I focused in on it. I blinked repeatedly. I stood and I walked toward it.

I picked up the bowl. I ran my hand over the scalloped edges, and around its overly glossed sides. It was clearly handmade.

And clearly made by the same person who’d created the bowl I’d seen in Forester’s study, the one that had looked so familiar to me somehow.

Now, the recognition came flooding in-my mother had taken a pottery class at Lillstreet Art Center when we’d first moved to Chicago and she was trying to find something to pull her out of her funk. She’d made one after another after another of these scalloped bowls, all in white or ivory. Her cupboards were still full of them. But I’d never known her to give them to anyone. Pieces started to fall into place. The bowl at Forester’s. The money he left her in the will.

My mom walked back into the room then, carrying two long-stemmed wineglasses filled with golden wine.

“Were you involved with Forester?” I said when she’d reached me.

Her face fell. She seemed to sway on her feet. I wondered for a second if she would drop the glasses.

“Don’t lie to me,” I said.

She sat on the couch, and without letting go of those glasses, my mother started to cry.

55

Although my mom is a woman who carries her sadness with her, she rarely cries. When she does, she does so beautifully. Tears appear like tiny crystals at the corners of her blue eyes and slide gently down her face-a graceful, trickling waterfall. I have always been fascinated the handful of times I’d seen her cry, and this was no exception.

I watched her, making no move to comfort her, because that wasn’t how she worked and also because I was profoundly surprised and confused.

Finally, I said, “You were cheating on Spence?”

She looked up, her mouth making an O shape. “No! It was years ago.”

“You’ve been married to Spence for fifteen years.”

She put the wineglasses on a side table. “It was before that.”

Now I was bewildered. “You’ve known Forester all this time?”

“Yes. I met him when I worked in radio.”

“When we first moved here? After Dad died?”

“Yes.”

“So you were working for one of Forester’s stations?” My mother’s career as a traffic reporter was so far in the past that when I’d met Forester it never occurred to me they might have known each other. In fact, when I introduced them, they acted, vaguely, as if they might have met each other somewhere but didn’t know each other well.

“We were friends first, the way Forester was friends with all his employees, but we were drawn to each other.” She glanced down, smiling a small, secret-looking grin. I knew that smile. It was the one I made before all this, during times when Sam wasn’t around, but when I thought of him, of his martini-olive eyes.

“He said there was something,” my mother continued, “something about me that made him want to take care of me, made him want to hold me.”

“He was married to Liv.”

The smile disappeared, replaced by a short affirmative bob of her head. “We were truly just friends for a long time.”

My mother was friends with Forester? She had an affair with him? A combo platter of emotions was served up in my head. The shock lingered. There was also a strange envy that my mother had experienced something even more personal, and apparently profound, with Forester than I. I realized now that I carried around a proprietary sense about Forester, and a certain image of him as a bastion of decency and values. Now I’d learned he’d had an affair? And with my mother.

And then there was something else, something that was beginning to grow-the realization that my mom lied to me. She had known Forester well. She’d had a relationship with him. If she’d been able to hide this for so many years, and so well, what else was she hiding?

“How did it start?”

It was as if my mother had been waiting to tell this story forever. She sat forward on the couch and began to talk in such an animated way I almost didn’t recognize her.

Nothing happened between them, she said, until one night when he saw her looking in vain for a cab after a company party. He asked her if he could give her a ride home. She protested, but when no cabs appeared, she finally agreed.

When they got to her Northside brownstone, he bid her good-night and waited in the car while she trotted up the steps.

“Remember how we always had problems with the lock on the front door?” she asked, her eyes bright with tears.

I nodded. As a city kid, I’d had to learn to carry around keys, and I’d wrestled with that lock for years.

“Apparently, he could see me struggling,” she said. “He got out of the car and helped me. When I turned around, we looked at each other, just looked, for a long, long…long time. And then he kissed me. I’d like to tell you that I resisted. But I didn’t.” She exhaled almost contentedly, remembering. “He turned and walked away, and neither of us mentioned it afterward.”

She glanced at me, seeming to register my presence for the first time in minutes. I gave a nod for her to continue. It was as if I was watching someone on a movie screen, someone I didn’t know, and I was compelled to see the ending.

Forester called her two weeks later, my mother said, and asked if she would have dinner, ostensibly to talk about her contract. They both knew Forester wouldn’t have normally been talking to the traffic girl about her contract. They both knew what was going on, my mother said, but it was as if some unstoppable force was pushing them together. Their affair, the first he’d ever had, started that night. It was bliss for about a year and a half. Initially, he said he was a better husband to Olivia because of their affair. Eventually, he talked of divorce, and they began to plan a future together. It was when Olivia was diagnosed with cancer that everything came crashing down. The guilt rushed in, and Forester broke my mother’s heart.

“Forester couldn’t abandon Olivia,” she said. “You know how he was.”

“I thought I did.”

Even though I hadn’t known anything about her and Forester and had never met him as a kid, I remembered the time she was talking about. A few years after we’d moved to Chicago, my mother seemed to recover from my father’s death, at least for a while. She played with Charlie and me with an ease that hadn’t been there for a long time. She smiled; she even giggled. I could remember now how she brightened during those years, but then she dimmed again; she disappeared again.

“He nursed Olivia,” my mother explained. “He took care of her day and night. We decided we would have to wait until after her treatment, and we cut off contact. But cancer was a battle Olivia fought for years. She would nearly recover, then another diagnosis would be made and another round of chemo would start and the tests would begin again.”

My mother said that she finally realized she and Forester would never be together. Heartbroken, she moved on, eventually meeting Spence. By the time Olivia died years later, Victoria was remarried, and Forester refused to get her into another affair. The love they had was bigger than that, he told her. Despite how much he loved her, he was tortured by what he’d done to Olivia, even though she’d never known about the affair. My mother, again, was heartbroken.

“You would have left Spence for him?”

My mother smiled a sad smile. “Yes. I would have. Forester was my other half, literally someone who was so much like me and so perfect for me, even more so than your dad or Spence. I know it was wrong, doing what I did back then-being involved with a married man-but when you’re truly in love like that, you will do absolutely anything to keep it.”

For the first time in this conversation, my mother said something I understood. I loved Sam that way. At least I thought I had.