The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Middletown

I didn't throw anything.

I read every word of it.

Then I folded the Journal in half and put it face down on my nightstand, the way I'd put Holt's governor photo on the porch.

"Frightened of Margo," I said.

"She's not wrong," Daniel said. "I'm frightened of you most days."

His phone buzzed on the quilt.

He looked at it and winced.

"My mother," he said. "She's read it. That's her fourth call since seven."

"Does she think I'm a stalker?"

"She thinks you're coming to dinner." He showed me the text. "One o'clock. Bring the girl. Bring the newspaper. I need it for the fish."

His mother lives in Middletown in a small grey Cape with a chain-link fence and a statue of the Virgin Mary in a bathtub shrine by the front walk.

She opened the door before we knocked.

She was small and sturdy, with Daniel's blue eyes in a round face and an apron that said KISS THE COOK, IT'S CHEAPER THAN A TIP.

She looked at me for a long moment.

"You're the one with the bangs," she said.

I turned and looked at Daniel.

"Your mother took my number at the party," he said. "Then she took my mother's."

"They what?"

"Your mother texts me pictures," his mother said. "You were a very serious little girl. Come in, you're letting the heat out. Did you bring the paper?"

I handed it over.

She carried it to the kitchen, spread Marjorie's garden photo flat on the counter, and dumped a pile of cod skins and bones right on her pearls.

"Best use for it," she said.

I laughed so hard I had to hold the doorframe.

Dinner was baked cod and boiled potatoes and green beans from a can, and a loaf of soda bread that she made me take two slices of.

There were photos of Daniel's father on every wall.

A big man in orange oilskins, holding up a lobster the size of a cat.

The same white boat, newer, with the same blue name on the stern.

"He'd have liked you," his mother said. "He liked a woman who stands up in a restaurant."

"You heard about that?"

"Sweetheart, all of Middletown heard about that. My hairdresser played it for me twice." She buttered her bread. "And the yacht club. My son, in a blazer, at the yacht club. His father would have died a second time."

"Ma," Daniel said.

"Eight years," she said to me, ignoring him. "He came home that August, after that summer, and sat in that chair, the one you're in, and didn't say ten words for a week. He was twenty-six years old and moping like a girl. His father took him out on the boat and made him haul traps till his hands bled."

"Ma."

"Then he shipped out for nine months and wrote letters he never mailed. I found one in the wash once. Terrible poetry."

"Margo and cargo?" I said.

His mother put down her fork and looked at her son with real pity.

"Oh, Danny," she said. "No."

After dinner she washed and I dried.

Daniel was sent out to fix the back gate, which she said had been broken since the Clinton administration.

She handed me a plate.

"That woman in the paper," she said. "She's going to keep at you."

"I know."

"She's got money and a newspaper and a lot of friends who like her parties."

"I know."

"What have you got?"

I thought about it.

I looked out the kitchen window, where her son was kneeling in the cold with a screwdriver and a gate hinge, swearing quietly.

"I've got the truth," I said. "And a lot of people who've started listening."

She nodded, slowly.

"Good," she said. "That's what we had, too, when the bank came for the boat in '91. We won."

The back door opened.

Daniel came in with grease on his hands and leaves in his hair.

"It's fixed," he said. "Mostly. Don't lean on it."

His mother took the dish towel out of my hands.

"Go on," she said. "Say it. I've been listening to him not say it for eight years. I'm sixty-two. I'd like to hear it before I die."

"Ma, for God's sake."

"Say it or I'll say it for you."

Daniel looked at me across his mother's kitchen, with the gate grease on his fingers and the cod bones in the trash on top of Marjorie's face.

"I love you," he said. "I loved you on Thames Street, and on the Cliff Walk, and every day on every ship. I didn't say it then because I couldn't stay. I can stay now. I love you."

His mother turned around and ran the tap very loudly.

"I love you too," I said, over the water. "I think I knew it on the boat when you said the buoy sees you."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever said."

"I know. That's how I knew."

His mother turned off the tap.

"Well, thank God," she said. "Now take her home. You're both making me feel young and I've got bingo at six."

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