“Was he in love with you?”
This time it was Helen who answered, very quietly. “Not while your mother was alive.”
The whole room seemed to shrink down to that table. I looked at my father, and he didn’t say a word. He didn’t deny it. He just looked down at the table with his jaw working.
Helen’s voice went gentle. “Your mother got very sick, very fast. Your father was exhausted—running himself into the ground taking care of her. You were working in another state, and none of us wanted to frighten you before we had to. So I started helping. That’s all it was, at the beginning. Helping.”
And suddenly I was remembering things I’d never questioned. Trays of food that always seemed to be in Mom’s refrigerator when I visited. Appointments that Dad, somehow, managed to keep track of even while falling apart. Fresh clean sheets on Mom’s bed when she’d gotten too weak to climb the stairs to change them herself.
“I always thought Dad did all of that,” I said slowly. “By himself.”
“Helen did most of it,” Dad said. “The cooking. The sheets. Half the appointments.”
“And Mom knew? That Helen was doing all that?”
“Yes.”
Helen swallowed hard. “For a while, she was grateful. Truly grateful.”
“For a while,” I repeated. “And then?”
Dad’s eyes went to the scratched photograph on the table.
“Then Maggie started watching us,” he said.
Nothing had happened. I need to be clear about that, because they were both so desperate for me to understand it. There was no affair. No kiss. No secret meetings in parked cars. Nothing you could point to and call a betrayal.
But my mother, dying in a bed upstairs, had seen something the two of them hadn’t even admitted to themselves yet. She’d watched Helen make my exhausted father laugh during the worst year of his life. She’d watched my father sit in silence next to Helen without having to perform being okay, without having to be strong for anyone. And a dying woman, lying there with her whole life narrowing down to weeks, had looked at that and seen the shape of the life that would go on without her.
“So she crossed you off the list,” I said to Helen. “And she scratched your face out of the picture.”
Helen nodded. “Yes.”
“But that doesn’t explain everything. If she just crossed you off, you’d still be around. You’d still be her friend. Where did you go, Helen? Why did you vanish so completely that I never even heard your name?”
Helen’s eyes filled.
“Because she asked me to,” she said.
I stared at her. “Mom told you to leave?”
“Three weeks before she died.”
Across the table, my father’s head snapped up so fast I heard his neck crack.
“What?” he said.
Helen went white. “You—you didn’t know that?”
Dad stood up so fast his chair banged against the wall behind him. “Helen.”
“She told me you knew,” Helen said, and her voice was starting to come apart. “She told me it was what you both wanted.”
“I never—” Dad’s hands were shaking. “What exactly did she tell you? Word for word. Tell me exactly what she said.”
Helen’s voice shook so badly she could barely get it out. “She said you wanted your last weeks with her to be just the two of you. Without me in the house. And that you felt too guilty to be the one to ask me to go yourself. So she was asking for you.”
Dad stared at her like she’d hit him.
“I never said that,” he said. “Helen, I never said any of that. I looked for you. After. For months. Nobody would tell me where you’d gone.”
“I know that now,” Helen whispered. “I didn’t know it then.”
She reached into her handbag one more time. And this time she pulled out a small sealed envelope, worn but never opened at the seam—no, it had been opened, once, carefully, long ago. Her own name was written across the front in Mom’s hand.
“Maggie gave me this,” Helen said, “the same day she asked me to leave. She told me to read it after I was gone.”
Dad didn’t reach for it. He couldn’t seem to move.
So I took it.
Inside was a single page. Helen had kept it for eight years, and it showed—the creases, the softness, the faint water stains near the bottom that might have been tears, hers or Mom’s, there was no way to know.
Mom’s handwriting started steady at the top and got shakier as it went down the page, the way it did near the end, when even holding a pen wore her out.
I know what I’m asking you to give up.
But I am dying, Helen. You are not.
If you stay, he will love you after me. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not for years. But he will. I’ve watched it start already.
And I cannot spend the last days I have left watching the woman who’s going to take my place.
Please. Give me this one selfish thing. Let me have him entirely, just for the end.
Leave before I do.
I set the page down on the table.
