three-hour drive to Maine,” I lied. “Afterward, I thought maybe you could follow me back down to Winslow. We could have a mother-daughter dinner. You could spend the night.”
She thought about it, but I knew she’d agree. For some inexplicable reason my mother was always trying to get invited to my house up in Winslow. She liked the university setting, and my “tiny cottage” (her words), and she liked that I cooked for her. I knew that she’d drive me to Maine if it meant she could come to Winslow.
“Okay, darling,” she said. “How exciting. A spontaneous trip to Maine, just you and me.”
It took a few hours to get her ready but we were on the road by noon, me driving her old Volvo. I hadn’t properly slept in about thirty hours, and the thought of spending another four hours behind the wheel of a car was not a pleasant one, but everything had gone perfectly. And it was nearly over.
We spent most of the trip talking about my father. “I hope he doesn’t expect conjugal relations,” she said, not for the first time.
“You’re not even married, so it would hardly be conjugal,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re not even going to recognize him. He’s not the same as he was before going to prison.”
“I should hope not.”
“He can’t be alone in the house. Not at night anyway. He has panic attacks. You don’t need to be near him at all times, but he needs to know where you are.”
“Yes, you’ve told me.”
I had told her, several times. Still, I knew she wasn’t prepared for what had become of her ex-husband. He had always had quirks and phobias. He was scared of the dark, scared of crossing city streets, scared of sitting in the backseats of cars. It was hard to understand, because he was also a man who had zero fear of speaking in front of large audiences, a man who would sneak out of his wife’s bedroom after she had fallen asleep, and let his mistress into the house, and have sex with her on the living room couch, a man who had climbed halfway up the outside of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown on a bet. But that side of my father, the reckless side, had disappeared after what had happened with Gemma, his second wife. He’d met her after the divorce with my mother had been finalized; he’d been living at a hotel on the Old Brompton Road in London. Gemma Daniels was an aspiring novelist, one year younger than me, who had probably come to my father’s favorite pub for the sole reason of meeting him. They became inseparable, marrying only six months after they’d met. One of the drawbacks to living in London for my father was that the English tabloids cared about the bad behavior of writers almost as much as they cared about the bad behavior of footballers and pop stars. My father and Gemma were photographed having screaming matches on the street; they were chided in headlines such as “Dirty Davie and His Child Bride.” This was all before the accident, before my father plowed his 1986 Jaguar into a tree after drunkenly leaving a weekend house party late on a Saturday night. Gemma was in the passenger seat and broke her neck when she went through the windshield. My father, who always wore a seat belt, was uninjured. He managed to call for an emergency vehicle, but he didn’t manage to exit the Jaguar to check on Gemma. It wouldn’t have made a difference. She had died instantly. Still, word got out that he had been found cowering in his vehicle, his wife sprawled across the roadside hedge. It was deemed manslaughter by gross negligence, and my father was sent to prison for two years. The sentence was cut to one year on appeal, and he’d been released in early September. I visited him where he’d been staying at a friend’s house in the Cotswolds and asked him to come back to America, to live with my mother. David still had substantial money, and my mother, after leaving her teaching because of a disagreement with her department head, had been struggling to pay the bills. Monk’s House was in a reverse mortgage. My father, tears in his eyes, had agreed to move back to Connecticut. “And you’re not far away, Lil. You’ll come and visit all the time, won’t you?” My father, who