The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,18
figure out our father was having an affair.
Davy feared Dad would leave us, forcing Mom to sell us—just like what happened to Seabiscuit’s jockey in a book we’d read. I, though, became scornful that my mother didn’t leave herself. I would never put up with that bullshit. I would never beg please.
In the shower, I leaned my forehead against the tile.
My dad still got all the glory, even though he was retired from competition now. He won four Olympic golds before a brutal fall injured his brain and spine five years ago. While Mom walked him up and down the hospital hallways and oversaw every physical therapy exercise, it was my father who got his picture on the cover of magazines even then.
Now my parents were only months away from their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Fifty years.
MY MOTHER’S GENTLENESS EMBARRASSED ME.
I sat on the edge of the tub, combing my hair, when Mom knocked. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, the words full of heartbreak. She sat beside me on the tub’s edge and put an arm around me. She smelled of wood smoke from their fireplace, with perfume faintly beneath it.
When she saw my arm, she stiffened. “What on earth happened? Did he hurt you?”
“No! No, no, one of the horses we removed this morning bit me.”
The coiled snake of my mother’s anger released a little. Mom knew Bobby’s father had been a violent man when alive. When Bobby and I first dated, Mom had seen Mimi once with a bruise-smudged lip. I’m not sure she ever truly believed that Bobby had purpled my own eye by accident, thrashing around during one of his nightmares.
I wished in that shameful instant that Bobby did beat me. I wanted to announce that Bobby and I split up because he hit me. I wanted a reason. Something as clean and sharp as an elbow cracking into a cheekbone in the dark.
IN BOBBY’S IMMACULATE KITCHEN—SOMEONE HAD cleaned up the cat’s blood—whatever Big David was baking filled the air with rosemary. Gabby had changed clothes, and polite Tyler had left for home. The evening blurred together with their comforts and conversations.
I turned to Gabriella. “Babe, you know this has nothing to do with you, right? This is between your father and—”
“If one more person says that to me I’m going to scream!” she said. “What am I? Six?”
I looked at the others, who shrugged sheepishly. Good. Good for them. I’d rather she heard it too often than not at all.
They asked me questions. I told the story. They talked. My mind drifted, hearing fragments.
I sat down at the tiled kitchen island with an ice-filled dish towel across my forearm. I traced the blue-and-yellow designs in the Portuguese tile we’d selected on one of our last trips together. It hit me—if he really was gone, that would have been our last vacation. The first of a series of lasts: the last Christmas, the last party, the last birthday dinner. Bobby’s birthday was just a week away.
As angry and hurt as I was, I mostly felt fear—fear for Bobby. What was he doing?
Once Gabby left the room, Mom was brave enough to ask. “Is there someone else?”
Even though I’d asked Bobby the same question, my mother bringing it up rankled me. “He said there wasn’t.”
“Of course he’s going to say that, right?” Davy said. “He’s too big of a coward to admit it to your face. But who would leave you for no reason?”
I loved my brother fiercely at that moment even though I didn’t want him to be right.
“That’s the first thing my mom asked, too,” Big David said. His sixty-seven-year-old mother, Ava, lived with them.
“You told your mom?” I was mortified.
Big David nodded. “While you were in the shower.”
“Not that she’ll remember it,” Davy said. Ava had Alzheimer’s.
Big David said, “She’s with Carol”—his sister—“and when I told her, Mom asked me, ‘Who did he leave her for? A man or a woman?’ ”
The floor seemed to tilt slightly. What? Bobby had talked often lately of “reinventing” himself. Well. That would certainly do the trick.
“Please,” Davy said, seeing me consider this. “He left Gabby a message. A gay man would never have been that insensitive.”
Even I laughed at that, grateful to Davy for breaking the grim mood.
“You should call Mimi,” Mom said of Bobby’s mother. “But otherwise, be discreet. He may realize he’s made a mistake and want to come back. And when he does, you don’t want to have dragged your dirty laundry through everyone else’s backyard.”