Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,40

didn’t. Did I want to set down all that anger?

Of course I did.

I let out a long sigh before saying, “I just don’t know how to do that.”

She leaned a little closer, waiting for more.

I’d already started. Might as well finish.

“I always kind of thought that forgiveness would come with time,” I said. “That the bitterness would slowly fade like a scar until I couldn’t even really find it anymore if I looked. But that’s not what happened. It didn’t fade. It hardened. Other things around it faded, but the memory of the day you left is still as sharp as if it just happened. I can still see your car pulling out of the driveway. I can hear the pop of the tires as they rolled over those seeds from that Chinese tallow tree. I can see the side of your face, absolutely still like a wax figure as I banged on the window. I can feel every emotion I experienced that day in slow motion. If anything, the memories have gotten stronger.”

Those memories were tied to other memories, of course, and there was no way I was going to share anything more with her. But what I was saying was true enough. “I know that forgiveness is healthy. I know the only person you hurt when you hold on to bitterness is yourself. But I literally wouldn’t even know how to start. How do you forgive people? How does it even work?”

These were meant to be rhetorical questions.

“You’re in luck,” Diana said then. “I happen to be kind of an expert on forgiveness.”

“Who have you had to forgive?” I asked. As far as I could tell, she was far more likely to be the victimizer than the victim.

“Myself, for starters,” she said. “And then lots of other people. You don’t get to be my age without disappointments. My parents, in some ways. Various friends. Your dad.”

“Dad?” I said, like, Please. “Dad is perfect.”

“He’s hardly perfect.”

“He was good to you.”

“Yes, he was.”

“He was good to you, and you cheated on him.”

She snapped to attention. “I never cheated on your dad.”

I gave her a look, like, I know all about it.

“Is that what he told you?”

“That’s what he told Aunt Caroline. I just overheard him.”

“I did not cheat on your father,” she declared again.

“You left him for another man,” I said, like, Case closed.

“Yes. But I didn’t cheat.”

I couldn’t help it. I crossed my arms.

“The semester I came up here as a visiting professor, I was desperately lonely,” she said then. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with Wallace. But I sat by myself every day at lunch—the art teachers were a strangely snobby crew—and he started sitting with me every day. He was terribly funny. And charming. He wore these gray cable-knit sweaters, and he had the most wonderful gravelly voice. He always smelled like gingerbread. I don’t know how to describe it. We just had a spark. The more I saw him, the more I wanted to see him. His wife had left him not too long before we met, and we were both just so … alone. He very quickly became the best thing in my life up here. And I’m sorry to say it, because your dad is a really good person, but as much as I did love him, I was never really in love with him. I married him because he was practical and helpful and good—but not because he ever swept me off my feet. I’d never felt that feeling in my life before I met Wallace. I didn’t even know it existed. It was like being caught up in a windstorm. But I never slept with him or even kissed him in all that time. We held hands a few times—passionately—but that was it.”

Diana rearranged herself on the sofa and kept going.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in love—”

I shook my head.

“But it’s a hell of a thing. It’s all-consuming. You can’t think about anything else. There I was, middle-aged but consumed with fire like a teenager. I didn’t just want to be with Wallace, I needed to. I came up with a plan that I would wait until after you left for college. It was only two more years. I figured I could hold out that long. But then, on the night I confessed my feelings to Wallace—and the plan—he told me that he was sick.”

Diana closed her eyes for a second. Then she went on. “He had a