The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [186]
“You could elope,” he suggested.
Phoebe considered this, turning a green plastic bracelet on her wrist. “No,” she said. “We wouldn’t have a cake.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Couldn’t you? I mean, why not?”
Phoebe, frowning hard, glancing at him to see if he was making fun of her. “No,” she said firmly. “That’s not how you have a wedding, Paul.”
He smiled, touched by her sureness of how the world worked.
“You know what, Phoebe? You’re right.”
Laughter and applause drifted across the sunny lawn as Frederic and his mother finished with the cake. Bree, smiling, raised her camera to take a final picture. Paul nodded to the table where the small plates were being filled, passing from hand to hand. “The wedding cake has six layers. Raspberries and whipped cream in the middle. How about it, Phoebe? You want some?”
Phoebe smiled more deeply and nodded in reply.
“My cake is going to have eight layers,” she said, as they walked across the lawn through the voices and the laughter and the music.
Paul laughed. “Only eight? Why not ten?”
“Silly. You’re a silly guy, Paul,” Phoebe said.
They reached the table. Bright confetti was scattered on his mother’s shoulders. She was smiling, gentle in her motions, and she touched Phoebe’s hair, smoothed it back, as if she were still a little girl. Phoebe pulled away, and Paul’s heart caught; for this story, there were no simple endings. There would be transatlantic visits and phone calls, but never the ordinary ease of daily life.
“You did a good job,” his mother said. “I’m so glad you were in the wedding, Phoebe, you and Paul. It meant a lot to me. I can’t tell you.”
“I like weddings,” Phoebe said, reaching for a plate of cake.
His mother smiled a little sadly. Paul watched Phoebe, wondering how she understood what was happening. She seemed not to worry very much about things, but rather to accept the world as a fascinating and unusual place where anything might happen. Where one day, a mother and brother you never knew you had might appear at your door and invite you to be in a wedding.
“I’m glad you’re coming to visit us in France, Phoebe,” his mother went on. “Frederic and I, we’re both so glad.”
Phoebe looked up, uneasy again.
“It’s the snails,” Paul explained. “She doesn’t like snails.”
His mother laughed. “Don’t worry. I don’t like them either.”
“And I’m coming back home,” Phoebe added.
“That’s right,” his mother said gently. “Yes. That’s what we agreed.”
Paul watched, feeling helpless against the pain that had settled in his body like a stone. In the sharp light he was struck by his mother’s age, a certain thinness to her skin, her blond hair giving way to silver. By her beauty too. She seemed lovely and vulnerable, and he wondered, as he had wondered so often in these past weeks, how his father could have betrayed her, betrayed them all.
“How?” he asked softly. “How could he never tell us?”
She turned to him, serious. “I don’t know. I’ll never understand it. But think how his life must have been, Paul. Carrying this secret with him all those years.”
He looked across the table. Phoebe was standing next to a poplar tree whose leaves were just beginning to turn, scraping whipped cream off her cake with her fork.
“Our lives could have been so much different.”
“Yes. That’s true. But they weren’t different, Paul. They happened just like this.”
“You’re defending him,” he said slowly.
“No. I’m forgiving him. I’m trying to, anyway. There’s a difference.”
“He doesn’t deserve forgiveness,” Paul said, surprised at his bitterness, still.
“Maybe not,” his mother said. “But you and I and Phoebe, we have a choice. To be bitter and angry, or to try and move on. It’s the hardest thing for me, letting go of all that righteous anger. I’m still struggling. But that’s what I want to do.”
He considered this. “I was offered a job in Pittsburgh,” he said.
“Really?” His mother’s eyes were intent now, such a dark green in this light. “Are you going to take it?”
“I think so,” he said, realizing he’d made up his mind. “It’s a very good offer.”
“You can’t fix it,” she said