Free The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard

out of the ordinary.”
    The fact that it was only me he was doing this with, and that he had chosen an art museum—rather than the Old North Church, or the Museum of Science, or the ballpark—filled me with pride. I had worried, when we walked in the doors and saw the admission price—four dollars—that he might decide the museum was too expensive, but he didn’t hesitate. He opened his wallet and took out the bills, counted them one by one, and handed me my ticket so I could give it to the woman at the entry spot myself.
    “You might want to hold on to the stub,” he said. “Memento and all.”
    We were walking up the staircase to the first room of exhibits—running ahead, I was so excited to be at a place like this, a mansion—when my father called out to me.
    “What do you know, Ruthie,” he said. “Look who’s over there.”
    The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum definitely didn’t seem like the kind of place my father and I would have run into anyone we knew, so for a momentall I could think was that he’d spotted a celebrity—the newscaster we watched on the local Boston station maybe, or some player on the Red Sox, though it didn’t seem too likely they’d be in this place either.
    But it was Val Dickerson, coming up the steps with her ticket stub. No Dana or Ray with her. Just Val.
    Other times I’d seen her over the years, she was usually dressed in her painting clothes, some old pair of jeans and a man’s shirt—George’s no doubt—rolled up around her elbows, with her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. This time, she was wearing a dress and high-heeled shoes, which made her even taller than usual, of course, and she had lipstick on. I hadn’t realized before how beautiful she was.
    “What a surprise,” she said, standing back as if to assess me. Maybe she was doing the same thing my mother always seemed to do, comparing me with Dana. Suddenly I felt awkward, gangly, stupid-looking. My pants legs were too short, and I had a pimple on my chin.
    But Val Dickerson wasn’t looking at me in the way I had come to expect from my mother—finding fault. Her eyes were locked so intently on my face that I had to look away. She stroked my cheek then, and when I looked at her again, I saw there were tears in her eyes.
    I didn’t know what to make of that. In all my twelve years, I’d never seen my mother cry, not even hearing the words she’d recently received from Wisconsin. But it wasn’t news to me that Val Dickerson was nothing like my mother. Who could say what went on in her head? I was thinking that maybe being around all this great art touched her off. With Val you never could tell.
    I didn’t know what to do, so I studied my museum brochure, with a map in it of where to find the different artworks.
    “She’s beautiful, Eddie,” Val said. This was the only time I’d ever heard anyone call my father Eddie. To my mother, he was Edwin. To his brothers, Ed.
    “She’s lucky she didn’t inherit her old pop’s mug,” he said. “Dodged a bullet there, I’d say.”
    “How amazing that you two would have shown up here the same day asme,” she said. Though this didn’t begin to say it, actually. The amazing thing was that we were here at all. That my father, a man who’d never visited an art museum in his life, would have brought me to this one, on the very day Val Dickerson, who lived somewhere in Maine at the time, if I remembered right, would also have dropped in on this, of all museums, and on this same marble staircase, at the very moment he and I were mounting the steps together.
    “What do you say we get a cup of coffee, Val?” my father said. “Catch up.”
    Something about the tone of his voice seemed odd to me, unfamiliar. My father was always quiet, and shy, but he had an agitated sound as he spoke, and his voice seemed to have gone up a half octave. Maybe he registered this, too, because he cleared his throat.
    “We just got here,” I said. “I want to see the