tell her she had loved her but never knew how to show it. Anything would have been better than the raw hatred she had met at her hands and seen in her eyes for the ten years she had endured before her mother left her. But now she could not ask her.
“There's a very simple answer to that, Gabbie,” Frank said, wiping his eyes. “She couldn't love anyone. She had nothing to give. I'm sorry to speak ill of the dead, but she was rotten to the core, mean as a snake. There was something wrong with her. No single human being can be that hateful. I always thought it was my fault. For the first five years of our marriage I thought it was me, that I had disappointed her somehow, or wasn't good enough, or had failed her. And then I realized it had nothing to do with me. It was her. It was a lot easier after that. I just felt sorry for her, but she still wasn't easy to live with.
“What she did to you is unforgivable, and you'll have to live with the scars of it for the rest of your life. You'll have to decide if you have it in your heart to forgive her, or if you just want to turn your back on her, as she did you, and forget her. But whatever you decide, you have to know that it had nothing to do with you. Any other human being in the world, except those two you were related to, would have loved you. It was just bad luck. You wound up with rotten parents. Maybe that answer's too easy for you, but I think that's what it was. She was a terrible person. There was something very important missing in her, and always would be. If she were here today, she wouldn't be able to give you the answer either. She never had any love in her heart from the first day I met her. She was very beautiful, and a lot of fun sometimes in the beginning, but not for long. The meanness came out real quick, as soon as we were married. And that was it, until she died. It had nothing to do with you, Gabbie. You were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and in the wrong line up in heaven, when they handed out the parents.”
That was it, then? she wondered. As simple as that? But as she listened to him, she knew it was true, it had nothing to do with her, and never had. She had her answer. It was all an accident of fate, a freak of nature, a collision of two planets that had never been meant to coexist side by side, and she had gotten caught in the resulting explosion. There was no answer to the question of why she had never loved her. Eloise Harrison Waterford had never loved anyone. She had no love to give, not even to her own daughter. And Gabbie felt oddly peaceful now as she listened. She knew that she had come to the end of the road finally, and she could go home now. It had been an odyssey that had taken her twenty-three years to accomplish. Other people's took longer. But she had been brave enough to face hers. She had wanted the answers. And she had the courage to go through the ordeals it had taken to get there. They had been right all along, all of them. She was strong. And she knew that now too. They couldn't hurt her with it now. She had survived them.
They asked her to stay for dinner that night, and she enjoyed being with them. The idea that Frank had been her stepfather for thirteen years and she'd never known him somehow touched her. And Jane was a lovely woman. She was a widow too, and they'd been married for three years and obviously loved each other. She said that Frank was a mess when she found him, and thanks to Eloise, was beginning to hate women, and she'd fixed that. And he laughed at her version of the story.
“Don't believe a word of that, Gabbie. She was a lonely widow and I rescued her, right from under the nose of some rich old fool from Palm Beach. I married her before he knew what hit him.” He smiled broadly as he said it.