Was I? I’d always assumed my parents had a good relationship, but I’d also seen the way my mother flirted with the landscapers, who were always young and handsome and often took their shirts off while they mowed the lawn or trimmed the hedges.
“I mean, if it comes out that he goes there all the time and has fathered a dozen illegitimate children or something, then I might care, but if we’re talking about him going there just to watch or whatever, I don’t see what the big deal is. My mom probably has more of a problem with it not being a four-star establishment than anything else.”
The light changed and I started to drive again. I didn’t know where I was going, so I just ended up driving around for a while until I finally ended up back near my parents’ house.
“I’m fine to drive,” Graham said. “I should at least get my truck out of there.”
So I drove back down the driveway, hoping that neither of them would come out of the house, which they didn’t. “You want to come back to my place for a little bit?” Graham asked.
“Sure,” I said, because I sure as hell did not want to stay here right now.
*****
It was dark when I got home, and the front light wasn’t on, so I didn’t see that my mother was sitting outside in the Adirondack until I almost walked past her.
“Hi, Chloe,” she said. I heard the ice clink in her glass as she took a sip of whatever it was she was drinking. “I’m sorry about earlier today.”
“Hi, Mom. Um, that’s ok.”
“That certainly wasn’t how I planned for the day to go.”
I went over and sat on the arm of the chair. I patted her shoulder. “I know. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have Graham over just yet. I mean, meeting the parents is something that happens when you’ve been together longer than we have, probably.”
“Are you two together?”
I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “We are. And he feels bad; he didn’t mean to bring things up like that. Honestly, I think he was kind of nervous, and then he probably had one too many beers ...” I stopped talking, realizing that if I was trying to make him sound better, I probably wasn’t.
“I would just never expect your father to go to a place like that,” she said. “He said he only went once, a long time ago, before you were even born, for a bachelor party, actually. You know whose party it was? Parker’s father’s.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering my conversation with him at my parents’ party. “He actually seems pretty nice.”
“He is. He’s a fine upstanding gentleman, and very successful, just like your father.”
“So, you shouldn’t be mad at him then, Mom. It sounds like it was a long time ago, and isn’t that the sort of thing people do at bachelor parties?”
“They do, I suppose.” She sighed and took another sip of her drink, ice clinking. “And that’s what I’ve been telling myself—that people do that sort of thing when they go to bachelor parties, that’s the whole point, but I still feel as though he kept a secret from me. We weren’t married then, but we were together. And I know you might find this hard to believe, Chloe, but I was a lot like you as a kid. I always wanted to do the right thing, and I never gave my parents a hard time or any of that. There was no teenage rebellion phase for me, and I was really thankful that you didn’t seem to have one, either. It just seems like now, you’re sort of making up for that.”
“I’m not trying to be rebellious. I guess I just don’t like feeling as though my life is being planned out for me. Which is kind of what I felt like was happening, especially with Parker.”
“So, the two of you just didn’t hit it off?”
“He’s nice and everything, but no, we didn’t. And Dad offering him a job to date me probably didn’t help things, either.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. And Graham did seem nice,” she said. “I can understand him being nervous. Not that we were trying to make him nervous! Maybe we can try to get together another time.”
“Well, I’m going to go visit him at work tomorrow after I go to the art center, so I’ll mention that to him.”
My mom reached up and squeezed my arm. She was trying, she really was, and I did appreciate that.
*****
The next day, I spent the morning at the art center, working on some more sketches. I didn’t want to start sculpting anything until I had a better idea of what I was going to do. I’d decided to scrap the mermaid thing—that was nice, and maybe I’d do a mermaid sculpture another time, but I wanted to do a piece that meant something. I just still wasn’t quite sure what that was.
But I made some good progress with my sketches and an idea started to take shape. Part of me wanted to talk to Graham about it, but then I decided that I wasn’t going to talk to anyone about it—I was going to have it be a surprise that would get revealed at the show.
Around lunchtime, I decided to leave. Tara called and said that Michael had been in touch and he still wanted to meet up with her today.
“You still in?” she asked. “If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.”