Riggs Park Read Free Page A

the airport. I always liked to be alone to relish the sight of my daughter after a long absence, to bask in what was a perennial surprise and delight: her large eyes and prominent nose; the ripe, wide mouth; the erect bearing that made Robin seem so regal. Yet when the plane arrived, I wished Jon were there to soften my shock at seeing the weary young woman who shuffled through the gate, face the color of talc, pale hair wiry and wild, clothes hanging on a spindly frame. Even with Robin’s divorce, I hadn’t imagined such all-pervasive wretchedness. I rushed forward blinking back tears, and closed my arms around my daughter’s knobby shoulders, feeling called once again to protective motherhood, yet helpless, too. What could a mother, herself long divorced and now living in what was once called “sin,” do for a grown but aching child?
    “Can you believe I waited so long to get married and then got snookered?” Robin said wryly as we waited for her luggage. “Thirty years waiting for the right guy, and then to get left for an actress.”
    “Stop kicking yourself, honey. You couldn’t have known it wouldn’t work out.”
    “Huh!” Robin snorted, spotting her suitcases on the carousel and rushing to get them. In the car on the way to the beach, she slumped in her seat and gazed so aimlessly at the summer-weary landscape that I had to restrain myself from pulling over and taking her in my arms, which she would have hated. Like Wells, her father, Robin had always been embarrassed by what she termed “gushy shows of emotion.” Yet she’d always come to me when she was troubled. Not for hugs, not even for advice. Simply to nest, to be near a fixed point in her universe until her spinning stopped. I was glad she’d come to me now.
    But I was horrified, over dinner that night, when she confessed to Jon and me that she’d been two months pregnant when Bob left and had miscarried, at home, alone, the morning after he moved out.
    “Oh, Robin!” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “I didn’t tell anybody,” she said woodenly. “I was—I don’t know. I felt like such a complete failure, I didn’t tell anyone.”
    “But I’m your mother!”
    “You should have come to us right away,” Jon added, his voice gruff and wounded.
    Robin smiled sadly. “I’m a big girl.”
    “You could have come to us,” Jon said.
    Stricken, I shot Jon a glance of gratitude for taking her side. But the discussion didn’t end there. It went on and on, Jon sounding so troubled that finally even Robin seemed embarrassed. I raised my eyebrows at him quizzically. What was he trying to prove? On previous visits, he and Robin had talked about nothing more personal than movies and sports.
    “Bastard,” he muttered when Robin left the room. “What a bastard.”
    “She’ll be all right.”
    “I hope so. We’ll see.”
    A jab of irritation canceled out my concern. After wanting to go off to do his interviews, how much could he care? Much as he seemed to regret not having children, he’d never struck me as particularly fatherly, either. “You don’t know Robin,” I said. “She’s resilient. Amazingly so.”
    “We’ll see.”
    As if I didn’t know my own daughter! But, of course, I did. By midweek, Robin was immersed in the intense business of filmmaking, and by the weekend, she’d actually cheered up—not that we saw her enough to know what was going on in the depths of her soul. When after two weeks Robin left for location in the Pennsylvania mountains, her color was good, her appetite restored. It had been a stupid marriage in the first place, I reasoned. A relief to have it over with. Robin was on her way to recovery.
    But Robin’s departure also ushered in those soggy days of waning summer when Jon began to retreat into the private corridor of sorrow I could neither understand nor penetrate. “When they’re at that age,” he said in a tone of immense weariness, “you wish you could somehow make it all