The Sweetness of Forgetting Read Free Page B

to think she was heartless, even though I admit now that I’d looked forward to those brief periods of time between boyfriends, when I’d have my mom to myself for a few weeks. Now I wish I’d understood sooner, in time to discuss it with her. I finally get it, Mom . If you don’t let them in, if you don’t really love them in the first place, they can’t hurt you when they leave. But like so many other things in my life, it’s too late for that.
    By the time I shower, washing the flour and sugar out of my hair and off my skin, it’s a few minutes before seven. I know I should probably call Annie at Rob’s and apologize for the way we left things earlier, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Besides, she’s probably doing something fun with him, and my call would only ruin it for her. Regardless of how I feel about Rob, I have to admit that he’s good with Annie most of the time. He seems to get through to her in a way I haven’t been able to in a long time. I hate that watching them laughing conspiratorially with each other sometimes makes me jealous first, happy for Annie second. It’s like they’re forming a new family portrait, and it no longer includes me.
    After throwing on a gray cable-knit sweater and slim black jeans, I stare at myself in the mirror as I brush out my shoulder-lengthdark brown waves, which, blissfully, haven’t started to turn gray yet, although they soon will if Annie keeps up this behavior. I search my own face for Annie’s features, but as usual, I come up empty. Oddly, she doesn’t look a thing like Rob or me, which led him to ask me once, when she was three, “Are you absolutely sure she’s mine, Hope?” His words had cut me to the core. “Of course,” I’d whispered, tears in my eyes, and he’d left it at that. Unless you counted her skin, which tanned evenly and beautifully, just like Rob’s, there was virtually nothing of her tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed father in her.
    I examine my features as I put on a coat of nude lipstick and swipe some mascara onto my pale lashes. While Annie’s eyes are an uneven gray, just like Mamie’s, mine are an unusual sea green flecked with gold. When I was younger, Mamie used to tell me that her looks—everything but the eyes—had skipped a generation and settled on me. While my mother’s dark brown, straight hair and brown eyes made her resemble my grandfather, I look like a near carbon copy of some of the old photos I’ve seen of Mamie. Her eyes, I used to think, were always sad in old photos, and now that mine carry in them the weight of living, we look more alike than ever. My sharply bowed lips—“like an angel’s harp,” as Mamie used to say—are just like hers were in her younger days, and somehow, I’m fortunate enough to have inherited her milky complexion, although in the last year, I’ve developed an unfamiliar vertical line between my eyebrows that makes me look eternally concerned. Then again, these days, I am eternally concerned.
    The doorbell rings, startling me, and I run my brush through my hair once more, then, on second thought, I run a hand through it to mess it up again. I don’t want to look like I’ve made an effort tonight. I don’t want Matt to think this is going anywhere.
    A moment later, I open the front door, and when Matt leans in to kiss me, I turn slightly so that his lips land on my right cheek. I can smell the cologne on his neck, musky and dark. He’s dressedin crisp khakis, a pale blue button-down with an expensive-looking insignia I don’t recognize, and slick brown loafers.
    “I can go change,” I say. I feel suddenly dowdy, plain.
    He looks me up and down and shrugs. “You look pretty in that sweater,” he says. “You’re fine as you are.”
    He takes me to Fratanelli’s, an upscale Italian place on the marsh. I try to ignore it when the maître d’ gives my outfit a not-so-subtle once-over before leading us to a candlelit table by the window.
    “This is too nice, Matt,”