Chapter 6 - Sintra’s Mist and Hard Truths
On the fourth day of the tour, Joyce and I stood on the battlements of the Pena Palace in Sintra.
The mist had rolled in from the Atlantic, thick and white as sheep’s wool, wrapping itself around the vivid yellow and scarlet towers of the palace until they looked like something dreamed up by an eccentric king who had never quite grown up. The stone beneath my fingers was damp and cold, covered in tiny rosettes of gray lichen that had taken two hundred years to grow the size of a five-cent piece.
"Charles would have hated this," Joyce said, pulling her wool scarf tighter around her chin. "Too many stairs. He would have stayed down in the café with a ham sandwich and told you to take pictures of the tiles."
I laughed. The sound was bright, clean, and entirely free of the old, dragging weight that usually accompanied his name.
"He would have," I agreed. "He would have complained about the bus driver’s shifting, too. He always thought he could drive a manual transmission better than any European alive."
"He was a good man, Myrna," Joyce said, looking at me sideways. "But he took up a lot of room in the room."
I didn't answer right away. I looked out over the parapet, watching the white fog drift through the crowns of the giant ferns that grew in the valley below.
Joyce was right. Charles had been large, loud, generous, and completely central to the orbit of our life. When he was happy, the house was full of light; when his back hurt, the whole house tiptoed on carpet. Caleb had inherited that same quality, but without Charles’s weight. Caleb had learned that a man could simply exist at the center of things and let the women around him arrange the furniture so he didn't bump his shins.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
It wasn't a call this time. It was a text from Caleb.
*Can I call you? Just me. Please, Mom.*
I looked at Joyce. "Give me five minutes," I said.
She nodded, pointing her crossword pencil toward a stone archway. "I’ll be in the queen’s bedchamber. Apparently, her husband had worse taste in wallpaper than my first husband."
I walked down a flight of stone steps into a small, secluded courtyard paved with black and white river stones. The air was cool and smelled of wet cedar. I dialed his number.
He picked up on the first ring.
"Mom?"
He was alone. I could tell by the quality of the background noise—the low murmur of a hotel lobby, the clink of porcelain, the absence of Tori’s sharp, rhythmic breathing.
"Hello, Caleb."
"Where are you?"
"I’m in Sintra," I said. "On a mountain. There’s a castle here painted the color of an egg yolk."
He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was small, stripped of the corporate confidence he used like armor. "I’m sorry, Mom."
I leaned against the mossy wall. "Why are you sorry, Caleb?"
"Because... because I knew," he whispered. "I saw the text you sent in April. I had it on my calendar."
"Then why did you let her do it?"
The question hung between us, heavy and cold as the mountain mist.
"Because it was easier," he said. The admission sounded like it had been dragged out of him with pliers. "It was just... easier to let her believe you’d say yes than to tell her we had to cancel the vouchers. Tori’s had this promotion hanging over her head for six months. She’s been impossible, Mom. Everything in the house is an emergency. The laundry, the kids' tutors, the lawn service. If I disagreed with her about Japan, she would have spent three weeks making every dinner feel like a deposition."
"So you gave her me instead," I said.
He didn't speak. I could hear his breath hitching through the receiver.
"Caleb," I said, looking down at my shoes, which were spotted with wet gravel from the palace paths. "Your father loved you very much. But he taught you that keeping the peace was the same thing as being good. It isn't."
"Mom—"
"Keeping the peace just means you let the loudest person in the room decide what everyone else has to live with," I told him. "You let her drop those children on me because you knew I loved them too much to leave them on the porch. You used my affection for your children as a shield against your wife’s temper."
A sharp, ragged sound came over the line. Caleb was crying. He hadn't cried in front of me since the day we lowered Charles into the ground at Oak Hill.
"I don't know how to fix it," he choked out. "She’s so mad at Patrice she won't even leave the hotel room. We’re in Kyoto, Mom. It’s beautiful, and we’re sitting in an eighty-story Hyatt eating club sandwiches from room service because she won't go out."
"Then you should go out," I said.
"What?"
"Put on your coat, Caleb. Leave the room. Go look at a garden. Go look at something that took four hundred years to grow and didn't ask anyone’s permission to do it."
"Mom, she’ll—"
"Let her be mad," I said firmly. "Tori’s anger is her own weather system. You don't have to carry an umbrella every time she frowns. And when you get back to Ohio, you are going to go to your mother-in-law’s house, you are going to pick up your children, and you are going to thank her for doing what you didn't have the decency to ask her to do."
"Are you coming home?" he asked, his voice sounding like that of the seven-year-old on the kitchen counter with the splinter.
"On the second of June," I said. "Not an hour earlier. My tour has four days in the south, and I intend to see the ocean."
May you like
I didn't wait for him to answer. I ended the call, slipped the phone back into my pocket, and walked through the archway to find Joyce and the queen’s wallpaper.
***
