In that moment, just hearing Charlie say he had broken up with Zulya wasn’t enough for me. As Anabelle suggested in her comments on my last post, I couldn’t trust him, at least not yet. I needed proof. And an apology.<\/p>\n
As I put the phone back in my handbag, I finally took in the picture I\u2019d been staring at. Sure enough, it was a photo of the famous four-person wedding: Dad, Mom, Laura and Leif stood on their dais, joyful but self-conscious. Leif is dressed incongruously in a tuxedo, Dad in a jacket and tie, Mom in a business suit and Laura in a green scoop-necked dress. I imagined that anyone who looked at this picture could tell, by the way their hands are linked, that these are more than friends.<\/p>\n
As I absorbed the photograph, my breath shortened. I\u2019d searched in vain for something like it at my mother\u2019s house, and I knew my father didn\u2019t have any photo albums older than his marriage to Betty. I hadn\u2019t seen any photographs from the group marriage at all in over fifteen years. A few I\u2019d kept from childhood disappeared sometime after I was in college, along with boxes of school papers and toys. I never doubted what happened, but my whole family acted as if it didn\u2019t. And I realized as I stared at this picture that the lack of anything physical I could point to had given the experience some of its aura of fantasy in my mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrings back memories, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d Laura had come silently up the cushioned stairs. \u201cSorry, I didn\u2019t mean to startle you. You were gone for so long it\u2019s getting toward lunchtime. I wanted to see what you and your kids would eat.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, the usual kid stuff,\u201d I said. \u201cAnything that\u2019s not nutritious.\u201d<\/p>\n
She laughed. \u201cSounds easy!\u201d But the two of us didn\u2019t budge, gazing at the picture.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t believe you\u2019ve got this hanging here,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoes it embarrass you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot me. What does Marco think?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe can\u2019t stand it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen why display it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause he can\u2019t stand it.\u201d<\/p>\n
I turned to see the crows feet deepen on her face.<\/p>\n
\u201cActually I already moved it once. You know that wall in the hall with all the oil paintings of Marco\u2019s ancestors?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are his ancestors?\u201d<\/p>\n
She nodded. \u201cThe guy in the funny hat was a Greek general who did something or other in their War of Independence. Anyway, I originally had this picture across from them just to tease him. And to see what reactions I got from visitors.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWere they shocked?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMost people didn\u2019t say anything. You\u2019d see them stop and put their faces closer to the picture, trying to figure it out. Then they\u2019d look at me, and back at the picture. And then their jaws would clench, as if they were at a fancy dinner and had just taken a mouthful of something bitter but were too polite to spit it out. One couple hasn\u2019t had anything to do with us since I explained who was in the photo, which is wonderful, because I was looking for a way to stop seeing them. I still do get some questions about it, once in a while, if a guest of ours has wandered upstairs looking for the bathroom. They\u2019ll say something like, \u2018Are these your brothers and sisters in that picture on the stair case?\u2019 and I\u2019ll say, \u2018No, my ex-husbands and wife.\u2019 I\u2019ve had some at this point actually get angry, as if I\u2019ve made an off-color joke. But the ones I like best want to know every detail.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou tell them?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course. And sometimes I show them the other pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have more?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLoads.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I absorbed the photograph, my breath shortened. I\u2019d searched in vain for something like it at my mother\u2019s house, and I knew my father didn\u2019t have any photo albums older than his marriage to Betty. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[99,89,96,91,88,113,115,114,116,53,10],"class_list":["post-1002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adrienne","tag-adrienne-eisenberg","tag-fiction","tag-interactive","tag-laura-wrightson","tag-novel","tag-online","tag-photographs","tag-photos","tag-pictures","tag-poly","tag-polyamory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1006,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}