No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [10]
“What about Mom?” Grace asked.
“What about her?”
“Does she have to walk with me?”
“I’ll talk to her,” I said.
“Talk to who?” Cynthia said, walking into the kitchen.
Cynthia looked good this morning. Beautiful, in fact. She was a striking woman, and I never tired of her green eyes, high cheekbones, fiery red hair. Not long like when I first met her, but no less dramatic. People think she must work out, but I think it’s anxiety that’s helped her keep her figure. She burns off calories worrying. She doesn’t jog, doesn’t belong to a gym. Not that we could afford a gym membership anyway.
Like I’ve mentioned, I’m a high school English teacher, and Cynthia works in retail—even though she has a family studies degree and worked for a while doing social work—so we’re not exactly rolling in dough. We have this house, big enough for the three of us, in a modest neighborhood that’s only a few blocks from where Cynthia grew up. You might have thought Cynthia would have wanted to put some distance between herself and that house, but I think she wanted to stay in the neighborhood, just in case someone came back and wanted to get in touch.
Our cars are both ten years old, our vacations low key. We borrow my uncle’s cabin up near Montpelier for a week every summer, and three years ago, when Grace was five, we took a trip to Walt Disney World, staying outside the park in a cheap motel in Orlando where you could hear, at two in the morning, some guy in the next room telling his girl to be careful, to ease up on the teeth.
But we have, I believe, a pretty good life, and we are, more or less, happy. Most days.
The nights, sometimes, can be hard.
“Grace’s teacher,” I said.
“What do you want to talk to Grace’s teacher for?” Cynthia asked.
“I was just saying, when it’s one of those parent-teacher nights, I should go in and talk to her, to Mrs. Enders,” I said. “Last time, you went in, I had a parent-teacher thing at my school the same night, it always seems to happen that way.”
“She’s very nice,” Cynthia said. “I think she’s a lot nicer than your teacher last year, what’s-her-name, Mrs. Phelps. I thought she was a bit mean.”
“I hated her,” Grace concurred. “She made us stand on one leg for hours when we were bad.”
“I have to go,” I said, taking another sip of cold coffee. “Cyn, I think we need a new coffeemaker.”
“I’ll look at some,” Cynthia said.
As I got up from the table Grace looked at me despairingly. I knew what she wanted from me. Talk to her. Please talk to her.
“Terry, you seen the spare key?” Cynthia asked.
“Hmm?” I said.
She pointed to the empty hook on the wall just inside the kitchen door that opened onto our small backyard. “Where’s the spare?” It was the one we used if we were taking a walk, maybe a stroll down to the Sound, and didn’t want to take a ring loaded with car remotes and workplace keys.
“I don’t know. Grace, you got the key?” Grace did not yet have her own house key. She hardly needed it, with Cynthia around to take her to and from school. She shook her head, glared at me.
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s me. I might have left it next to the bed.” I sidled up next to Cynthia, smelled her hair as I walked past. “See me off?” I said.
She followed me to the front door. “Something going on?” she asked. “Is Grace okay? She seems kind of quiet this morning.”
I grimaced, shook my head. “It’s, you know. She’s eight years old, Cyn.”
She moved back a bit, bristling. “She complains about me to you?”
“She just needs to feel a bit more independent.”
“That’s what that was about. She wants you to talk to me, not her teacher.”
I smiled tiredly. “She says the other kids are making fun of her.”
“She’ll get over it.”
I wanted to say something, but felt we’d had this discussion so many times, there weren’t any new points to make.
So Cynthia filled the silence. “You know there are bad people out there. The world is full of them.”
“I know, Cyn, I know.” I tried to keep the frustration,