father and discovered what it was like when a man really cared about me. Frankly, until this minute, I forgot all about Jim. He was a go-getter, that’s for sure.”
Closing the magazine, she reaches to put it on the rack behind her, then shudders a little before tossing it into the cart on top of some groceries, a pair of pliers, and a thick roll of electrical cable.
“You’re buying that magazine?” I ask.
“So I can get a taste of how the other half lives.”
Right. The other half that we’ll never be. We’ll never have much money, let alone a house that could go in a magazine. At least, not unless one of my dad’s so-far-out-there-it-inhabits-its-own-time-zone inventions takes off.
“Looks like the other half lives with pizza ovens,” I say, ready to make light because Mom looks a little wrecked over this.
“Money isn’t everything.” She swipes at her face with her hands, making a holy mess out of her mascara. I don’t have the heart to tell her, though. “Anyway, this is what’s meant to be. I have you and Theo. And Daddy.”
“Instead of a twenty-bazillion-square-foot house.”
Without responding, she shoves the cart to the checkout line and starts unloading with a little more force than necessary.
I can’t help flipping the magazine open to the article again. I’ve never seen anything like this place. A mongo curved staircase, room after room of total luxury, a master bedroom that kind of hurts to look at, it’s so gorgeous.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to be that rich,” I muse.
“Money doesn’t make you happy,” Mom insists, whipping carrots and lettuce out of the cart. “Money doesn’t make you laugh when you’re lonely, or make you full of contentment on Christmas morning.”
Sorry, but on Christmas morning, money can make you really happy.
I hold out a picture of a giant pool built on the edge of a patio, the water spilling over into an ocean beyond it. “Looks like money does buy something called an infinity pool overlooking the Bay of Biscayne.”
She shrugs, opening her wallet. “He wasn’t capable of loving anyone but himself,” she murmurs. Then she takes the magazine from my hand and plops it on the conveyor, the last item to be rung up. “I can’t believe I’m spending six dollars on that.”
“Did you love him?” The question sort of pops out without full brain engagement. Maybe it isn’t my place, but I really want to know.
“I … I …” She slides the credit card slowly through the machine, holding her breath a little as she always does until it clears. “I did.”
When she scribbles her name and flips the last plastic bag off the round bag holder, I can’t resist pushing a little more. “Did you love him more than Dad?”
I stay close to her while she rolls the cart to the auto-open door. I’m dying to know the answer, but kind of scared to hear it, too. I don’t want her to love anyone more than Dad.
“I loved him the way a woman loves a man she wants to change, but knows she never will.”
Which makes zero sense and strikes me as a non-answer. “What did you want to change about him?”
“I wanted him to be faithful, for one thing, which I never really could be sure he was. And I wanted him …” She thinks for a minute as we wait for a car to pass. “I wanted him to love me for who I was, and I never felt quite good enough for him. You’ll understand someday.”
Someday? I understood about ten minutes ago on a school bus.
We stop talking about it on the hike to the van, which is parked in another zip code. About halfway there, she freezes in her tracks with an SUV behind us.
“I really love Daddy,” she announces. “I mean, you and Theo are all I live for. What would I be with Jim Monroe? Rich and lonely, that’s what.”
“Maybe you’d still have us.” I guide her to the left to let the SUV by.
“I wouldn’t have you,” she insists, giving the cart a push toward the minivan. “Maybe I’d have some other kid. But not you. Not Theo.”
She reaches for the dented hatchback—a mistake of backing into Theo’s basketball hoop that would cost $2,600 to fix, so we lived with it—and yanks the door upward.
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“You wouldn’t exist, Annie.”
How does she know? “I look way more like you than Dad,” I tell her. “People always say I’m your clone.