She’d decided: She couldn’t face this day without getting a look at Dad. One look at his normal, unsuspecting, did not get the email self—that would reassure her. At least until they heard back from customer service and could decide if there was cause to pursue this at all.
And if he had gotten that big red exclamation point message? Well, let him bring it up—or not. If he seemed off, she’d know there might be something to this. Which would leave her … well, exactly where she stood.
Dad had retired early and reluctantly last year, after worsening high blood pressure flags provoked Mom’s threats to damn well give him a heart attack if he didn’t slow down. Their siblings had collectively died young, one cautionary tale after the next, and though Caroline’s parents were just creeping up on sixty, they’d spent conservatively and invested well. Why wait and risk never getting to enjoy retirement, especially with three grandbabies nearby? Now, Dad started every day with the lazy luxury formerly reserved for Sundays: reading the newspaper front to back while savoring three slow cups of coffee—though he’d crankily switched to decaf. He habitually rose as early as every other senior she knew, but that didn’t mean he liked it. Caroline never wondered where her aversion to her alarm clock came from.
Mom, who’d been a homemaker until Caroline left for college and then worked at a handbag outlet “just for fun”—fun being an obvious euphemism for “employee discount”—was the opposite, all get up and go, and collected comments that she didn’t look old enough to be a grandmother the way other people collected vinyl or coins. By now she’d be at one of her fitness classes, a rotation of yoga, water aerobics, and senior spinning. Dad poked fun at the latter title, bringing to mind the ridiculous image of oldsters getting dizzy on swivel desk chairs. But for all Caroline cared, Mom could be off turning cartwheels—as long as it meant she’d catch him alone.
She stopped at Busken Bakery for a half dozen of their heart-shaped, low-fat glazed doughnuts, which no amount of fruit-topped yogurt, egg white omelets, or eye-rolling could stop him from calling “the only edible heart-healthy breakfast in town.” Mom would frown upon this, but Caroline needed a ruse. Nothing would disarm him like fried dough.
She scarfed two of the pastries while she drove. She’d claim to be bringing leftovers. His house was only ten minutes out of the way—it was conceivable she’d detour just to treat him.
At least, she hoped so.
The morning was dreary, gray clouds sagging with the threat of rain, and the porch light still glowed as she eased the minivan into the driveway. Same old house as always. With same old Dad inside—surely. Probably combing the dining and entertainment sections by now, looking for some new restaurant or show Mom might like. He was so good at that sort of thing, the mere thought of it made her feel disloyal for giving this question any thought at all, test results be damned. He’d loved his Hannah from the day they met, married her straight out of college, and never looked back. Not like Caroline and Walt, who’d traversed the same spheres for years before taking interest in each other. The doughnuts suddenly seemed more preemptive apology than excuse.
She was halfway up the front walk when she caught sight of it: the Enquirer, in its plastic weather sleeve, leaning between the front door and the stoop. Usually, no faster could the courier toss it than Dad would be out here, waving thanks. Unease tickled the nape of her neck, but she fought the urge to turn on her heels. One small detail out of the ordinary did not mean her fears about the New Match! were being realized. The lack of sleep was clouding her thinking, swinging her suspicions willy-nilly. Two steps ago, she’d been brimming with confidence.
She grabbed the paper with her free hand, pressed the doorbell, and waited.
And waited.
No answer.
She rang again, wondering for the first time if a rogue email was the least of her worries. What if her intuition was firing for a different reason? One or both parents sick? Hurt? Could they have been robbed? She’d seen that news story about seniors as easy targets. She tried the knocker, three times, each thud of brass on brass carrying the metallic echo of mounting panic.
She was about to knock again when the door flung open, and she felt before she saw the whoosh of anger behind it. Mom glared at her through puffy eyes in a face hardened with determination, a boxer bruised to the point of staggering but adrenaline-ready for the clang signaling another round. As she registered Caroline, her relief was obvious—this was not the bell she’d thought it was—and her rage diminished to exhaustion, pale and drawn.
The older Caroline had gotten, the more she’d begun to resemble Mom outwardly, if not inwardly. She’d always kept her unruly locks longer than Mom’s dyed-to-her-natural-color bob, lest she look too much like the matriarch. But now their mannerisms had become alike, the no-nonsense way they moved about the kitchen, the unconscious habit of talking with their hands. They even grew to share physical oddities—the same mixed astigmatism, one meridian of each eye farsighted and the other near-, the same slight bunions on their left feet, the same random flare-ups of dermatitis. Now, as she took in the woman standing barefoot in her nightgown on the flowered doormat, all Caroline could think was that she didn’t look like herself at all. Which was to say she didn’t look like Caroline, either. She looked like a stranger.
“Mom?” The house was dark behind this shadowboxer version of her mother. Maybe Caroline had woken them—maybe they were sick, the kind where all you wanted was sleep. “You okay?” Mom sniffed, and Caroline almost believed she was about to invite her in, laugh whatever this was away. But she didn’t smile, didn’t speak. Instead, she seemed to shrink inward, like Owen at the end of a tantrum.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Not here.” Monotone, she eyed the newspaper and doughnuts with disgust. “Those for him?”
Caroline nodded, once—the bare minimum, as Mom’s expression made it plain this was the wrong answer. “I had some left over, from a—a meeting. But finders keepers, if you’re here alone…” She held them out, a peace offering, but Mom didn’t move. “Where’d he go?”
Mom opened her mouth as if to give some pat response, but her expression caught there, a scratched track on an old record—and what came out was part cry and part laugh, the twisted combination of a roar to back off and a whimper to pull her close.
“Mom, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”
This was a woman whose wifely restraint was legendary in Caroline’s circle. A child of messy divorce from an era when divorce still meant scandal, Hannah Shively let it be known she had solemnly vowed never to argue in front of her child. Thus, if she had something constructive to say to her husband, she’d whisper it into his ear. So infallible was her approach that the teenage Maureen and Caroline had perfected a hilariously believable SNL-style skit of the couple communicating this way even when they were alone. Rare disagreements that escalated peaked at a cold shoulder, never a confrontation, until harmony was restored, things presumably resolved offstage.
“It’s between your father and I.” With that, Mom seemed to remember whom she was talking to, but that wasn’t enough to stop the tears from spilling over. They streaked frustration down her cheeks, and she swiped at them as Caroline stood slack-jawed, clinging to an unlikely hope that the timing of this fallout was a coincidence.