Page 12 of Truly, Madly, Deeply

“Bullshit.”

Mom and Dad stared at her, mouths agape.

“People change? Sometimes they grow apart? It’s not your fault?” She scoffed. “I’m not actually asking for the intimate”—Mom and Dad cringed in perfect synchronicity—“details of your relationship, but I’m your daughter and I think I deserve more than empty platitudes.” That was a reasonable ask, wasn’t it? “You’ve been married thirty-three years and I’ve been alive for twenty-seven of them. Are you just giving up?” She dug her toe into the carpet and blinked up at the ceiling, eyes burning. “Throwing in the towel?”

Over thirty years and a whole life they’d built together, boom. Gone.

“We are not throwing in the towel.” Mom had the audacity to smile. Smile. It made Truly want to bare her teeth and growl. “Your father and I aren’t throwing anything away.”

“We’re taking some time,” Dad reiterated, as if she wasn’t already committing this entire conversation to memory. As if it wouldn’t keep her up tonight. Haunt her dreams. “We’ve discussed what this time for us means. We plan to sort out what we each want going forward and whether we want the same thing.”

“How much time?”

“Three months,” he said.

“Three months!”

Any amount of time was too long, but three whole months? Wouldn’t that much time apart just make it harder for them if they—when they got back together?

“We don’t want you to worry,” Mom added. “The only reason why we decided to bring this up now—rather, why your father decided to blurt it out—”

“Hey now. Truly deserved to know. We agreed on that.”

“I never said she didn’t. I’m not taking umbrage with what you said, just how you said it.”

Truly shoved her sleeves up her arms. “Guys, it’s not—”

“I didn’t hear you telling her, either, Diane. You had an opening and you stalled, talking about your botany club. Someone needed to rip off the Band-Aid.”

Christ. Was it hot in here? Or was she just having a hot flash? Could you get those in your twenties? “Guys. How you told me isn’t the issue—”

“It’s a preservation society, not a club.”

“Oh, my sincerest apologies.”

“Was that sarcasm?”

“Better sarcasm than passive aggression.”

Truly scratched at her throat, the pearl-adorned buttoned collar she’d slipped on beneath her sweater suddenly confining. God, was that—was that a rash? Hives? Had she ever even had hives before? Was she showing a latent allergy to something in Nonna Luzzatto’s bouche de dame? Or was she just allergic to conflict?

Mom and Dad never fought.

Never.

“You are calling me passive-aggressive?”

“If the shoe fits.”

“Pot meet kettle, Stan.”

“Why did you say my name like you’re imagining an extra a in it?”

“Are you implying that I’m calling you—”

“Just stop it!”

Any other time, it would’ve been comical how Mom and Dad froze, twin expressions of regret and shame etched on their faces. Truly couldn’t find any humor in the situation, in her parents looking like scolded children. She was the child. Adult child, but child. Not them, her.

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