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“Not alone?” I said, staring at my mother. Her claim that a passenger had been present when my father crashed three years ago sent a chill through my body. “How is that possible? The emergency responders only found Dad in the car.”
“His companion snuck off after the accident.” My mother gripped the chair armrests, visibly steeling herself as she bent closer to me. “Darling, I must break something else to you. Your father’s mistress was the person in the car with him. He was having an affair.”
I reached behind me for the wall as the blood drained from my head. I wasn’t sure which declaration shocked me more: a second person’s presence at the accident, or that someone other than my mother would want to sleep with the man. As much as I loved my father, he’d never struck me as a Lothario.
“I know it’s difficult to believe somebody would be that inconsiderate,” my mother said, shaking her head as she resettled in the chair. “To think somebody would use a gift bestowed out of guilt to promote the very thing it had been given to remedy.”
“Wait a minute.” I clutched my skull. “What are you talking about now? What gift?”
She blinked. “The Buick, dear. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
My hands fell to my stomach. I felt as though I were being sucked into a vortex of insanity, the pressure crushing all my vital organs. “You’re saying Dad bought you the Buick because he slept with another woman?”
“Yes.”
“He told you this?”
“Don’t be silly, dear,” my mother said, making a face. “Of course Rick never admitted to purchasing that car out of guilt. He didn’t even know I knew about his affair. But he wanted a Toyota Corolla, remember?”
I didn’t remember, but that hardly seemed relevant. Although technically the Buick was a shared vehicle, everyone knew my mother lay claim to it. My father had bought himself a motorcycle only a year earlier. And why hadn’t her joy been dampened that day if she believed her husband had only agreed to the model she wanted because of his compunction over a secret extramarital affair?
“So who was this mistress?” I asked. “A friend of yours?” Although I hadn’t met all of my mother’s friends, amid the sea of crotchety old widows and dowdy middle-aged women familiar to me, I couldn’t come up with a single candidate who might tempt a man looking to stray.
“Not a friend.” My mother shuddered.
“Then who?”
“Rick had been sleeping around with one of his business associates.” The way she emphasized business associates made it sound as if he had been running a prostitution ring.
“A coworker?” I asked.
“Perhaps. Or a supplier. Or somebody else he ran into during the course of his working day.” She shrugged, then added, “I don’t know who,” as if she had already run through all the possibilities.
I straightened away from the wall. Now that the initial shock had passed, skepticism was creeping in. “If you don’t know who the mistress was, how do you know Dad cheated on you?”
She dipped her head, peering up at me as she tapped her skull. “Women’s intuition, darling.”
I suppressed a scoff. “Did your women’s intuition also tell you he slept with a business associate rather than a woman he met another way?”
“On the desktop calendar Rick kept in his home office, he’d penciled in ‘business appointment’ for the date of the accident,” she said.
I gaped at her. “So? If Dad was cheating on you—which I’m not convinced he was—he wouldn’t very well have scribbled down ‘sex with mistress,’ would he? Isn’t that the first lesson taught in Extramarital Affairs 101?”
“Don’t be flippant.”
“And Dad’s company went bankrupt a month before the crash,” I went on, undaunted. “What possible business could he have been attending to when Track-It wasn’t even in business anymore?”
“Precisely, dear.” My mother crossed her legs, a smug smile bloating her cheeks. “That’s one reason why I believe he had been with another woman that night. Plus, the crash occurred at six-thirty p.m. on a Thursday night. The late hour hardly suggests that Rick had been attending to legitimate business.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “But then what makes you so sure Dad had been with a business associate? Just because he used the word business in his fake calendar entry?”
“Before it failed, that company required Rick’s full attention,” my mother said. “And he never had a chance to become engaged in any other ventures before he died. Where else would he have met someone?”
I did have to agree that my father had seemed too busy with Track-It to partake in other activities. Also, my parents had shared the same group of friends. If my father had become involved with someone in their social circle, my mother likely would have observed something suspicious about their behavior together.
Still, he might have met someone randomly on the street one day. But could a fleeting encounter have enticed him enough to stray from my mother? Despite how suffocating I found her to be, my father had genuinely enjoyed her company. They had always seemed so happy together, the envy of myself and many others with failed marriages of our own for comparison.
In fact, they had been the most well-matched couple I knew.
I tilted my head, scrutinizing my mother. “Are you sure Dad slept with someone else?”
She bristled. “Of course I’m sure. A woman always knows when her husband is unfaithful.”
“A woman doesn’t always know,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I didn’t know.”
My ex-husband Derek had been cheating for months before I found another woman’s makeup bag under our bed and confronted him. Surprisingly, he’d admitted to the affair right away. More surprisingly, he hadn’t been the least bit apologetic about the whole thing.
It occurred to me now that I had let him off too easily by initiating a divorce without first dragging him down to the nearest auto dealership and demanding a new luxury car.
My mother flapped her hand. “Well, of course you didn’t know. But any woman in an otherwise happy marriage would be clued in from the start.”
The audacity of her accusation ignited a spark of irritation. “Are you saying my marriage to Derek wasn’t happy?”
“Of course you weren’t happy, sweetheart. You were a miserable wreck.”
“A wreck?” I repeated, dumbstruck by her conclusion.
“You were always moping about as though your mother had just died,” she confirmed. “I used to leave your company checking my pulse to make sure I hadn’t already passed on.”
My hands clenched into fists. “Believe me, if my mother had just died I’d be positively celebratory.”
“There’s no need to get defensive, darling. All I did was point out how miserable you were the last couple years of your marriage,” my mother said patiently, as though I should be thanking her for trusting me with this patently untrue judgment. “You used to have this spark. When it went out in your thirties, you looked so limp and lifeless. Like a dreary slug, dear. Really. Even when you wore makeup you couldn’t hide how terrible you looked.”
Despite the source, I couldn’t help but feel stung. Had any other woman in history ever been compared to a dreary slug?
A belated embarrassment washed over me. Did everyone in my acquaintance share the same unflattering opinion of my married self?
My mother regarded me. “Surely you knew this already.”
I shook my head, watching my limp, lifeless brown hair fan around me. “But thank you for so graciously pointing it out now.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, clearly missing the sarcasm in my tone. “Sometimes it’s a mother’s duty to help her children face the obvious.” She eyed me as she might a lab specimen. “I must say, Derek’s departure has added some color back to your complexion. You no longer look like one of those pasty, deep-sea fishes who never see sunlight.”
“How flattering.” I refrained from prodding for information on what animal I resembled nowadays, afraid my new companion species might be darker scaled but still fail to appeal.
“Derek certainly did you a great service when he left,” she said.
“Derek didn’t leave me,” I corrected. “I kicked him out. I have a certain intolerance toward husbands who don’t honor their wedding vows.”
My mother’s cheek twitched. “Are you implying you have a strength that I do not?”
“No,” I said, surprised she had picked up on my meaning. How could she read me so easily sometimes yet be blissfully oblivious other times? “I was talking about me, not you. Dad’s affair still hasn’t been verified. All we know is that your women’s intuition conjured up some harebrained idea that he cheated on you.”
She frowned. “Harebrained is hardly appropriate. I would think you’d offer the woman who encouraged your success all these years a little more respect.”
“I’m trying to be respectful,” I said hotly, “by not letting you accuse Dad of adultery without proof.”
My mother drew herself up to her full, seated height. “I most certainly do have proof. I wouldn’t go around making accusations without having evidence to back them up.”
Her outburst drained some of the fight from my body. “You have proof Dad cheated on you?”
“Of course.” She gestured toward the bed, causing Chip to raise his head. “What do you think I brought in this suitcase?”
I glanced at the suitcase, my pulse quickening. What could my mother possibly have inside? Some other woman’s underwear? Used condoms tweezed from the carpet under their marital bed?
“With your father’s spirit no longer around to identify the woman in the Buick that night, I brought the item here in the hopes that you would help an aging woman uncover the truth before she perishes on her deathbed.” My mother sighed, flopping against the chair. “But it’s evident your only interest is in arguing with your mother, the very woman who suffered through eighteen hours of grueling labor in order to bring you into this world without forceps.”
“Well, I’m sorry my big head required that you push a tad more than planned.” I took a deep breath and told myself to exemplify the type of calm and understanding daughter who invited confessions of her parents’ extramarital affairs. “But I really would like to hear more about your evidence.”
“The item in my possession was discovered in the car after the accident,” my mother announced.
I waited for her to elaborate, but after ten seconds of silence I realized she wanted me to act more enthusiastic before the big reveal. I obliged by leaning forward, feeling as if I were auditioning for a movie role and this represented my one chance to please the irrational talent director before she snatched her suitcase of casting contracts away. “What was found?”
My mother held my gaze for a moment before saying, “I’ll fetch it for you.”
She rose from her throne and lifted her suitcase onto the mattress before unzipping it with the deliberate care shown by bomb-defusing experts and flipping the cover open with a flourish.
Watching her, I finally understood where my daughters had inherited their own penchant for theatrics.
“Good heavens!” My mother reeled backward as Chip leapt up and pounced on her open suitcase. His tail swung like a metronome as he braced himself to dig through her clothes.
“Chip, no.” I pulled the dog away. Thirty minutes ago I would have delighted in any behavior that discouraged my mother from moving in, but now I was too anxious to see this evidence firsthand to let Chip destroy it.
My mother watched the dog with hard eyes, seeming a bit deflated as she reached inside the mesh pocket stitched into the suitcase flap. Chip’s display had apparently dampened her enthusiasm for this starring role of Woman Scorned.
I let go of Chip as my mother reached out and dropped something into my hand. I fortified myself with a deep breath before looking at the object, my anticipation transitioning to confusion as I took note of the innocent tube of ChapStick nestled in my palm.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Cherry lip balm,” she said.
I stared at her. “Cherry lip balm? That’s your big proof of Dad’s affair?”
My mother bobbed her head in the affirmative. “It was found right under the passenger seat after the accident. Rick’s mistress must have been applying it during their . . . outing.”
“Mom,” I scolded, “finding lip balm in your car is no indication that Dad was driving around with a mistress. I’m surprised anyone even bothered to return such a useless thing to you!”
She shut the suitcase and pressed her palms against the cover, her eyes flashing. “If it didn’t belong to Rick’s mistress then explain to me how it ended up in my car. It wasn’t mine.”
I threw my hands up, inadvertently sending the ChapStick flying through the air. Chip barked and dashed after it.
“It could have belonged to anyone,” I raved, lunging after Chip and prying the ChapStick out of his mouth. I was more concerned about him swallowing something indigestible than destroying the silly token of non-evidence. “It could have been dropped there before Dad even bought the car. Some other test driver might have left it.”
My mother sniffed. “That’s ridiculous. The dealership scrubbed that car thoroughly before we took it home. And don’t you think I’d done my own share of cleaning?”
I tried and failed to recall when I’d last cleaned out my own car. “You’d only owned it three months.”
“That’s three months of filth you would have me sitting in.” Her face flushed from the indignity of my suggestion. “I vacuumed that car ten days before Rick crashed.”
“That still doesn’t prove the lip balm belonged to Dad’s mistress,” I said.
My mother’s nostrils flared. “He only drove my car once since that last cleaning: the night he crashed. And I hadn’t driven anybody around. So tell me, if the lip balm didn’t belong to Rick’s mistress, whose was it?”
“It could have been anyone’s,” I reiterated. “Lots of people use lip balm, including men.”
“Men using lip balm,” she murmured, shaking her head. She caught my gaze again, her mouth twisted in disappointment. “And you’re ignoring the most important detail.”
“What’s that?”
“This lip balm is cherry.”
I lifted one palm up. “So?”
My mother blinked in that deliberate manner of hers indicating she wasn’t sure where she went wrong during my formative years. “So clearly it belonged to a woman.”
I snorted. “Cherry is not just a female flavor, Mom.”
“Of course it is.” She squinted at me. “You’re starting to sound as contrary as your sister.”
“Brother,” I corrected. “Charlie is living as a man now, remember?”
“Of course I remember,” she said, her ears turning red. “What kind of mother can’t remember such a thing as that?”
“The kind who’s in denial.”
My mother still could not completely accept that my sister Charlotte had opted to live as a man twenty years ago after feeling trapped in the wrong body all of her young life. Admittedly, I had a hard time with the transition myself, the older sister I’d once admired now replaced by a somewhat effeminate gay man. But despite how distant we’d grown since Charlotte had become Charlie, I still loved my sibling and supported his decision.
My mother was a different story. In fact, I suspected her deep-seated belief that Charlie’s gender switch would someday reverse itself was the only thing permitting her to accept the situation at all. Despite Charlie’s constant reminders to the contrary, she insisted that one day he’d get over his identity crisis and return to his former, female self.
“Okay, let’s assume for a moment the ChapStick did belong to some woman,” I conceded for the sake of switching topics. “We’ll even assume she slept with Dad and rode in the car that night. What makes you so sure she was present during Dad’s accident? Dad could have dropped her off somewhere beforehand.”
My mother arched an eyebrow. “At six-thirty? He’d only left our house forty minutes prior. It would have taken him twenty or thirty minutes to reach Shoreline where the crash occurred. That’s enough time for Rick to pick up the woman and head toward their destination, but hardly long enough for them to finish whatever it is they were doing and part ways.”
I considered my mother’s scenario. She was right that the timeline didn’t allow for any shenanigans more time-consuming than a backseat quickie. Still, if my father had picked up a passenger at some point during his drive, wouldn’t the person have shown up at the scene? “If you’re so sure someone else witnessed the crash, why didn’t you ever mention it to the police?” I asked my mother.
Her face crumpled. “I didn’t really put the pieces together until months later, sweetheart. By then, that lip balm was the only evidence left.”
“I would hardly call this”—I pinched the ChapStick tube and held it in front of my nose—“evidence.”
My mother stepped forward and snatched the lip balm from my fingers. “I should have known you would defend your father like this.”
“One of us has to,” I said. “Besides, if you want me to be upset with someone, you were the one who kept the truth about Dad’s so-called affair from me for so long.”
“That wasn’t my choice. Your father asked me not to tell you.”
“He’s been dead for three years,” I argued. “And you claimed Dad didn’t know you knew about his affair.”
“Even so,” she replied. “He was embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed about what?” I asked.
Her eyes darkened. “For sticking his willy where it didn’t belong, of course.”
“So Dad did know you knew about his affair?”
She huffed. “I’m talking about his spirit, sweetheart.”
I dug my fingers into my scalp, a lame attempt to ward off an impending headache. The last thing I needed was to complicate this conversation by adding a dead person’s spirit to this cast of crazy characters.
My mother slipped the lip balm back into her suitcase, causing Chip’s ears to prick up. As she fumbled with the zipper, I spotted her fingers trembling and couldn’t help but feel a smidgen of sympathy. She appeared to be mourning my father all over again now that his spirit had theoretically departed.
The poor woman had endured a lot in her life, I reminded myself, setting my hands on Chip’s back to thwart any ideas he had about wrestling his new fetch toy away. She’d lost a husband to a car crash and, effectively, her oldest daughter to her desire to live as a man. Not to mention the hardships she’d encountered thanks to my oversized head and slug-like body, which she’d had to expunge from her womb without the benefit of forceps. Maybe if I had extended her more compassion over the years she wouldn’t have withheld her wild theories for so long.
I took a deep breath. “You don’t have any proof of Dad’s affair besides the ChapStick?”
My mother’s nose wrinkled. “Naturally I never witnessed anything firsthand.”
“You mean like Dad sticking his willy where it didn’t belong.”
She sucked in a breath, her eyes widening. “Good heavens, Betsy. What a thing to say.”
I spread my hands. “I was just quoting you.”
“Your father deserves some respect,” she chided.
I clamped my hands on my hips. “Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t run around spouting accusations and complaining about me defending him, then act all indignant when I parrot back what you’ve told me.”
“I’m not trying to tarnish your father’s memory.”
“Neither am I,” I assured her. “I’m just having a hard time accepting that he cheated on you.”
My mother sagged onto the mattress as her body wilted. “There were other clues pointing to an affair, of course, but nothing really tangible.”
“Like what?” I asked, sitting a couple feet away from her.
“For instance, Rick became quite distracted the year before his death.”
“He was probably concerned about Track-It,” I said. “Being in charge of the company’s financials, he must have known it would soon go belly-up.”
“His professional responsibilities wouldn’t have consumed his interest to this degree,” my mother countered. “Remember, Rick was no stranger to the perils of new companies, having invested in several himself before trying a hand in his own.”
“But leading the finance department of a startup requires a lot more involvement than investing in one,” I pointed out.
“Even so.”
“Then maybe he was worried about making your car payments. He’d only purchased the Buick two months before Track-It’s failure.”
“Rick never would have bought me that car if he didn’t believe we could afford it, no matter how guilty he felt about his mistress.”
I decided she was right. My father had always managed money well, even if most of his investment ventures didn’t pan out. He wouldn’t have bought something as expensive as a brand-new vehicle if he didn’t think he could make the payments.
“I’m afraid it was another woman on his mind,” my mother said with a sigh. “As I said, a wife knows these things.” I tensed as she surveyed me, but she refrained from adding how I might be the dimwitted exception to this rule. “He became so secretive that last year, holding furtive phone conversations and jumping whenever I popped into his home office. He clearly suffered from a guilty conscience and feared I might catch him conversing with her.”
“Did you ever check Dad’s phone records?” I asked.
She lifted a hand to her heart. “My generation doesn’t do things like that.”
I studied my mother, remembering how my father’s death had plunged her into despair three years ago. Her distress had actually molded her into a surprisingly tolerable individual, the trance she’d operated in either obliterating her ability to disparage or leaving her too weary to bother. I’d only noticed her starting to recover four months after the fact, when I’d confessed to my own disintegrating marriage and she’d responded with some of her characteristic reproof.
That had also been around the time my father’s spirit had decided to make an appearance.
“Well, I’ll do my best to find this woman,” I told my mother now, wondering when I would regret this offer. Reminiscing had made me unusually pliable to her demands. “Although, honestly, a mistress running away from Dad’s accident sounds awfully unlikely. Don’t be surprised if I can’t uncover anything.”
My mother looked satisfied by my promise to help. But in lieu of a thank-you, she reached back into her suitcase and pulled out an address book. “This belonged to your father. His mistress might be noted in there.”
I took the book from her. “Did you review the entries already?”
She shook her head. “I’m not comfortable looking through your father’s private things.”
Fortunately, I’d never had any qualms about poking through my parents’ belongings, recalling the many times Charlie and I had snooped in search of trinkets related to their sex life or proof that we were secretly adopted from two people who no doubt boasted a saner gene pool.
Downstairs, a door banged open, causing my mother and me to jump. Chip scrambled off the bed and raced out of the room, barking his way down the stairs like an unmedicated mental patient.
“Mom?” I heard one of my daughters shout over Chip’s frantic greeting. “Where’s dinner? We’re starving!”
“Well,” my mother said, pushing herself off the mattress and heading toward the bedroom door, “I should go break the good news to my grandchildren. Now that I’ve moved in, they won’t need to worry about coming home to an empty table and an adult role model who’s forgotten to feed them.” She slipped out the door before I could form a retort.
I considered following after her, then decided I needed a break from her company. Instead, I flipped through the address book, trying to note whether any pages were particularly worn or, perchance, certain names sported swirly hearts drawn around them. But, of course, my father had not been a lovestruck twelve-year-old girl doodling about his obsessions. I couldn’t deduce anything meaningful from the way he wrote any of the entries.
My fingers slowed when I landed on the page for contacts beginning with the letter E, stopping on Harold Earnest’s entry. My father had founded Track-It with Harold, an old college friend of his, at the height of the country’s recession five years ago. Harold, an engineer, had wanted to develop a subcutaneous chip that tracked children’s whereabouts via radio or radar or some other invisible mechanism that transmitted a signal to a mobile phone or other smart device. The company had followed the path of so many other businesses at the time—not to mention startups initially consumed with research and development efforts—and failed within two years, only a month before my father’s car accident.
I knew my father had mentioned the name of his female assistant at Track-It, but that was years ago and I didn’t remember it. With any luck, Harold would be willing to fill in the gaps.
My eyes strayed to the nightstand, where my cell phone sat. I sighed as I reached for it, still not really believing that I’d started an investigation into my mother’s crazy theory.
