Teresa looked at me. Asking.
I didn’t know what I was feeling. I didn’t know what was right. But I knew my daughter. Or I thought I did. Maybe I didn’t. That’s what Teresa had said.
You don’t know your daughter at all.
“Keep the watch,” I said. “We’ll figure out the money later.”
Teresa nodded. She held the box against her chest.
Then she looked at me, and her face was so full of things I couldn’t name.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For all of it. I know I don’t have the right to say that to you.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
She took Annie’s hand, and they walked down the porch steps and out to an old silver car with a cracked taillight.
I closed the door.
Then I turned around and looked at my daughter.
“Two months,” I said.
Lily was sitting on the bottom step where I’d been. She was hugging her knees.
“You’ve known for two months.”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer right away. She picked at a thread on her pajama pants.
“Lily. Why not?”
“Because of how you get,” she said quietly.
“How I get?”
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“About Dad.” She finally looked up. “You still sleep on his side of the bed sometimes. You still have his voicemail saved on your phone. You listen to it when you think I’m asleep. I can hear it through the wall.”
I felt my face get hot.
“You talk about him like he was perfect, Mom. Like the best husband in the world. Every time we drive past the coffee place he liked, you say, ‘Your dad loved that place,’ and your voice gets all soft. I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to take that away from you.” She wiped her eyes. “You already lost him once. I didn’t want you to lose him twice.”
I sat down on the floor. Right there in the front hallway, on the cold tile.
“So you carried it,” I said. “By yourself. For two months.”
“I was going to tell you. I just kept waiting for the right time. There wasn’t one.”
“You found a box in the garage that said your father had another child, and you just… put it back and went to school the next day.”
“I didn’t put it back. I kept it under my bed.”
“Lily.”
“I’d take the pictures out at night,” she said. “And look at them. Annie at the zoo. Annie with a missing tooth. Annie in a Halloween costume. She was a bumblebee when she was five.” Her voice got very small. “He wrote on the back of every single one. In his handwriting. I’d look at his handwriting and think, he loved her. He loved her too. He just never told anybody.”
“And that made you want to sew her a dress.”
“No,” she said. “That made me want to throw up. For like a week.” She almost laughed. “Then I saw her at school. Sitting alone at lunch. With Trevor calling her Goodwill. Wearing the same jacket every day. And I thought, she’s my sister. That’s my sister. And she doesn’t even know. And she has nothing. And I had him. I had birthday parties and Christmas and him teaching me to ride a bike. She had one ice cream a year with some guy she called Uncle Mike.”
