Page 45 of The Light Year

“How far are you willing to take this? Like, will you go to trial?”

“I won’t have to.”

“You seem pretty sure about that.”

Barbie considers this, realizing as she does that she knows how her father will respond. “I am sure of it. My attorney made some great points, and actually, he kind of turned the tables andbullied George Mackey, which, I can tell you, doesn’t happen often.”

Carrie tosses her long hair over one shoulder and gives a sharp “Ha!”

“I’m serious. My whole life, he’s been the one who does the yelling. He makes the rules, and he decides what’s what. I’m sure me giving him pushback hasn’t sat right with him at all. For all I know, he’s writing me out of his will as we speak.”

“And how will that make you feel if he does?”

Up ahead, Jo and Jude stop for a water break and talk to Frankie, both of them peering into the pram at baby Lucas. They’re far out of earshot, so Barbie goes on. “I think I would feel okay with that. I’m a married woman and I don’t need him to support me by any means. But I would feel bad for my kids, because I think he might punish them as well. And my boys don’t deserve that. If he has money set aside for them to attend university, then that money should be theirs and not based on how he’s feeling about me.”

“Do you really think he’d stoop that low?”

Barbie squints at the way the clouds are parting, revealing a tear of blue sky and a stream of warm sunlight. The hair on her arms stands on end. She nods. “I think he would,” she says. “I really do.”

Furthermore, she’s seen him do it before. As the women walk on, Barbie is hit like a lightning bolt with a memory that she’s tucked so far into her subconscious that it feels like it never happened.

It had been the month before the fateful trip to the Jersey shore with her family, the one that led to her mother’s untimely death. Barbie, spending her last weekend at home before she and Todd got married and moved into their own little home, had overheard her parents talking in one of the sitting rooms. She’d paused outside the door, although their voices were low andeven; neither was shouting, and nothing in their tones jumped out at her.

Still, Barbie had paused, holding a stack of freshly laundered clothing that she’d intended to take to her room and pack for her move as a new bride, and listened briefly as her father spoke.

“You will do no such thing, Marion,” he’d said. “Leaving this house means leaving me, and I have a career to think of. No politician of good moral standing has a wife who lives apart from him.”

“It’s not permanent,” Marion Mackey had said. “Nothing concrete like that.”

“Yet,” George countered. “You mean nothingyet. But that’s what you’re telling me, isn't it? That you’d like to leave, set up your own house, and eventually divorce me, either legally or just unofficially, so that you can whore around and do whatever you damn well please?”

“No, George,” Marion sputtered. “There’s no one else.” She’d paused, and Barbie stood outside the door, hugging her laundry to her chest as she held her breath. “There’s no one else forme,” Marion had gone on. “But I understand that for you, there have been many other women. There’s probably another woman right now, for all I know.”

“This is not part of the discussion,” Barbie’s father said. “Not part of it at all. The bottom line is that you’re going nowhere, and no one will see me living here alone like some sad divorcee. That’s not happening.”

There was a clatter from inside the room, and Barbie sucked in a sharp breath; her mother had undoubtedly given in to the fiery temper that always seemed to trip her up. Barbie imagined her throwing a pillow from the couch and knocking over a glass figurine, or toppling an ashtray onto the Oriental rug with one brush of the hand across an end table.

“The children are grown, George. Barbara will be married in a month, and I’ve done my job here. You don’t need or want me anymore.”

“What’s gotten into you? Have you lost your damn mind?”

Marion sobbed inside the room, and Barbie nearly reached out to push the door open; she’d wanted to go to her mother in that moment, but instead, she pressed her body up against the striped wallpaper of the hallway and kept listening.

“You’ve treated me like a piece of furniture for years,” Marion Mackey sobbed, her voice sounding firm but soaked in tears. “You never loved me.”

“I never loved you?” George asked incredulously. “You married me because you wanted comfort. Children. A life of ease. And you got all those things. And now you’re done with me? No way—you’re my wife, and your job doesn’t stop just because those children you wanted so badly have grown up and left.” Barbie’s father had paused there, and she’d puzzled for a moment over this turn of phrase that her mother had used: had she been the only one to want children? Hadn’t George evenwantedto be a father?

But she didn’t have time to ponder it too deeply, as her mother had gone on.

“George,” she begged, “I can’t keep going on as the wife who pretends she doesn’t know what her husband is up to. Every time you leave for the capitol, or to go to D.C., I know that you’re with another woman. Do you know what that does to me?” Wisely, George said nothing. “You stopped touching me long ago. As my body changed, you stopped wanting it. Do you know whatthatdoes to a woman?”

George cleared his throat, his words coming out with a tinge of hesitation. “I assumed you didn’t want me to. When you—when your?—“

“Menopause, George. It’s called menopause.”

“Right.” Barbie’s father cleared his throat again. “I assumed that meant you were…”

“Undesirable?”

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