The Secret History

As a young girl, Adrienne Brodeur often stood in the shadows of her glamorous, charismatic mother. Then one day her mother woke her up with a whisper that would change both of their lives.

- Adrienne Brodeur

Wake up, Rennie.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder and pulled the sheet over my head. “Rennie, please.” Even before I turned and saw her face, I could hear a peculiar quaver in my mother’s whisper. Her voice sounded hesitant and desperate. The mattress sank where she lowered herself beside me, and my body stiffened against the depression. I kept my eyes shut and steadied my exhalations.

“Rennie!” The whisper, more urgent now, still held an unfamiliar tremor. She pulled down the sheet. “Please wake up.”

I opened my eyes. Malabar was in her nightgown, her hair mussed. I sat up.

“Mom, what’s wrong? Is everything OK?” “Ben Souther just kissed me.”* I took in this information.

Tried to make sense of it. Couldn’t. I rubbed my eyes. My mother was still there beside me.

“Ben kissed me,” my mother repeated. A noun, a verb, an object—such a simple sentence, really, and yet I couldn’t comprehend it. Why would Ben Souther, a family friend, kiss my mother? It wasn’t that I was naive; at age 14, I knew that people kissed people they weren’t supposed to. My parents had not shielded me from stories of both of their transgressions during their marriage, and in this way, I knew more about infidelity than most children. I was four when my parents broke up, six when my father remarried, seven when that new marriage started to fall apart, and eight when my mother was finally able to wed my stepfather, Charles, who’d been separated from, but still married to, his first wife when they met.

Ben was married, too, of course, to Lily. The Southers had been married for 35 years.

Mom and Charles. Ben and Lily.

The four of them had been couple-friends for as long as my mother and stepfather had known each other, about a decade now.