One Cold Night

patterns of a happy family and also — it hit her now with force — to an old, lost faith that had hovered quietly within her. She realized now that she wanted God back as much as she wanted Lisa and Dave back. Her faith had always been an island of comfort for her, regardless of what her husband thought of it. But today, she wasn’t sure if she deserved any of them — Lisa or Dave or even God — because she had drifted too far into a life mined with failures, failures she could no longer pretend weren’t there.
    She had failed at her childhood by growing up too fast.
    She had failed at motherhood by not seizing it when it came to her.
    She had failed at love by denying Dave the full truth of her.
    She had failed Lisa in every possible way.
    She had failed God by lying her way through life.
    Susan tried to close her eyes again but they wouldn’t stay shut.
    The incense scent returned — no, it was something else this time, a cooking smell seeping under the closed door: stewing onions, garlic and thyme. Her mother had found the chicken and was making the Famous Whatnot Stew both Susan and Lisa had grown up on.
    Standing up, Susan wiped her palms over her tears, then dried her hands on her red pants. She walked into the hallway and slipped her feet into the pink flip-flops Lisa had left out; they were two sizes too small for Susan, and the backs of her heels fell off the ends. The sandals slapped the wooden floor as she rejoined the others in the living area.
    “There you are.” Bill scraped his chair away from the table, leaving Marie and Audrey with an empty space between them, and came toward her. “Your friends and I’ve been talking and we just don’t think your old sweetheart would hurt Lisa — she’s his own flesh and blood. As I recall, Suzie, that boy really loved you at the time.”
    Susan glanced into the kitchen, at her mother, for help. But Carole was in there for a reason: She was avoiding Bill’s energetic attempt to commandeer his — and everyone else’s — sense of helplessness by hiding out in the kitchen and teaching Glory to make the stew.
    “Peter only loved himself,” Susan said, that precise notion finding her for the very first time. She realized now that it was what had made him so exciting to her as an insecure teenage girl. If only she had been able to recognize his narcissism then, none of this might have happened... but the thought of no Lisa — no Lisa — was impossible. And in the same moment that she understood the incapacity of Peter’s love for her, she banished all regrets.
    “Well,” Bill said. “Marie here’s been remembering something your old friend said to her on the phone about half a year back. ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’ Do you have any inkling what he meant by that, Suzie?”
    Was he talking about the groom’s periodic calls to Marie? Had Bill’s doubts fully surrendered to the likelihood that Peter really was the groom?
    “He wasn’t my friend, Dad.”
    “Come on, Suzie, you know what I mean. Now think. ”
    Susan looked at Marie, in front of whom sat a pad of paper covered in doodles of triangles within circles within squares and the barbed wire of curlicues surrounding it all. Within the chaos, a string of words had formed: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
    “I don’t know where the memory came from,” Marie said. “But I do remember him saying it. He said it two or three times in one phone call. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time. It still doesn’t.”
    Susan glanced at the letters remaining on Marie’s Scrabble stand: PLWPEAT. Peat jumped out at you, but a longer look showed you apple.
    “I don’t know what it means, either,” Susan said. Peter, the groom’s calls to Marie, all these random memories. Susan felt she had to go outside and get some air — alone.
    “I’m going to take a walk.”
    “What?” Bill stepped closer to Susan, as if he would block her from leaving.
    “Let her go, Bill.” Carole was standing in the kitchen entrance, wearing Dave’s black-and-whitechecked apron, holding a metal cooking spoon that was about to start dripping stew juice onto the floor.
    Susan picked up her purse from its usual spot on the coffee table and zipped her BlackBerry into its outer compartment. Shoving her bare feet into well-worn suede loafers by the door, she slipped into the fifth-floor hallway. The elevator was already there. She couldn’t face the multitude of her own