Chapter 7 of 10
The Woman in the Photograph
Elena’s mother, Carol, lived four hours away in a small house with a garden she was overly proud of and a phone she rarely answered on the first ring.
She answered on the first ring this time. Elena wondered later if some part of Carol had been waiting for this call for thirty years.
“I need to ask you something,” Elena said, no greeting, the photograph still in her hand like it might disappear if she set it down. “And I need you to actually answer me instead of changing the subject like you always do.”
A long pause. “Okay.”
“Did you work at Calloway Textiles? Before I was born?”
The silence on the other end of the line lasted long enough that Elena checked to see if the call had dropped.
“Where did you hear that name,” Carol said finally. Her voice had gone very quiet, very careful — the voice of someone choosing each word like it might detonate.
“Margaret Calloway died. She left me part of her company. Mom, she left me a letter telling me to ask you about the summer you worked there. About something that happened in July.”
“Elena.” Carol’s voice cracked, just slightly, on the second syllable of her own daughter’s name. “Please don’t do this over the phone.”
“I don’t have a choice. I have a lawsuit against me, a company I never asked for, and a photograph of you and Margaret Calloway looking at each other like—” Elena stopped herself. “Like family. I need to know why.”
Another long silence. When Carol spoke again, her voice sounded thirty years younger and infinitely more tired.
“I worked there the summer I was twenty-two,” she said. “In the front office. Margaret ran that company like she ran everything — sharp, exacting, impossible to please. Except with me. With me, she was different.”
“Different how?”
“She looked out for me,” Carol said. “More than an employer should. I didn’t understand why at the time. I was young, and grateful, and I didn’t ask enough questions. I know that now.”
“Mom, that still doesn’t explain—”
“There was a man,” Carol said, cutting her off, the words coming faster now like she’d finally decided to stop holding the dam. “Someone from the family. It doesn’t matter who, not yet — I’ll tell you everything, Elena, I promise, but not like this, not with you standing in your kitchen and me four hours away. I fell in love with someone I had no business falling in love with, and it ended badly, and I left that job and that town and I never spoke of it again. To anyone. Not even you.”
Elena’s chest had gone tight. “Was he my father?”
The silence this time was answer enough.
“Mom.”
“I need you to come see me,” Carol said, voice shaking now, all pretense of composure gone. “This weekend. In person. There are things I should have told you when you were eighteen, or twenty-five, or any of the hundred times you asked me about your father and I said it wasn’t worth talking about. I was wrong. I was protecting myself, not you, and I am so sorry for that.”
“Was he a Calloway?” Elena’s voice had dropped to barely a whisper. “Mom. Was my father a Calloway?”
Carol didn’t answer the question directly. What she said instead was somehow worse, and somehow made everything that had happened in the last week feel suddenly, terrifyingly small.
“Margaret didn’t just leave you part of a company because she liked you, Elena,” Carol said. “She left it to you because you were never a stranger to that family. You were the granddaughter she was never allowed to claim.”