Page 140 of Again, In Autumn

“It started that summer,” I answer.

“Oh my God!” She shakes the table when she violently stands. She charges out of the house, slamming the door.

Heddy begins, “I’ll talk to her.”

“No,” I say, stopping her with my hand. “I will.”

I leave Adam and Heddy with my Dad, something I’ll apologize to him later for, and go outside. I glance at my coat, but figure I’ll be fine without it. As worked up as Francesca is right now, her heat will warm me.

She paces in the back yard. The heels of her boots stab the grass.

I stand just at the bottom of the stairs.

Francesca glowers at me. “So, you lied to me.”

“About?”

She holds up her fingers to be ticked off. “One, that night they came over for dinner, I asked if you two were fucking that summer and you said no.”

Before I can explain, she holds up a second finger. “Two, when you said you didn’t know where Adam was this morning, you did know, didn’t you? Because he was in the room you were keeping me out of.”

“Yes.” I walk toward her. “I lied to you.”

She spits, “I knew something was going on when he kissed you. That was a comfortable kiss, not the way you kiss someone because of a mistletoe dare. It almost knocked you over. And the way you skirted around the whole, oh it’s not our first kiss, bullshit.”

“Fran, just stop walking in circles, please.”

She does, just to get up in my face and say, “And what was going on that summer? Huh?”

“We were seeing each other in secret.” She’s an inch away, close enough to spit on me, but I feel lighter after saying that short sentence. All secrets and hiding, all the pain I carried afterward, is gone. I continue, “At night. In the morning. When you and Dave weren’t around.”

“Ugh.” She backs off and makes a disgusted face. “Did you do stuff on our couch?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. We weren’t doing anything,” I insist.

“I don’t want to know what you were doing.”

“Fran, we got to know each other and…I fell in love with him.”

“You were eighteen!” she cries.

I insist, “It was real.”

“You had a perky butt and smooth skin, and he was hot and played the guitar. That was lust, Vienna, not love.”

Just to get it all out in the open, I add one final pebble to the unsteady stack of boulders she’s trying to process. “He asked me to marry him on my eighteenth birthday.”

She teeters, her eyes moving on the ground, thinking. “You were the girl he was engaged to. How did I not know about this?”

I glance back at the house, hopeful that another fire isn’t brewing inside there. “Dad came to get me before anything happened. I asked him not to tell anybody. I was embarrassed to leave, to hurt Adam, to make Dad so angry. I didn’t see or talk to Adam again until this week.”

Her teeth grind together and her nose squints. It’s the pullback of a trigger, the wiggle of a big cat ready to pounce on its prey. I prepare for her attack.

Calmly, she says, “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

I exhale. “I couldn’t Fran. I thought you’d be mad.”

“Like I am now?”

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