Page 65 of April Flowers

Vic couldn’t look at her. He stared directly at his hands on the table.

“I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen him before,” he said. “I panicked and called his name. Frank! He stopped and turned around to look at me. He was so surprised that I think he might have dropped a few things. I saw him say something to you, something about waiting in the car, maybe. He put some stuff down and came over. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. I realized then that I was the ghost he’d been dreading all these years. Iwas sweating, although it wasn’t cold outside. And he looked at me and said, ‘Why now?’ I’ll never forget that.”

Margot repeated it. “Why now?”

It mystified her.

“I don’t blame him. I would have been freaked out, too.” Vic sipped his wine.

“What else did he say?” Margot asked.

“He looked at me, blinking a lot, like maybe he thought he could make me disappear. And then I told him that my mother had died. That hit him like a ton of bricks. He started crying right there in the parking lot.”

Margot realized that all this time, in Vic’s story, she was waiting in the car, eager to head back to her garden. She’d been clueless.

“He told me he couldn’t talk right then,” Vic said. “But he asked me to meet him at Ralph’s later that night. I agreed. I thought I was going to faint. I think he wanted to hug me, but instead, he backed away through the parking lot and got back in the car with his daughter. With you, I mean.”

Margot put both hands over her mouth.

Vic raised his shoulders.

They both knew what happened next in the story. They both knew that immediately after that, Frank and Margot had been in a car accident that had taken Frank’s life.

“I heard the accident from several blocks away,” Vic said. “I didn’t want to believe it was him. I went to Ralph’s that night to meet him, and everyone at the bar was talking about how Frank Earnheart was dead and how Lillian was out of her mind with grief. They said that she was already blaming her youngest child. Some of them said that she was never kind to her youngest, that she’d only had her youngest to get over ‘what had happened.’ I knew that ‘what had happened’ was me, the baby Frank had fathered with his mistress, my mother. At that moment, I knew Ihad to get as far away from Nantucket as I could. I stayed awake all night in my hotel and drove to the ferry first thing in the morning.”

In her own life, Margot knew what had happened next. Lillian had fallen apart, and Margot had run away. Twenty years had passed.

“Why did you come back?” she whispered.

Vic rubbed his chest. “I came to Nantucket last summer to visit my friend Marc. He’s getting married out here next week. And he invited me to an engagement party of sorts.”

“I know. I’m doing the flowers for his wedding.”

“Small world,” Vic said, offering the first soft smile Margot had seen in a while. “I went back to Ralph’s, and lo and behold, the guy remembered me.”

“He has a good eye,” Margot said.

“That he does. He told me he was sorry about my father and asked if I’d ever met him. I said I had, but only briefly. I didn’t tell him that I’d met him right before the accident. I asked him about Frank’s family, and he explained that all his children were gone and that Lillian was holed up by herself in that house alone. The thought of that broke my heart. I told him that, and Ralph said, ‘She did it to herself. She was cruel to her children. She was cruel to everyone except Frank. Ironically, Frank cheated on her. That only made her want to be kinder to him.’

“I felt like I owed it to Lillian to meet her and explain myself. But the minute we met, it was like I just couldn’t tell her the truth. She took an immediate liking to me. She invited me out for cards, and then I invited her out to a restaurant, and we started playacting the role of mother and son. I hadn’t seen my mother in almost twenty years at this point, and I’d never had a father. I found myself feeling loved in a way I hadn’t in many, many years.”

Margot’s eyes were heavy with tears.

“Anyway,” he said, “I started reading the journals here and there to get a better sense of who my father was. It’s funny to see him through Lillian’s eyes. She thought he was the sun, the moon, and the stars. He could do no wrong. Not even the affair made her stop loving him.”

“She really did love him like crazy,” Margot whispered.

“I wish I could learn from her,” Vic said.

“What do you mean?”

Vic laughed. “I wish I could love that hard.”

It was the first time Margot realized she’d learned something from her mother.

She’d learned how to love Noah with all her heart.

When Vic finished his story, Margot suggested they walk down to the boardwalk and grab dinner. She was starving after such an immense story. Vic agreed, although when they got to the restaurant, neither of them could focus on their food. They flew through the events of their lives, analyzing how lonely they’d been, talking about how that April day twenty years ago had inextricably altered every event that had followed.

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