The Professional Lover
Crumbs under my wet fingers reminded me of Aster’s throaty laugh, of apple skins and flesh between our teeth, her peanut butter breath, and of her touch, soft as bread. “That’s ridiculous. They were only together that one night, and the bees were there since they jumped.”
“You’re kidding, right? Aster ‘delivered’ Grande’s Groves products to our house every day after my father left for work and I went to school. It was in the note, how nobody ever knew, not even my father. He never put it together. How could he? I never showed him the note. It would have infuriated him, and I didn’t need that. So I’ve kept their secret all these years.”
It began to make sense, Aster’s hatred of the way tourists gawked at her when she went out in public, veil or no veil, the way she became a hermit after Lily died. If she left the house for Lily, why would she ever leave again once Lily was gone? And then, her last words began to make sense, too, and I thought but didn’t say, “Of course he knew.”
Helen continued, thumbing through Aster’s notebook, replacing the lilies as they slipped from the pages. “But now I need to know. Why’d she do it? Why’d Aster send her away that night?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Cut me a break, Jade. They were seventeen when they jumped, sixty-two when Aster broke it off. I realize Aster was off her rocker for the past decade, but you can’t expect me to believe she never told you. All these years together, in the same house?”
I wanted to punish her, to withhold this information the way she’d kept me from having a family of my own, the way she’d kept the note from Aster and me all this time. “It’s nobody’s business but theirs, that’s what Aster always said. That part of the note wouldn’t have made any difference to her, anyway, even if she had known. She was never religious, not the way the other founding mothers were.”
After a long moment, she reached over me and turned off the water. “You won’t tell anyone about them, what the two of them were.”
“Is that a question?”
“No.”
“I see.” I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, in that moment, consider indulging the Green City Board of Directors and their request that I deliver the eulogy in the form of Aster’s life story. Why shouldn’t the city know who their first founding mother was? In the end, of course, I kept quiet. If she had wanted her private life made public, she would have left the house every once in a while. She wouldn’t have holed herself up for forty years and made me the bridge between the outside world and her existence in the groves. I turned the water back on. If I didn’t wash her dishes, some other lover would.