Page 160 of Let's Kiss and Tell

“God, Lucy, he didn’t cheat on me,” my mom interrupts me with a roaring sigh.

My face collapses. The ground shatters and the walls cave in. I’m positive I heard her correctly, but I don’t understand.

“What?”

She looks down, shaking her head. The room feels so silent, like you could hear a pin drop over this plush carpet.

“When you were a kid, we were having problems.” My mom looks at me, pain in her eyes. “Fighting all the time. God, all we would do was fight.” She exhales. “We weren’t intimate anymore; every single little thing turned into an argument. It was bad, Lucy, it didn’t even feel like we were married sometimes. We were so unhappy…”

I don’t know where she’s going with this. I feel like I’m trapped in a haunted house that I willingly entered and now can’t escape.

“So, what happened?” I manage to say, not even sure if I want to know.

“We talked about separating…and we did.” She looks down again, like she can’t even look at me.

“What?” I jerk my head in confusion. “Youseparated? When?!”

“When you were just a kid,” she says. “You were, I don’t know, six? Seven?”

“I don’t understand.” I push on my temples. “How were you separated? We all lived here together.”

“You were so young, you wouldn’t remember,” she says. “But for months your dad stayed with your uncle Frank. He never actually slept here.”

I want to tell her to pause, rewind, and clarify. I have so manyquestions, but before I can even begin to think of my first one, she continues.

“It was the end for us, Luce. We were getting divorced. It was over. We just didn’t know how to tell the family.” My mom looks at me. “And then one day he comes home and I could tell he was crying. There was a woman in his department he confided in, and one thing led to another—” She stops herself. “It only happened once and he immediately regretted it. He told me that he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to be with anyone else other than me and he wanted to make it work.”

A breath escapes me. Every single hair on my body is standing, and I feel nauseated. Sick to my stomach. There are a million questions I could ask in this moment, but none of them would be conducive to a productive conversation.

“Mom…” I barely get out.

“I told him that I did things too…things I also regretted but I was just afraid to tell him.” My mom nods somberly like she’s no longer with me in this room, but she’s there with my dad…or maybe someone else.

I want to travel back to thirty seconds ago before I knew any of this. I regret asking and I don’t want to know the rest, but I need to.

“Why didn’t you go through with the divorce?” I ask.

“We didn’t want to,” she says firmly. “I loved your father. I lovedyou.We both realized that we were being stupid and we wanted to make things work. So, we did. We were stronger and happier than we had ever been.” My mom’s expression turns grim. “Then a few months later, your father gets a call from Natalie…”

“Wait…” I say, now catching up to where we are in the story. The part of the story that intersects with the details that I’m finally familiar with.

“He was conflicted. He didn’t know what to do,shedidn’t know what to do.”

My stomach twists and my eyes begin to swell. “Jesus Christ.”

“We cried, we fought, but we both knew that we still loved each other. That whatever happened or we did, we would get through it because we would rather go through it with each other than alone.”

I’m having difficulty breathing. Everything feels like it’s spinning, and my eyes become bleary. I don’t know what to say, what to do, what to think. Everything that I thought I knew has been completely turned on its head and my life is not my life. Everything that I believed and stood for has been crushed. The people who raised me are not the people I thought they were. I don’t even know what way is up or down or left or right.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I cry.

“Because you didn’tneedto know those things, Lucy. What good would it have done? You were a child. And it was mine, your father, and Natalie’s decision to continue our lives the way we did. I’m only telling you this now because you asked…and because you’re an adult. Because you know that love is complicated and that there is no right or wrong way to live our lives. That people make mistakes and all we can do is learn from them and try to do better…that love is messy.”

I try to look anywhere else but at my mom, but she brings my attention back to her.

“When your father and I decided to stay with each other, we knew that was a decision nobody would understand, and that’s okay,” my mom says. “Because nobody will understand our relationship except the two of us.”

I try to blink away the burning in my eyes. “How can you still say you love each other after all of that?”