stay on board. They played games for a while and afterward they watched a movie and ate popcorn the cook had sent up for them. They were still in the movie theater when the others came home. They had had a great time together, and Phillip couldn’t help but comment on how different their mother was on this trip, even during their meetings about the business. She was so much more relaxed, and much more easygoing than she was at home. All she wanted was for them to have a good time. It made him even angrier that she had spent so little time with them when they were young.
“When are you going to get over that?” Liz confronted him when he said it. The three siblings sat together on deck, after Amanda, Sarah, and Olivia went to bed.
“Maybe never,” he said harshly. “I never had a mother for my entire childhood. And neither did you. Why are you so willing to forget that now?”
“Because I think she did the best she could. And she did a lot of other things for us. She was always nice when she was home. So she went away a lot. So what? Other parents do a lot of other things that are worse. I’ve been home all the time for my kids. How do I know they won’t be pissed off at me someday for something else? You can’t get it right all the time. It’s easy for you—you don’t have kids. No one is ever going to be telling you what you did wrong. You get to stay a kid all your life and be pissed at her. And look how hard she tries now. She knocks her socks off every year to give us a vacation so we can all be together. She’s still trying, Phillip, and you never give her a break for the past. That seems really wrong to me.”
“Well, listen to Miss Therapy,” he said angrily. “You don’t ever get back your childhood, Liz, and as far as I’m concerned she ruined mine. I never had a mother for all those years.”
“Yes, you did. She wasn’t perfect—well, neither is anyone else’s. And looking at her now, she seems pretty goddamned good to me.”
“That’s up to you. I don’t happen to see it that way.”
“That’s unfortunate for you. You’re never going to be able to forgive yourself, or anyone else, until you learn to forgive her. Are you so perfect? Haven’t you ever screwed something up?”
“Not the childhood of four children. That’s why I don’t have kids.”
“I feel sorry for you,” Liz said quietly, and John stepped in and changed the subject. He didn’t say it, but he thought Liz had a point. Their mother went all out to entertain them royally every year, and he had to admit, she was wonderful with their kids. It made up for a lot with him. And he had never been as unhappy as Phillip. For him, Granibelle and their father had been enough. And when their mother was home, it was icing on the cake. For Phillip, as long as she was gone, nothing else had ever been enough. But he wasn’t a happy person, even now. He was always grumbling about something, and he had a wife who withheld approval and affection, which their mother never had. She had been gone, but whenever she came home, they knew that they were loved. Phillip and Cass had just refused to accept her as she was, recognize that she had tried, and forgive her her mistakes, even now. It seemed like a waste of energy to John. Forty years of anger seemed like an unfair sentence to him. John thought their mother didn’t deserve the punishment she’d been given, particularly with all she’d done for them in other ways, and still did. They dropped the subject after that, but Phillip was still annoyed. He thought his brother and sister were far too easy on her, and Cass was right. If he didn’t work for her, he would have taken his distance from her too.
The next day they left St. Tropez and headed back toward Antibes. They didn’t stop at the Hotel du Cap again, but docked outside the old port instead, and went into town by tender, to wander around the ramparts, and Olivia took them all by cab to a little church she knew on top of a hill with a lighthouse, which overlooked the entire coast, and had a breathtaking