Secrets Untold: Stories of Love, Longing & Movin' On

By Lisa Foley

Secrets Untold, Stories of Love, Longing and Movin’ On will take you on a journey where decisions and deeds, thoughts, inner voices, and secrets people normally keep to the themselves are revealed with unflinching – and often humorous – candor.

In the opening story, Honesty, a young woman finds out the truth about her mother’s death. In Skinny and Unavailable, a single mom offers the reader simultaneous translations of her true feelings as she discovers her boyfriend’s attention seems tied to her weight and availability. In the title story, the main character runs away with a cowboy and shares the secrets she learns about herself through her infidelity. Sorrow and Dust looks at a woman coping with the loss of her best friend, while Gravity describes the downside of getting old and still being crazy in love.

Lose yourself in the stories of these women as they embrace love, lust, loss and the need to move on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa Foley
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540165350

Book preview

Secrets Untold

Stories of Love, Longing & Movin’ On

Lisa Foley

Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Foley

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission from the author.

Cover design by Connor Beck

Editing by Conor McCarthy

Formatting by Polgarus Studio

Foley, Lisa.

Secrets Untold : Stories of Love, Longing and Movin’ On

The stories in this collection appeared in the following publications:

Canada’s Storyteller, Honesty

Pottersfield Portfolio, Revived

Front & Centre,, The Hitch

Front & Centre, Skinny and Unavailable

The Loose Canon, Secrets Untold

The Danforth Review, It’s Not Really Depression

Traffic Cone Quarterly, Sorrow and Dust

The definitions of gravity came from merriam-webster.com, www.dictionary.com and Google.com

For Jim and Hailey

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my wonderful family and friends for your unwavering support. It is always appreciated and never taken for granted.

Thank you to the publishers who have supported me, but I must single out Matthew Firth. Thank you, Matthew, for convincing me that my writing was worthwhile. It’s because of your support I kept on.

Thank you, Connor Beck, for the wonderful cover design. It is simply magic.

Thank you, Conor McCarthy, for your editing. I hope we have more collaboration ahead of us.

And most importantly, thank you Jim Hamilton, for your encouragement, guidance and inspiration. Without you, this book wouldn’t exist.

Table of Contents

Honesty

Revived

The Hitch

Skinny and Unavailable

Secrets Untold

Texas Gate

It’s Not Really Depression

Sorrow and Dust

Gravity

Honesty

It isn’t every day a man turns eighty and although my father Ed, was not interested in a party, the numerous phone calls I had received from his friends made it clear we had no choice in the matter. Being the only child – only daughter – of a widower, celebrations of any kind had long since become my responsibility and I was happy to be planning a party for Ed. There was an air of anticipation which I put down to anxiety over the growing list of preparations and my concern that everything be just right. It was only sometimes when I was alone that I acknowledged some apprehension. Not normally being given to premonition, I dismissed that as anxiety over Ed’s advancing age.

The party would be held outdoors so I was particularly concerned with the garden. I had planted Honesty for the first time this year and it had come up tall and strong with delicate looking pink and white flowers. It stood out nicely against the cedar fence in an area shaded by maple trees. I was hoping it would still be blooming for the party, but the petals had started to fall off giving way to tiny green seed pods. I find colour to be important around water – it adds warmth – and with our yard backing onto the river, the blooms would have been a nice touch for Ed’s birthday.

Feeling disappointed that I would have to settle for some green leafy plants in that spot, I reminded myself that after a long, cold winter, the colour green was not an inadequate compromise. It was only June, after all. It’s the simple things we take for granted most. Like the colour green in June or the stillness of the water in the evening. Like honesty.

I knew who would have to be invited and whom we could accidentally overlook. Family of course – even Auntie Evelyn, the family drunk, a woman Ed could barely tolerate sober, but did. Auntie Evelyn was the only one from my mother’s family who cared to keep in touch with us after my mother died and Ed let her into our lives every once in a while out of a sense of duty and guilt, I suppose. Duty to me and my mother, guilt because he never remarried and I grew up motherless. Rail thin, chain-smoking, mickey-in-the-purse Auntie Evelyn.

If this was anything like having a mother would have been like, I was eternally grateful I didn’t have one. You could see the disappointment in her eyes every time she looked at me. I bore no physical resemblance to my mother and was apparently nothing like her. Auntie Evelyn would say things like, I see you’re still wearing your hair the same way. Your mother used to change her hairstyle every other week, or, Still living at home, Angela? Veronica was on her own by the time she was sixteen. It wasn’t as if my mother died giving birth to me. She went out in the boat one night and didn’t come back. Only the boat was found and Ed got rid of that right away. Had it destroyed. I was three. I sometimes wondered – especially given Auntie Evelyn’s predisposition – if alcohol was involved, but I never asked.

There’s a sadness about Ed. I’ve never know him to be any other way and I recognize it as an acquired sadness. It comes from somewhere between my mother and me and I don’t feel I have the right or the desire to pinpoint it exactly.

There were lots of things I never asked about – tidbits of gossip I’d picked up from the time I was a child, offhand comments made when Auntie Evelyn was around and had had too much to drink. I’d heard on more than one occasion, it was the gypsy in her, liked to roam. As I grew older I began to suspect she may have left Ed at one point, though I knew she wasn’t going anywhere the night she drowned, as all her clothes and jewelry had been left behind. Auntie Evelyn had told me many times that my mother never went anywhere without all her jewelry. Like early independence and a regular change of hairstyle, Auntie Evelyn seemed to consider this an admirable quality in a person.

The fact that I was unplanned and completely unexpected was never kept from me. How could it be when a childless couple has a baby in middle age? Ed was thirteen years older than my mother, and at forty-three my mother must have been shocked to discover she was pregnant. There are only a few baby pictures of me. Ed always said it wasn’t that they didn’t love me, people just didn’t take as many pictures back then. I always appreciated his attempts to make an excuse, but assumed having a baby at that point in their life, my parents were probably too tired to take pictures.

I don’t remember ever calling Ed Dad. I do remember using it as a weapon in my early adolescence. Whenever he refused me something I would yell at him, you didn’t want me to call you Dad because you never wanted to be a Dad! No Angie, he would say quietly, it’s just what you started calling me after your mother died and I didn’t have the energy to try and persuade you otherwise.

I had a series of nannies. All pleasant enough from what I recall, but they never stayed long. Ed wouldn’t have it. He had a sense of mistrust about them having himself been raised by the original nanny from hell. Until he was thirteen that is, when she fell down their basement stairs and broke her neck. I’m sure Ed felt partly responsible for her death because he despised her so, and she was looking for him to give him a wallop for something when she fell. Ed is a man of few words – fewer still as he grows old, although one can never tell with a man Ed’s age whether it’s the hearing or the need to say something that’s gone. But from what I gleaned from him and other family members over the years, her death came just in time. This was a not a woman likely to tolerate puberty in boys.

So my nannies never stayed longer than a year, but that was okay, I had my mother – a phantom mother who came with me everywhere I went, who listened to everything I had to say and always took my side, always sympathized with me and my point of view, who always liked the way I dressed and the way I looked, and always supported my endeavors whatever they happened to be. She had this smile, this benevolent smile everyone remembers their mothers having. A smile that said, It’s okay, it was worth it. You were worth it. The ‘it’ being self-sacrifice I suppose, though my mother didn’t live long enough to give up too much for