Jennifer sits at the kitchen table, the sun hitting her dark brown hair and highlighting the pretty red undertones. Her face is drawn and pale and she stares down at the table as though her life is over.
I want to comfort her but I fear that my words might sound hypocritical for I too am grappling with mixed feelings about her father getting married tomorrow.
“It’ll be alright, honey,” I say. “Everything will be just the same as it is now.”
“Everything’s rotten now!” she snaps.
Jenny had never been one to talk much about her feelings but I knew that the pain she felt was deep. After her father left, I’d often hear her crying alone in her room. I knew she had never given up hope of her father and me getting back together… maybe I hadn’t either. But tomorrow would put an end to the quiet longings we both had over the past two years.
“I’m not going,” I hear my daughter say.
“You’ll go,” I respond gently.
“No. I hate him!”
Jenny jumps up and I hear her footsteps moving quickly up the stairs. Then comes the sound of her bedroom door slamming shut.
I wait a few minutes and walk upstairs. I stand in front of her door, take a deep breath and knock.
She is sitting on her bed. The Little Prince lies opened on her lap.
I had first read The Little Prince to Jenny when she was six years old. She’d cried at the ending and when I told her it wasn’t real, she announced there were some things adults would never understand. I wonder if that’s why she’s reading it now.
“Let’s go for a drive,” I say. “I feel like getting out of the house for awhile.”
She looks at me suspiciously. “Where?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Just for a drive.”
I don’t know where I’m going as I head north on the Parkway. Jenny and I have both been silent since we got in the car.
“Where are we going?” Jenny asks, breaking the silence.
“I’m not sure yet,” I say. “But we’ll know when we get there.”
I can feel Jennifer looking at me disapprovingly. She is at the age where any unexpected or frivolous act by an adult, especially me, is intolerable.
I pull off on an exit for Bedford Hills. Her father and I used to take Jennifer to a park around here.
I make a right turn on a familiar looking road and there it is. I park the car.
“Doesn’t this place seem familiar?” I ask as we walk along a narrow cement paved path.
Jenny shrugs.
“Your dad and I used to take you here,” I say as I sit down on a wooden bench with a view of the lake.
“Why are we here?” she asks.
Now I shrug my shoulders. “It seemed like a nice place to re-visit some old memories, good memories.”
Jennifer walks to the lake. She squats down and her hand plays with the water.
She’s so angry, I think sadly — so hurt. I remember being in this very spot with a lively, bright eyed little girl, and a loving husband and father. It wasn’t that long ago and yet it seems like an eternity. I take a deep breath of the cool evening air and suddenly I feel more at peace than I’ve felt in some time.
I sigh as I get up and walk toward the lake. “What are you thinking?” I ask Jenny as I squat down next to her.
No answer.
“I remember when you were five years old,” I say. “You drove me and your father crazy because you always wanted to come here and feed the ducks. But when the ducks came near you, you’d cry and want to go home. Then the next weekend, you’d want to come back and do it again.”
A smile forms on Jenny’s lips which she quickly withdraws.
“Your dad loves you very much, Jen,” I say.
“No he doesn’t,” she responds as she stares down at her hand which is hovering above the water.
“He does, Jen.”
Jenny whirls her head around to face me. “Then why did he leave me!”
There are tears in her eyes as she turns her head quickly away from me and focuses back on the water.
“He didn’t leave you,” I say softly. “He left me. We just weren’t happy anymore.”
Jenny jumps up. “It’s not fair. I’m the one who has to pay for it!”
Jenny is crying. She turns her back on me and walks a short distance, stopping in front of a large oak tree. I can see her running her hand gently over the surface of the tree.
I walk over to her. “You’re right,” I say.
She turns her head slowly to face me, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“It’s not fair that you’ve been hurt. But sometimes life isn’t fair, Jen. But we have to move on and accept that things change.”
Jenny looks away, her eyes fixated on the lake. “Some changes are rotten,” she says.
“I know,” I say, “but we can’t dwell on the past. All we have left from the past is memories and you have a lot of happy memories from when you dad was at home. Now it’s time to go on, to stop being angry, and to make new memories.”
Now she looks back at the tree and runs her hand over the names and initials that have been carved in it over the years. “Here it is,” she says softly.
“What?” I ask as I lean down to see what she’s pointing to.
“Daddy carved this in the tree when I was six… I’ll never forget.”
I look at the carving. It reads “Jenny — Daddy’s little girl.”
She turns to face me and I hold her in my arms. “I love you, mom,” she says.
“I love you, Jen,” I say.
Jill Potter is a psychologist and re-emerging writer from New York whose stories were previously published in a variety of literary and women’s magazines in the U.S. and Scotland. She has worked with Broadway and Off Broadway scripts as an editor and advisor and she is currently working on a screenplay based on a true story from the 1920s.
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