Free American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

“Before they built the bridge, it used to take people an hour to get across by ferry,” he said. “But sometimes there was such backup you’d have to wait ten or twelve hours before there was room for your car.”
    I nodded, while inside I was thinking of the announcement I’d make.
Granny is having an affair with Dr. Wycomb,
I would say. Briefly, I had believed she wouldn’t return to Chicago now that I knew her secret. Or maybe she didn’t realize I knew. But she had to, otherwise she’d have demanded more explanation for my sullenness.
    “Can you imagine having the patience to wait twelve hours?” my mother was saying.
    Should I have guessed about my grandmother? I had read
The Well of Loneliness
at the age of fourteen, pulling it down from her shelf and returning it with slight confusion at the idea of two women falling in love, but not enough to ask her about it. Anyhow, that book had been set decades ago, and in England. For my own grandmother, the grandmother living in my house, who used the same bar of soap in the bathroom that I did, whose jewelry and high heels I’d dressed up in as a little girl—for her to be in a homosexual relationship didn’t make sense. She’d been married, she’d had a child! And even if it was true, why hadn’t she been more careful to prevent me from becoming party to her secret? She was making me choose between her and my parents, and what sort of choice was that? In a way, I had always loved her more deeply, I had loved her most, but I had thought she and I were conspiring to conceal this hurtful fact.
    We were passing another set of binoculars, and my father stooped and peered into them. When he rejoined us, he took my mother’s hand, and I could sense the buoyancy of his enthusiasm.
    For the next three nights, we stayed in a motel in St. Ignace, all of us in one room. The motel was called Three Breezes and had a pool in which my father swam laps, though my mother and I found it too cold. On the day we hiked the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, I thought,
I will tell them in fifteen minutes. In another fifteen minutes. When we’re back in the car.
The day after that, we took the ferry to Mackinac Island, where we rode in a horse-drawn carriage, ate fudge, and had lunch at a restaurant in the Grand Hotel. “Maybe you’ll come back someday for your honeymoon,” my mother said, and she squeezed my knee beneath the table.
They are having an affair,
I thought,
and Dr. Wycomb is giving her lavish presents, and maybe she’s even giving her money.
    During our last dinner in St. Ignace, my parents drank two bottles of wine between them, and later, my father convinced my mother to swim with him in the motel pool, the sky dark but the pool lit up. From the room, I could hear them giggling. I went to sleep, and the next morning, I opened my eyes and thought,
They already know.
I listened to them sleeping in the bed across from mine, my mother’s deep breathing and my father’s quiet snores, as if even when asleep, he was trying to be polite.
They already know,
I thought,
and if they don’t, it’s because they’ve chosen not to.
Surely that accounted for my father’s initial resistance to my accompanying my grandmother to Chicago the previous winter. I would say nothing, I realized, because it wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t my place. I was glad then that I had not previously been able to express the words.
    And really, what has stayed with me from that vacation as much as my own suspicious, petty agonizing is my father on the esplanade just after our arrival. The wind blew his hair, and he was fidgety with delight, straining to explain to my mother and me exactly why the Mighty Mac was so impressive. I wondered at the time—I wonder still—if that was the happiest my father had ever been.
    IT TOOK LONGER , but we drove home via the southern route: once more across the Mighty Mac (this time I was allowed to take the wheel), then down through the lower part of Michigan,