Free The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard Page A

paintings.”
    “Of course she does,” said Val. She seemed to have gotten ahold of herself a little by this point, though her eyes were still moist, as if she was a minute from tears even though she probably wasn’t really.
    “Ruth here’s a real art lover,” he told her. “You should see the pictures she brings home from school. That’s something you two have in common.”
    “I’d love to see your work someday,” Val said. Nobody else had ever referred to the drawings I made as my “work.” To my mother, they were pictures.
    “I guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen my girl here,” my father said. “She’s shot up since the last time. Must be all the good vegetables.”
    Val was studying my father’s face now too. She had stepped back a little, the way a person would if she touched an electric fence. “You took me by surprise here, Edwin,” she said. (Edwin now, not Eddie.) “I don’t know what to say.”
    “Maybe we could take this place in together,” my father said. “You could probably tell us about the artists, Valerie. I’m not much for knowing this stuff myself.”
    For a moment, then, the two of them had just stood there. My father was looking at Val Dickerson, it seemed to me, in a way I had never seen him look at my mother, a way I’d never known my father might look. The thought came to me that he must be in love with her. As for Val, the person she was looking atagain was me. Then it seemed as if the two of them collected themselves—or Val did, anyway, and she turned back to my father.
    “Isabella Stewart Gardner was a wild woman,” she said. “She lived outside the rules, ahead of her time. This place used to be her home, you know.”
    I had run ahead now, impatient to get to a room I saw down the wide corridor, with golden furniture inside and a velvet couch, and paintings of angels on the ceiling. Though maybe part of it was not wanting to see what I guessed I might if I’d stayed standing in that spot. Whatever the two of them said to each other after that, I didn’t want to know. I was looking at a portrait of a woman in an old-fashioned dress by an artist named John Singer Sargent. This was safer, and also interesting.
    A minute later, my father joined me.
    “What happened to Mrs. Dickerson?” I said.
    “Something came up,” he told me, his voice back to normal, more or less. “She had to go. I guess we won’t be having that coffee after all. But when we’re done, I’ll buy you a hot chocolate at the refreshment stand.”
    That was how much my dad knew about art museums. He thought they had refreshment stands.
    We didn’t stay at the museum that long. My father seemed to think that what you did at a place like this was stroll through the rooms, reading the brass plaques posted next to every artwork, stopping just long enough to take in the name of the artist and when he was born and died—or she, in the case of the one I liked best, a painter named Mary Cassatt.
    The unfamiliar agitation I’d observed in him when we ran into Val Dickerson stayed with him. He seemed anxious and distracted, so I did not protest when he finally said, “What do you say we call it a day? There’s a barnful of cows waiting for me who don’t know it’s Christmas vacation.”
    He said almost nothing, driving home, but somewhere around Peabody he commented, “It might be best if your mother didn’t know we ran into Val Dickerson. You know how she is about those Dickersons.”
    I did know and I didn’t. Our relationship with the Dickersons had alwaysbaffled me, and now there was one more event involving a Dickerson that made no sense. Or—this was worse—an event that seemed comprehensible, but in a way that frightened me. Suppose my father and Mrs. Dickerson were in love? Suppose they ran away together, and left me alone with my mother and my sisters? And then Dana Dickerson would get my dad. And what then of my secret love for Ray Dickerson?
    Only I knew my father would