Treasure Island!!!

ear.
    “Mom, a person has quiet and harmless but also personally helpful obsessions, and they’re not to be trifled with just because a stray card lands in the bathroom. Honestly. I was surprised you let Adrianna talk so disrespectfully to me tonight.”
    “I’m not sure I’m following you. You’re upset about the index cards?”
    “I was sitting up waiting for you and I started stewing. I hope you don’t believe Adrianna that I’m keeping a logbook. And the diary idea especially offends me. I would never stoop so low as to measure my life by the pulse of domestic time! Where’s the mastery in it?”
    “Hobbies are nice, dear. Never mind what anyone thinks about it.”
    “It’s not a hobby! And why is Dad sleeping in the car?” The question just popped out; I swear on Israel Hands’ watery grave that I didn’t really want to know her answer.
    My mother settled in beside me at the breakfast bar. “I suppose there’s no point in having secrets now. Don Tatum and I have a bit of a history, you see. Which of course you and Adrianna have no way of knowing about. It was when you and Ade were very small. Your father was just starting out at Leonard Milkins, and Don was the new assistant vice principal. There’s a long version and a short version. But at this hour, I think a short version will suffice.”
    Which is how my mother came to tell me, quite abruptly, that twenty years earlier she and Don Tatum had, for a period of three weeks, fallen into a passionate affair while my father taught summer school, and that she had mistakenly ascribed more importance to the sex act than it warranted, and temporarily left my father, only to return, six days later, asking for forgiveness. Which, she added judiciously, had been granted, so far as it was possible with these things.
    “You
left
Dad? Where was me? Where was I and Ade?”
    “You were with your father.”
    “But you said he was teaching summer school. Where was we—where were we—during the day?”
    “Maybe you weren’t with your father. I think Aunt Boothie might have come to stay. You should ask your father. It was only a week. It’s a long time in a young marriage, but a very short time in the span of a life.”
    “I can’t believe you are minimizing this. You had sex and because you liked it, you
left
us?”
    “It wasn’t the end of the world, it was just an adventure.” My mother smiled. She seemed to be enjoying her memories a little too much, forgetting that the essential note to strike was one of repentance. “It was . . . We were . . . Oh, it’s just too complicated for my brain right now,” she murmured. “We’ll all deal better with this in the morning.” She stood up briskly. “I’m glad you’re mature enough to handle it. Thanks for listening. Nighty-night.”
    She tripped off to her bed, her neat little figure disappearing into the darkness of the hallway.
    Had I heard her right? Had she called
that
an adventure?
    This was a woman who lived in a world in which nothing dangerous or exciting could be undertaken; a woman who devoted herself to the tedious, net-mending tasks of family life. She had subscribed to
Bon Appetit
for three decades and still had every issue, arranged in chronological order. How could
she
have had a restless heart?
    An abyss of possibilities opened up before me. Now would be an excellent time to attach my mouth to a cask of cognac, but my parents didn’t keep hard liquor. I dug up the original hand-lettered sign I’d made on a creamy seventy-pound piece of paper with a lovely deckled edge—
     
    BOLDNESS
    RESOLUTION
    INDEPENDENCE
    HORN-BLOWING
     
    —and stared at its sharp-tipped letters. If my mother embodied the Core Values better than I did, I would never forgive her.
     

CHAPTER 20
     
    I don’t think I slept a wink that night. In the morning, when I heard the others in the kitchen, clanking around with their coffee cups, I crept in. I could hardly believe we were going to eat breakfast together, knowing what we all now knew. Except, I realized, as I saw Adrianna drizzling syrup on her frozen waffles,
she
didn’t know it yet.
    “You’re up early,” my mother said to me from her position at the sink. The coffee maker gave a shudder and began to hiss.
    “Didn’t want to miss the part where you divvy up the spoils and the blood money. Where’s Dad?”
    “He decided to take his coffee and toast in the car.”
    “He went to work already?” Adrianna asked absently.
    “No,” my