After Her by Joyce Maynard Page B

this point; his father would die of a heart attack the following spring. My grandmother on my mother’s side, who’d kept JFK’s photograph on her nightstand, wore black and wept through the ceremony.
    â€œI don’t know which fact about the day made her cry,” my mother told us. “Everything, most likely.”
    Our mother had remained dry eyed. “I never trusted that man,” she said, referring to Kennedy, I assume, though the remark could have been construed other ways. Even before all the stories about JFK’s cheating came out later, she’d known. She maintained a strong affinity for Jackie, a woman she claimed to identify with, though the two could hardly have had less in common.
    With a baby on the way, the college plan was scrapped. Three months later she suffered a miscarriage.
    Our parents could have split up then, but something had changed. Where before my mother dreamed of college, and my father had his eye on a big career as a city homicide detective, in their grief and shock all they could think of was another baby.
    My mother enrolled in secretarial school and got a job as a typist. Our father graduated from the police academy, joining the force around the time my mother finally got pregnant again, with me. From the photographs she had of that time—one of her and my father on a cable car, and another of her in a maternity dress and him with his hand on her stomach, grinning—I figured this must have been a period my parents were actually happy together.
    One of my earliest memories concerns how handsome my father looked in his uniform—the sparkling badge, shiny shoes, the hat he’d put on my head or twirl with his finger or toss in the air and retrieve without even seeming to try. Good as he looked in that uniform, though, what he always wanted was to be a plainclothes detective.
    Plainclothes: hardly the word for how my father dressed. Even in those days, when his salary was very low, he paid regular visits to a tailor to make sure everything fit just right: a black leather jacket that showed off his broad shoulders and narrow waist and hips; shoes of the softest leather; a shirt of some very good cotton, or sometimes silk. His pants were perfectly pressed (ironing, the one domestic chore he performed, other than cooking). His hair was black and shiny as my tap shoes and he cut it himself, perfectly—a gift he’d learned from his barber father.
    I have no memory of my sister’s birth, given that I was not yet two years old when she was born. That’s when we moved to Marin County, the house on Morning Glory Court. And all the other places that made up the landscape of our childhood: Marin Joe’s, where our father took us for tiramisu. That wonderful bridge—the Golden Gate—its implausibly red beams spanning the dark and churning water of San Francisco Bay. On one side, the glittering city. And on the other side, the mountain.
    Always, before, it had been the city that conjured images of danger, while our side of the bridge remained a safe and sleepy haven. That summer, 1979, everything changed.
    T HE FACT THAT HE WAS married to our mother—back when he still was—never got in the way of our father’s expressing interest in other women. More than that. He didn’t try that hard to conceal this, even from us. He never saw his appreciation for the opposite sex as anything to be ashamed of. That’s how he was, and the rest of us should just accept it. Love him for it, even.
    When we were out with our father, we were always bumping into women we’d never met before, who seemed to know our father well, or think they did.
    Once, when I was walking down a street with him—heading to his office at the Civic Center—a woman had mistaken my father for Dean Martin (or claimed to anyway; that might have been her way of striking up a conversation). Oblivious to the presence of a little girl in a Brownie uniform