The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [34]
“That's what Mrs. Gendron said.”
“What?”
“That I should talk to Dad, and if I couldn't, then I should feel free to call her.”
She can barely grip the steering wheel. Uncomfortable as Drew is, the words spill out of him. His first inkling came late last summer. He had slept over at Clay's house, only Clay forgot to tell his mother he was there. Early the next morning, really early, like four thirty or five, he heard his father's voice. Thinking he'd come to pick him up, Drew started down the hallway just as his father and Mrs. Gendron came out of her bedroom together. Mr. Gendron wasn't home; away on a business trip, Drew assumed. Or maybe in rehab, never a secret in the Gendron household. After that, no one ever said anything. But from then on, Mrs. Gendron seemed nervous around him, uneasy, always asking, “What's wrong? What're you thinking about, Drew? You're worried about something, aren't you? I can tell.” Pestering him with questions, Drew recalls, as if she wanted it out in the open but needed him to do it.
“There were a couple other times,” he says, but as much as Nora has wanted details, she doesn't want them from him, her son. “And then this one day I'm in the kitchen waiting for Clay. As usual,” Drew adds, and Nora glances at him. Like his mother, Clay is always late. “Mrs. Gendron was cooking and feeding Lyra, and he still wasn't there, so I said I better go. ‘Wait!’ she goes, and she shuts off the stove, then she sits down with me and Lyra. She said she wanted me to know that sometimes things happen between people that maybe no one wanted to happen, but then when they do, people have to try and help one another. And it was weird, the whole time I'm like, what the hell's she telling me this for? And Lyra, she keeps banging her Barbie doll on my arm, tryna get me to laugh, and it's like, all of a sudden I know, I know what she's talking about. ‘I better go,’ I said. And then she holds my face, like this,” he says, hands cupped at his cheeks. “And she says how she loves me like her own son, that's how close we've always been. Both families.”
“What did you say?” She can barely get the words out.
“Nothing. I was like … freaked. I took off I went home. And I never went back. It's all just … just so fucked up!” He punches the dashboard so hard it leaves a dent in the pale blue leather. “Why? Why's it have to be so fucked up?” he groans. “I don't get it! I just don't get it!”
She drops Drew off at home and tells him she'll be right back. As she drives, she thinks of that day at the beach years ago. The two women, in memory so much younger then, their backs to the hot wind, kneeling, squatting on the square blue canvas, its corners weighted with smooth, flat sea rocks, while they passed out sandwiches to the three children. Robin's peanut butter and Fluff, marsh-mallow spread a delicacy forbidden in Nora's kitchen. Nora had packed plums, grapes, yogurt, individual bags of Goldfish crackers, organic lemonade pouches.
A brilliant day. The dazzling heat that had driven them to the water's edge, undiminished by the steady wind from the land. They shouted to be heard over the crashing foam-curdled waves, the wind's whine. Voices swelled around them, up and down the beach, children laughing, screaming, mothers calling, each part of something for which she had no name but deeply felt, an inner stillness, a pure moment, a riotous communion on the edge, the very edge of the earth. And for one so seldom trusting happiness, it seemed a kind of rapture, as she watched Chloe, Drew, and Clay run into the surf, hurling themselves headfirst into the churning tide, then surfacing, staggering against one another, sand streaming down their backs and legs, wet hair plastered in dark clumps over their brows and ears as the tide surged in. Squinting under the straw weave of her hat brim, she dug her fingers in the coarse wet sand, the water seeping instantly into each channel as they plunged into the waves again and again. With Nora as sentinel, Robin leaned back on her elbows, her face tanning