Page 34 of Ten Christmases Without You
Emmy covered her legs with the blanket and set the plate in her lap. “That sounds like her. I loved the story of how you two met. I used to make her tell me over and over. But now I wish I’d had her tell me other things about herself. She didn’t share anything else?”
“To be honest, she didn’t really talk much about her younger days.”
“She didn’t tell the love of her life about any of her experiences? That doesn’t sound like Mom.”
“I never pressed her.” He paused as if there was something he wanted to say.
“What is it, Dad?”
“She was more private than you think and had lots tucked away in that mind of hers.”
“Like what?”
“Therewasone thing she didn’t include when she told you girls the story of how we met.”
“What was it?”
“You know the story of the little café on the corner of her block where she’d have coffee and sketch out her design ideas—that day that I first saw her, she’d been crying.”
“Why didn’t she tell us that?”
“I suppose it wasn’t as romantic, so she left it out.”
He paused, the line buzzing in the silence.
“I couldn’t bear to see sadness in such a stunning woman,” he continued. “I went over to her and asked if she had a minute. I had no idea what I was going to say, but I wanted her attention.”
“What did you say was your reason for needing a minute?”
“I told her I was lost, even though I’d been living in Paris for months. I asked her for directions to the Louvre. It was the first thing I thought of.” He laughed.
“Did you ever find out why she was crying that day?” Emmy asked.
He cleared his throat. “Just a bad day at work. That’s all she told me.”
Emmy could definitely understand a bad workday. But, other than the time she’d caught her mom packing up clothes during her struggle with cancer, Emmy couldn’t remember seeing her mother flustered.
“She must have gone through something awful to make her cry in public.”
“I know. Your mother hated to show emotion in public. She used to tell me that her emotions and her face without makeup were meant for my eyes only. She viewed those two things as intimate. The world was meant to see the external Anne, but only we got to see what was underneath.”
A memory came to mind of her mother, dressed in a long nightgown, her feet bare on the kitchen floor as she giggled with Emmy and Madison, making pancakes in the early morning before school. Her tangled hair was tucked behind her ears, and she didn’t have a stitch of makeup on. Emmy always thought that was when she looked the most radiant. It seemed to be when she was the happiest.
“That sounds like her.” Emmy picked at her bagel. “So was her job why you two just moved to Tennessee together?”
“It didn’t happen quite that way. I saw her again and then, after a while, a day didn’t go by when we weren’t catching up. I told her I wanted to eventually move home. I wrestled with leaving after the semester. Some of the students in my cohort were applying for jobs abroad and I considered it. I knew I might have to stay for her, but I struggled with being so far away from the small-town culture I grew up in. Once we began thinking about the future, she rushed in and suggested we ‘get away.’ Those were the words she used. I thought she meant take a vacation, but she wanted to leave everything behind.”
“Why? Because of work?”
“Apart from that first day, I didn’t get the idea that she hated her job. She was a designer for Baudelaire. She was just getting started. While she worked long hours, she seemed happy. Then, one day, she said Paris wasn’t where she wanted to start a family. She wanted someplace where she could hide away, she said. She wanted a small house where she could garden and a big yard to play in. So I applied at various architecture firms back here, and when I got a job offer, we made the move.”
“I’ve never understood why she gave up her talent entirely, though,” Emmy said. “She was studying abroad and designing gorgeous clothes. That doesn’t sound like someone who wants to live in a secluded place.”
“I think when it came down to it, she decided between her love of design and her dream of family. She didn’t want to have a family in the city, but she didn’t feel she could further her fashion career in Tennessee. And the hours weren’t conducive to raising kids.”
“It didn’t matter what Mom did, she seemed so sure of her choices,” Emmy said, wishing she’d inherited that trait.
“Yes. She was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted.”
