Chapter 36

The next morning, Katherine sheepishly came downstairs to have a talk with her mom.

The Gallagher house had a Sunday routine. After breakfast, her father left to play golf. The house became hers and her mother’s. It was warmer, slightly less organized; in a way that it wasn’t when he was around.

She came downstairs in an old Berkeley sweatshirt that she had long ago appropriated from her father and pajama bottoms.

Ellen Gallagher was making Sunday soup.

Sunday soup was a ritual that Katherine had grown up with. The ingredients were spread out on the kitchen island, and the soup-making began: the stock, the vegetables, whatever protein she wanted to add.

She had not thought about it as a ritual until she had heard Quinn describe Maria’s cooking as a form of love and had gone back to examine her own household for the same thing. She found it in the Sunday soup. Her mother’s hands moved over the cutting board with the unhurried attention of someone doing something they had done a thousand times and still did with care.

She sat at the kitchen counter, sipped coffee, and nibbled on a croissant.

Her mother looked at her once, noted the sweatshirt and pajama pants, and continued chopping.

“Tell me,” Ellen said.

Her mother had been doing this her whole life, and she had not noticed until the past year that it was her mother’s way—the deliberate making of space rather than the filling of it.

She told her.

She started with the story of Quinn and Paula Reeves and that Monday morning, then stopped. She went back to the real beginning in the backseat of Carter’s car. Before she could tell the Paula part, she had to tell the Carter part, which she had never told anyone before.

The Carter part. The first-time part.

Her mother’s hands stopped on the cutting board and listened.

Katherine told it plainly: the country club dance, the back seat of the car, the afterward. She did not make it more or less than it was, not traumatic, just embarrassing and disappointing.

Her mother said nothing.

She told about hearing about Paula Reeves and Quinn on that awful Monday. The whole thing. The St. Regis. The sharing pleasures phrase. What it was and where it came from. Jean Auel and the Valley of the Horses and what sharing really meant, then the disappointment especially sharp when all you had was the experience with Carter to go by.

Then she told about the New York trip and how she had struggled with her feelings.

She stopped.

The kitchen was very quiet except for the stock doing its slow work on the stove.

Her mother stood at the cutting board with the knife in her hand, and she was not looking at the vegetables. She was looking at the window above the sink, the Sunday morning light doing its thing through the glass.

Katherine waited.

Ellen Gallagher set down the knife.

She turned and looked at her daughter, not the reading look, something older and more direct than either of those, the warm understanding look that lived underneath all her other looks.

She said, “I knew about Carter.”

“Really?”

“Not him specifically, but I knew something had happened to you. You came home from that party ... different, I guess. More moody.” She paused. “I didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

Ellen looked at the window again. “Because I didn’t know how to. That’s the honest answer. I didn’t know how to ask, and I was afraid.” She stopped. “I know now I made a mistake. I should have asked.”

Katherine sat with this.

“I wouldn’t have told you. I was different back then,” Katherine said.

“It’s not entirely okay,” Ellen said. “But thank you.” She came around the counter and sat on the stool beside Katherine.

“Tell me about the phrase,” Ellen said. “What it did to your thinking.”