had told me about the rest of it: how dank and loamy it was in there, how even when I didn’t have my period, so much was going on, shifting and softening, leaving slippery clues for me to follow. As I floated toward sleep, I dreamily replayed the night’s events again and again—shirt up, hands on breasts—until an utterly new commotion unleashed itself inside me. An unfamiliar wave swelled from a center deep within and ricocheted through me, licking every nerve and cell along the way.
What just happened?
I felt fully awake again, trying to figure out the steps I had taken, wanting to memorize the path to this extraordinary place, but it eluded me. I drifted in and out of a fitful sleep.
* * *
“Wake up, Rennie.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder and pulled the sheet over my head.
“Rennie, please.”
Even before I turned and saw her face, I could hear a peculiar quaver in my mother’s whisper and smell the remnants of the Pinot Noir. Her voice sounded hesitant and desperate. The mattress sank where she lowered herself beside me, and my body stiffened against the depression. I kept my eyes shut and steadied my exhalations.
“Rennie!” The whisper, more urgent now, still held an unfamiliar tremor. She pulled down the sheet. “Please wake up.”
Even with her beside me, hovering over me, her breath warm against my ear, I didn’t want to abandon thoughts of Ted. Why was my mother in my room in the middle of the night? For a moment, I panicked: Did she have some sixth sense that I’d just made my first foray into sex? Or had Peter betrayed me and told her that I’d been sneaking off, getting into trouble? I turned away from her, half asleep, in no mood for a lecture. Still floating from the sensation of what had just happened, I didn’t want to lose track of it.
“Rennie, wake up. Please wake up.”
Just go away, I thought.
“Sweetheart. Please. I need you.”
At this, I opened my eyes. Malabar was in her nightgown, her hair mussed. I sat up.
“Mom, what’s wrong? Is everything okay?”
“Ben Souther just kissed me.”
I took in this information. Tried to make sense of it. Couldn’t. I rubbed my eyes. My mother was still there beside me.
“Ben kissed me,” my mother repeated.
A noun, a verb, an object—such a simple sentence, really, and yet I couldn’t comprehend it. Why would Ben Souther kiss my mother? It wasn’t that I was naive; I knew that people kissed people they weren’t supposed to. My parents had not shielded me from stories of both of their transgressions during their marriage, and in this way, I knew more about infidelity than most children. I was four when my parents broke up, six when my father remarried, seven when that new marriage started to fall apart, and eight when my mother was finally able to wed Charles, who’d been separated from but still married to his first wife when they met.
Ben was married, too, of course, to Lily. The Southers had been married for thirty-five years.
Mom and Charles. Ben and Lily.
The four of them had been couple-friends for as long as my mother and stepfather had known each other, about a decade now.
That’s what really stumped me about the kiss—the friendship between Ben and Charles. The two men adored each other. Their affection went back some fifty years, maybe more, to a time when they were young enough to skip stones across the flat, gray water of Plymouth Bay, where they pretended to be Pilgrims and built forts in the dunes, fending off imaginary enemies with stick muskets. Over the years, they’d hunted and fished together, dated each other’s sisters, been ushers at each other’s weddings, and become godfathers to each other’s sons.
“What do you mean, Ben kissed you?” Suddenly I was fully awake. I pictured her slapping him in response. That was something my mother might do. “What happened?”
“We took a walk after dinner, just the two of us, and he pulled me into him, like this.” My mother crossed her arms around herself, simultaneously demonstrating Ben’s caress and embracing its memory. Then she collapsed the rest of the way onto the bed, smiling, and stretched out alongside me.
Apparently, there had been no slap.
“I still can’t believe it. Ben Souther kissed me,” she said.
What was it about her voice tonight?
“He kissed me, Rennie.”
There it was again: joy. A tone I hadn’t heard from her since before Charles’s strokes. Joy had fallen from the night sky and