He Kept Me Secret Seven Years, Then Proposed to Her novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Suitcase

Clara refuses to hear her dying mother, who leaves a sealed letter with Tom, and at midnight Miles tells her Lydia is pregnant with his child.

I drove forty yards and parked in my father's driveway.

My hands were still shaking on the wheel.

Through the kitchen window I could see two people sitting at the table where I had eaten every breakfast of my childhood.

One was my father, with his big arms crossed over his flannel shirt.

The other was a thin woman in a camel coat that was too large for her.

I went in through the back door.

The kitchen smelled like tea nobody had drunk.

"Clara," my father said, and stood up so fast his chair scraped.

The woman stood up too.

She was fifty-five, and she looked eighty.

Her grey hair was cut short, and there was a hospital bracelet half hidden under her coat sleeve.

I had seen her face in two photographs my father kept in a drawer.

I did not need to be told.

"Hello, sweetheart," my mother said.

"Don't," I said.

My own voice surprised me. It was flat and very quiet.

"I came as soon as I could," she said. "I'm sorry to turn up like this, on a night you're dressed up."

"I'm not dressed up for you."

She looked at the red dress, and then at my face.

She seemed to understand something about it, and that made me angrier.

"Dad," I said. "Why is she here?"

"She knocked on the front door an hour ago," he said. "I didn't know what to do. I called you."

His voice was steady, but his hand on the chair back was white at the knuckles.

My mother sat down again, slowly.

"I have pancreatic cancer," she said. "The doctors say four months. Maybe five."

I waited to feel something.

What I felt was the same thing I felt in the hallway at four, listening to the wheels.

Nothing at all, and a long, long cold.

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.

"I didn't come for sympathy."

"Then what did you come for?"

"To tell you why I left."

I laughed once.

It was an ugly sound, and my father looked at me with sad, worried eyes.

"Twenty-four years," I said. "You had twenty-four years to tell me. You had a phone. You had a stamp."

"I tried to write."

"Everyone says that."

"Clara, there is a part of it you don't know."

"It isn't only about your father and me. It's about someone else, and she has a right to be told."

"Stop."

"If you'll just let me say..."

"I said stop."

I put my palm flat on the table.

"I stood through one speech tonight and took it," I said.

"I am not taking another one."

"You don't get to walk in on the worst day of my life and make it about your last wish."

My mother's mouth shook.

She did not argue.

I will give her that.

She reached into her coat and took out a long cream envelope, soft at the corners from being carried.

She did not hold it out to me, because she could see I would not take it.

She held it out to my father.

"Tom, please," she said. "Keep this. When she's ready."

"I don't think she's going to be ready," my father said gently.

"Then keep it anyway."

He took it, because he has never been able to refuse a person who is tired.

My mother stood up one more time and buttoned the big coat.

"I'm at the Harbor Inn, room six," she said. "I'm not going anywhere, Clara. I'm too sick to go anywhere."

She went out the front door.

I listened to her steps on the porch, slow, and not at all like a suitcase.

When the car pulled away my father put the envelope in the drawer with the two photographs.

"You don't have to read it," he said.

"I'm not going to."

"All right."

"Dad, I'm leaving Westbrook."

He did not ask why.

He did not ask about the dress, or the key, or the party next door that we could both still hear through the walls.

"There's a clinic in Providence," I said. "They offered me a job in the spring. I told them no."

"Because of him."

I stared at him.

"Clara. I'm sixty-one. I'm not blind. I have watched that boy's car in the garage every Tuesday for seven years."

My face went hot, and then it crumpled.

My father put down the kettle and came around the table.

He held me while I cried into his shirt, which smelled of pine and machine oil.

"I should have said something," he said into my hair. "I thought if I kept quiet you'd tell me when you wanted to."

"I never wanted to," I said. "I wanted him to."

At midnight I was lying on my childhood bed with the red dress on the floor and a suitcase open on the desk.

Gravel hit my window.

I knew the pattern. Two small stones. A pause. One more.

He had done it since he was fourteen.

I opened the window.

Miles stood in the dark between our gardens in his good suit, with no tie and his hair a mess.

His left eyebrow had its thin white scar from a fall off that wall.

His face looked ten years older than it had that morning.

"Clara. Please come down."

"No."

"I need to tell you something I've told no one."

"Tell Lydia."

"I can't tell her this," he said. "I don't remember sleeping with her."

I stared at him.

"Not that night, not any of it," he said.

"I woke up in her apartment in April. I couldn't remember anything after the second drink."

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