hall that was beige and white marble and led into a living room with a spectacular view, all the way to the ocean, with a terrace outside. There were comfortable seating areas and an outdoor fireplace for chilly nights. She led them outside, invited them to sit down, and offered them something to drink, which they refused. She excused herself for a minute, called someone on her cellphone, and canceled a lunch date. She said something important had come up and she was sorry, and then turned her full attention to her daughters.
“I’m sorry. I don’t even know what to say, I’m so stunned to see you. I didn’t think I’d ever get to see you again. I thought by now, you’d forgotten me,” she said in a wistful voice. She seemed like a gentle person, but who knew what she had been like in her youth. She might have mellowed with age.
“We thought you were dead,” Gemma said with her usual bluntness. Their mother nodded and wasn’t surprised.
“I know he told you that when you were younger. I thought by now he’d have told you the truth.”
“It would have made him a liar. I guess he didn’t want to admit that,” Kate said more diplomatically. “We found your divorce papers in the safe after he died. We never knew you were divorced. That’s what made me look for you online. There was no death certificate with the other papers.” It was obvious why not now. “And we found the relinquishment papers,” she said more softly. “It was too late to ask Dad what really happened, so we wanted to see you. We would have wanted to meet you anyway,” she added, “now that we know you’re alive.”
“I made a terrible mistake. The worst mistake of my life,” she said, referring to the papers she had signed. She went to an outdoor bar then, and poured them each a glass of water, and one for herself, and sat down with them. “I suppose you want to know what happened.” She was grateful for the chance to tell them herself, and was suddenly glad they hadn’t heard it from their father, who might have told them a different version of the story. The gospel according to JT. She knew he had never forgiven her for what she’d done, and the punishment had been severe, a life sentence for her, which he thought appropriate in the circumstances, and most of it had nothing to do with their children.
“I was nineteen when I met Jimmy. He was twenty-one. He was an itinerant ranch hand, going from ranch to ranch and town to town. My father was a minister, and he didn’t want me to be with him. He said he’d never amount to anything. He was wrong about that. I married him anyway, and had you ten months later,” she smiled at Kate, “and Gemma a year after that. I worked at an all-night diner when your father came home from work, and he took care of you while I worked. Times were hard in Texas then, there had been a drought, crops were bad, money was tight, we could barely afford to feed you and ourselves. They used to give me leftover food at the diner. Most of the time, that was all we had to eat. We were dirt poor, with no future on the horizon. And your father…he wasn’t an easy man. He had a vision and he expected me to follow him. He expected me to live by his rules, and do what he said. When you got sick, we couldn’t take you to a doctor. My parents helped when they could. I never met Jimmy’s family. They were from another part of Texas, and most of them were dead or in jail. His father had died in a bar fight. Jimmy was no different from most ranch hands, except that he was smarter and stronger and tougher, and he expected me to follow him blindly. I was madly in love with him. It was hard not to be. He was dazzling and he expected me to follow him off a cliff if he said so, without questioning him, and I got scared. I was terrified about what would happen if one of you got really sick, or he did. We should have been on welfare but he was too proud. He tried to save every penny he could, which meant we had even less to live on.