Something She's Not Telling Us - Darcey Bell Page 0,11
cook anything too delicious.”
Charlotte laughs, a giggle she makes when someone (usually Eli) kills a hope that she knows is unrealistic. Each time Rocco brings over a girlfriend, Charlotte hopes she’s the one, though she hates the idea of the one. She wants her younger brother to be happy, to have someone to love him and help him, someone kind and decent and conscious. Or at least sane.
In therapy, Charlotte and Ted have discussed the possibility that Charlotte might be ever so slightly possessive and territorial about her brother—the way she is about her daughter. And maybe that’s why she’s so critical—hypercritical—of Rocco’s women.
But Charlotte didn’t imagine what those women actually did. Mae-Lynn came to dinner with a bag of organic broccoli crowns and a beaker of distilled water in which she insisted they steam them. The girlfriend after that, Kathy, stole from them, never anything expensive, but always something treasured, which was the point. Daisy’s beloved stuffed giraffe, Eli’s favorite fountain pen, a business card from a man who told Charlotte he’d developed a solution that made cut flowers last longer. Each time there was a frantic search, especially for Raffi, the giraffe. Kathy is out of Rocco’s life, but Charlotte will never forgive her for pretending to look for the toy when she had it all along. Charlotte had been so afraid that the dust kicked up by their search would bring on one of Daisy’s asthma attacks.
Rocco has trouble breaking up with these women. Underneath his surface toughness is a good guy who can’t bear to hurt anyone and has that male terror of women’s tears. He refused to believe Charlotte when she suggested that Kathy was a kleptomaniac. He didn’t end the relationship until he found, in her tote bag, a framed photo of him and Charlotte, on the steps of their childhood farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. The photo must have been taken not long before their mother burned down the house and got sent away.
Rocco couldn’t look at Charlotte when he returned the photo. She didn’t need to see his face. She knew that his expression (detached or dreamy, depending on what you wanted to see) would be just like the look on twelve-year-old Rocco in the picture.
Before Klepto Kathy, he dated a woman who ripped out her hair in clumps, and before her the cutter, and before her the nudist, and before her the one who locked herself in their bathroom and swallowed a fistful of antibiotics from the medicine chest.
The stable ones never last long. Boring, Rocco says. He jokes about his love life. But he doesn’t learn from his mistakes.
Why should Charlotte feel responsible? If she wants someone to blame (and who doesn’t?), it should be their mother, who, acting on some selfish childish romantic impulse, named them after Charlotte Bront? and Mr. Rochester. Mom should have been a character in a nineteenth-century novel; that’s how she imagined her life until Dad took off and moved to the city to live with an intellectual property lawyer who consulted for his law firm.
That stress must have been too much for him. He died two years later, of a heart attack.
Mom survived, more or less. After Dad left, she evicted their tenant, who taught at a college nearby and lived in the attic rental apartment in their family home—on the farm they’d inherited from Mom’s parents and rented out to local farmers.
Mom moved into the apartment and left the house—and Rocco—to Charlotte. When that failed to bring Dad back, Mom really went off the rails. After she burned down the house, a fire that almost killed Rocco, she had a choice: either jail or a stay at a hospital, the latter of which she agreed to because its inmates included movie stars. After a while she was released, more or less cured. For a short time she lived with Rocco in an apartment in Hudson while Charlotte went to college. Neither Mom nor Rocco did well, and Rocco got into trouble, drinking and doing stuff that Charlotte doesn’t like to think about now.
Not long after Rocco left home, Mom moved to Mexico. Now she’s living in Oaxaca, still partly on the money from the family farm, which they sold to Andrew John, the Argentine billionaire hobby farmer for whom Rocco works now, trucking perfect vegetables to the Greenmarket in the city.
When Rocco first went to work for Andrew John, he had been drinking heavily. He’d been twice in and out of rehab, for