Dr. Mark, My Mom’s Ex-Husband

8

Sophia

"An old friend," I repeated, watching my mother stir whatever was in that pot with more attention than it needed. "Which old friend?"

"You'll see when he gets here." She still wasn't looking at me, and something about the deliberate way she said it made the back of my neck prickle, though I couldn't have told you why. "Can you set out the water glasses? They're in the cabinet above the sink, same as always."

I let it go, because pushing my mother rarely gets me anywhere faster, and because I had twenty minutes to kill before whoever this mystery guest was arrived, and twenty minutes felt like plenty of time to snoop around a house I'd grown up in and thought I already knew every corner of.

I wandered into the living room while she finished up in the kitchen, running my fingers along the bookshelf, past the photos she'd arranged there for as long as I could remember. Me at six, missing my front teeth, grinning at a piano recital I'd been terrified of. Me at eighteen, graduation gown, squinting into the sun. My grandmother, gone eight years now, standing in front of a Christmas tree in a house that didn't exist anymore.

And then, tucked at the end of the shelf, half hidden behind a candle, a frame I didn't recognize.

I don't know why I picked it up. Instinct, maybe, or the particular pull that unfamiliar photographs have in a house where you thought you'd memorized every image on display. It was older, the edges slightly yellowed, the kind of photo that had clearly lived somewhere else for years before landing on this shelf.

A wedding photo. My mother, younger, maybe fifteen years younger, in a simple ivory dress that looked more like something you'd wear to a nice dinner than an actual wedding gown, standing in front of what looked like a courthouse. Small ceremony. No flowers, no elaborate anything, just my mother and a man in a dark suit, both of them smiling the polite, slightly formal smile of people posing for an obligatory photo rather than people drowning in the happiest day of their lives.

I looked at the groom's face, and the room went very quiet in a way that had nothing to do with actual sound.

It was him.

Younger. Maybe fifteen years younger, the way my mother was fifteen years younger in the same photo, no gray yet at his temples, his face a little less lined, a little less weighted down by whatever years of surgery and running a hospital does to a person. But it was unmistakably him. The same eyes. The same quiet, steady set of his mouth, the one I'd watched from across a rooftop bar and then across a conference table three weeks later, telling myself both times that I was imagining the effect it had on me.

I stood there holding the frame with both hands, feeling something cold slide down through my chest, my brain doing the same thing it had done in that conference room three weeks ago, refusing to process information that didn't fit into any category I had ready for it.

It's not him. It's someone who looks like him. It's a coincidence, another one, because apparently my life had decided this was the year for those.

Except I knew, even as I told myself that, that I was wrong. I'd know that face anywhere at this point. I'd spent an entire night memorizing it in the dark, and an entire meeting three weeks later trying very hard not to look at it too long, and there was no version of this where I mistook another man for him.

"Sophia?" My mother's voice from the kitchen doorway, and I turned so fast I nearly dropped the frame.

She was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite place, something careful, something that looked almost like she'd been waiting for this exact moment, dreading it and wanting to get it over with at the same time.

"Mom." My voice came out strange, thinner than I wanted it to be. "Who is this?"

She crossed the room slowly, wiping her hands on the dish towel still slung over one shoulder, and looked down at the photo in my hands with an expression that had gone soft, almost nostalgic, entirely too calm for what my own pulse was doing.

"Oh, that." She said it like I'd asked about an old piece of furniture, something inconsequential she'd nearly forgotten was even in the room. "I should have put that away before you got here. I forget it's still out sometimes."

"Mom." I said it again, sharper this time, because she wasn't answering the actual question, and something in me needed the answer before I could take another breath. "Who is he?"

She looked up at me then, and whatever she saw on my face made her pause, just slightly, like she was recalibrating something, though I couldn't have told you what.

"You look like you've seen a ghost, sweetheart. It's really nothing to be upset about. That was a long time ago."

"Mom. Please."

She reached out and gently took the frame from my hands, looking down at it herself now, at her own younger face smiling that polite, careful smile, at the man beside her whose face I now knew better than I wanted to admit, in ways I would never be able to explain to my own mother.

"That was my ex-husband," she said.