Page 96 of The Frog Prince
“She can’t afford to raise a baby on her own, and she really wants the baby, wants a family,”So did I.
He sighs. “I can’t hurt her, Holly. She’s fragile. Delicate. I have to protect her.”
I bite my lip and look away. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, protect me, but he’ll ride in on his white stallion and rescue someone else.
“I just wanted you to know, to hear it from me,” he concludes awkwardly. “I wanted you to understand.”
Understand? He wants me to understand?
Is he insensitive or what?
I lean forward, hands wrapping tightly around my cup. “Once you loved me, Jean-Marc. You had to have loved me. What happened?”
“It’s complicated—”
“Explain it to me, then. I need to know. Where did the love go? What was it that I did?”
He lifts his head, looks up, his expression sympathetic. “It wasn’t ever you,cherie—”
“It was, because one day you loved me, and the next”—I snap my fingers—” we were over. The love was gone.”
He leans back in his chair, groans beneath his breath, shifting in his chair. “It was…”—and he looks at me and then away before plowing on—“your mother.”
My mother?
My mother, I silently repeat, staring at him, a dull pain in my middle, more of a memory of hurt than real hurt, since I don’t understand what he means, but I’m afraid anyway.
“What about my mother?” I force myself to ask, trying to sound natural, normal, despite the terrible tenderness filling me.
My mother has not had an easy life. My mother has battled alone.
I look at Jean-Marc and try to contain the rush of anger. He has no right attacking Mom, or any business criticizing her. What’s happened in my mother’s life should happen to no one, let alone a woman.
Women are just grown-up little girls, and little girls may appear delicate and fragile, but they also dream of Jedis and samurais, pirates and kings. They want adventure and excitement. They want life. But mostly, they crave happily-ever-afters.
My mother did not get a happily-ever-after.
And I see my mom in an old black-and-white portrait when she was five, and she has a big bow in her hair and dark spiral curls à la Shirley Temple and a stiff little dress on, pudgy knees, ankle socks, and black patent Mary Janes. My mother is smiling into the camera nervously, hopefully, as she waits for her big moment to come.
Her big moment.
I feel a massive lump inside my chest, huge and hot and tender.
Her big moment never came.
“She scared me.” Jean-Marc laughs a little, as if he’s making a joke.
I feel my lips stretch, and I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, but on the inside I feel as if I were twelve again, on one of those nights when Mom had a rare date and she invited her date home for Sunday night dinner, and her roast is tasty, her mashed potatoes light as air, and the table is set with an ecru lace cloth and two white taper candles and a plastic floral centerpiece that looks dusty even to me. But her date is stiff, and he can’t seem to get comfortable with the three little Bishop kids sitting around the table, staring at him. And Mom is trying so hard to make conversation, trying so hard to have a nice evening, trying so hard to be a woman and a mom, and that’s maybe the thing I remember most. She’s just trying so hard, and it’s too hard, and everyone knows it but her, and I want to go upstairs to my room. I want to go far away from the good person she is and from the mistakes she unwittingly makes.
“I know this is unfair, but I thought”—and here Jean-Marc breaks off, rubs his forehead, and smiles his charming, rueful smile—“I thought you were going to turn out like her. Become her.”
I stare at him, appalled.
Momliked you, I want to say.She thought you were wonderful. She thought you were just what I needed. Prince Charming from a glorious French chateau.
I get to my feet, a jerky motion, and stare down at him.
Toad, I think—a big, green, horrid wart-covered toad.