. After that he'll study in his room for hours. Chloe got As on her last two tests, American Lit and math. Her room is perfectly neat. Yesterday she did all the laundry. She starts dinner now without being asked, usually because Nora is sleeping, which is how she spends her days.
Max is such a jerk, Chloe announced last night, as she ripped up his nine-page e-mail, her final and ultimate rejection: dropping the pieces into the trash instead of the recycling bin. It was an article he'd written about his experiences in Costa Rica. He asked if she'd please get her father to publish it. “Work on him—the way you do,” he wrote, as if she were some bimbo, she said, equally infuriated by his next request. Would she also find out about job openings at the paper this summer, maybe set up an interview for him next month. Otherwise he'll have to spend the entire vacation working at his uncle's sawmill in Maine. When he comes home, she's breaking up with him.
“Not because of what's going on. I mean, your father and me,” Nora said, resenting Ken even more: the emotional fallout souring even his children's relationships.
“No, that's not it,” Chloe insisted, but Nora knows that's part of it. Chloe wants to be valued for who she is, rather than as someone's meal ticket into the family business. As she drives she can't help wondering if Ken ever thought that of her. But then, he had been a most avid pursuer, managing to get her assigned to him, which she soon discovered meant being at his beck and call, phoning at all hours just to talk, wondering what she was doing, she must have a lot of down time not knowing anyone in Franklin, then showing up at her apartment on Friday nights with Chinese food and ridiculously expensive bottles of wine, flowers on her birthday, party invitations, dinner invitations, finally wearing down her qualms about getting involved with someone so different from herself, easygoing, carefree, always after a good time, and one of the kindest, sweetest men she'd ever known.
By the time they get home Drew's teeth are chattering. Cold and wet, they scramble out of the car, peeling off their wet things as they run inside. She forgot to turn the heat up before they left so the house feels damp and chilly. Hearing the quick thud of pipes up in Drew's bathroom, she smiles. One way to get the boy into the shower. In the family room she searches everywhere for the remote for the gas logs, finally finds it wedged between the sofa cushions. The house is messy, has been ever since Ken left, especially here and in the kitchen where most of their time is spent. Soda cans, coffee mugs, magazines, newspapers, cast-off sweaters and jackets, it doesn't bother her anymore; if anything, it seems a validation of some hard-earned ownership, like strips of ribbon and pieces of string birds leave in their nests. She even canceled