Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [71]
“My father is living a lie,” I began. “His wife isn’t what she says she is, and he deserves to know that.”
“And you’re sure he doesn’t know?”
I nodded, because I was positive that if my father had any idea who India really was, he would never have married her. Almost positive. If he had some kind of ridiculous knight-on-a-white-horse fantasy . . . but then I dismissed it. There was no way my father could have known what I knew about India and married her anyhow, let alone agreed to have a child with her.
“More pros?” he asked.
“Maybe if he knew the truth, they’d get divorced. Or the marriage would be annulled,” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe my mother would come to her senses.” I said it—putting it out there, as Vanessa, who was a big fan of putting things out there, used to say—even though I knew it was unlikely.
“Is your mom still in the city?” Darren asked.
I shook my head. “She’s . . .” This was painful to admit, but Darren was basically a stranger, a stranger who’d been on my payroll, which meant that he was obligated to keep my secrets. Besides, it wasn’t as if we had friends in common. There was no one he could gossip to who’d be interested. “She’s in New Mexico. In an ashram.”
“An ashram?” he repeated. “Whoa. Did she read Eat, Pray, Love?”
“She said she wanted to live authentically.” The last word came out more scornfully than I’d intended. I looked around to see who might have heard, but the other people in the park seemed focused on their food, or on one another.
Darren raised his eyebrows. “You don’t approve?”
I shrugged, feeling foolish, nibbling at a lettuce leaf to buy time. “She sends me pictures of herself in the sweat lodge.”
“Good times.” He grinned. “My mom sends me articles she clips from the newspaper. Like, actually cuts them out with scissors. Recipes, mostly. Those Mark Bittman ones, with six ingredients. You think your dad still loves her? Your mother, not mine.”
“I do,” I said automatically. My parents never fought, never even disagreed until my mother took up with the Baba. Then I thought of my father and India, beaming at me as they’d told me their “wonderful news,” the way he’d tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. I couldn’t remember him ever looking at my mother like that, or touching her so tenderly. My parents had been equals—at least at first. When they’d met, at the University of Michigan, my mother was the one who came from a wealthier, more established family, and she was a year ahead of him in school. Her parents had gone to college; my father’s parents had not. India was different—younger, smaller, more fragile, more in need of a wealthy man’s patronage. Maybe that was what he found appealing.
“And the stepmother?” Darren asked. “What’s she doing that’s so bad?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I mean, did she turn your bedroom into a sex dungeon?”
I smiled—it was a funny thought—and shook my head.
“Steal your boyfriend?” Darren continued. “Run over your dog?”
“She hasn’t done anything to me,” I admitted. I wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. “And I don’t have a dog.”
“Somehow,” said Darren, “that does not surprise me.” He’d finished the first milkshake. He lifted the second one, tilted it toward me, and started drinking almost before I’d finished shaking my head. “Do you think she makes your dad happy?”
“I think,” I said, “that if she does, it’s a happiness that’s illusory and transient.”
He frowned. “Jesus, where’d you go to school?”
“Vassar. And it won’t last,” I said. “A person like that, she’ll get bored. She’ll leave him.”
“And take all his money?” Darren’s voice was innocent enough, but he knew—he had to—that India couldn’t leave with more than a few million of my father’s dollars. Unless this folly they were embarking on came to pass. Unless they had a