And Grant's voice, lower, saying, "I know. I know. After. I swear to God, Di, after the baby, it's done, I'll tell her—"
Di.
Nobody called her mother Di. Her father called her Diane. Leo had called her Dee. Teresa called her Diana when she was annoyed with her. Di was a name from no world Nora had ever lived in.
She came around the corner of the house.
They were behind the lemon tree. That was the thing she'd remember afterward, with a strange, cold precision: that they had chosen Leo's tree. That the dead side of it, the side that had never come back after the freeze, made a kind of screen of bare gray branches between the back corner of the yard and the party, and that from the patio you couldn't see past it, but from the side yard, coming around the corner with a pitcher of lemonade, you could see everything.
Her mother had her back against the fence. Grant had one hand flat on the boards beside her head. Her mother's hands were on his face—both of them, the way you'd hold the face of someone you were about to tell something important—and he was kissing her, and she was kissing him back, and it was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding. It was not a peck. Nora had been married to that man for three years and she knew how he kissed when he meant it.
The pitcher left her hands.
She didn't drop it so much as forget she was holding it. Her arms simply stopped being arms. It fell straight down and hit the edge of the concrete stepping-stone at her feet and burst—there was no other word—burst, six pounds of glass and lemonade and ice exploding outward in a wet, glittering spray across the gravel and her sandals and her bare ankles. The sound was enormous. It was a gunshot. It was a window going in a storm.
The music kept playing. Behind her, around the corner, on the patio, twenty-six conversations stopped at once.
Grant spun around. Her mother's hands fell away from his face and stayed in the air for a moment, frozen in the shape of him.
"Nora," Grant said. His face had gone the color of paper. "Nora. Okay. Okay. Don't—you're bleeding. Don't move, there's glass. Let me—Nora, let me explain—"
And the scream came up out of her from somewhere she hadn't known was in her body, from underneath the baby, from underneath everything.
"Explain? Kissing my mother?"