No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [70]
By this time Mary had half forgotten his little indiscretion. What the…? She returned Penny’s smile, then changed the subject again, in her get-ready-for-gossip voice: “You’ll never guess what I heard last night.”
“What?” Penny asked, gripped by the prospect of scandal.
“Bridget the Bike and her husband have split up.” This was met with silence. “Someone told her he’d fathered that child in Sneem.”
Penny inhaled sharply.
“I know,” said Mary.
“Bridget Browne. Oh, dear God!”
“Apparently she discovered the truth weeks ago. They’ve been trying to work it out but…” Mary was shaking her head. “After all this time I wonder how she found out?”
“Well, the whole town’s talking about it,” Penny said.
“Yeah – but I wonder if it’s really true?” Mary pondered.
“Of course it is,” Penny said, betraying a little panic. “You think it’s not?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a rumour was unfounded.”
“Well, she’s left him, so it must be true.”
“Maybe. Still, I feel sorry for her. She sent me a lovely card when Ben died.”
Penny wasn’t ready to admit her part in the dissolution of the Brownes’ marriage so, despite the emergence of guilt, she managed a smile and inquired whether or not her friend wanted more coffee.
Later Penny was sitting in her dentist’s with a gap and a serious hangover. While she flicked through ancient magazines, she promised herself that she wouldn’t mix her drinks any more. It just wasn’t worth it. When she looked up, the woman opposite smiled. She smiled back, conscious of the gaping hole in her mouth.
“Cap?” the woman asked.
“Yeah.”
“Hmm. I have false teeth.” She loosened them in her mouth to demonstrate.
“Oh!”
“Eating steak’s a pain in the face.”
“Right.”
“I miss them all the same.”
“Right,” Penny said again, not sure whether the woman was referring to steak or her teeth.
The nurse called the steak-deprived woman in for consultation, leaving Penny alone. This time she picked up a celebrity gossip magazine that was normally not to her taste. She stared at the singer Mia Johnson crying on the front page. She read the article with shaking hands – and not just because she was hung-over: in that picture, the ever-elusive Sam Sullivan was standing behind Mia. She thought about bolting but the gap in her gob forbade anything so radical.
Once her tooth was fixed, she drove straight home and went online. Who is this man? At last she had found a story worth reporting.
Saying goodbye to his kids was always hard but this time Ivan didn’t experience the usual trauma. This time he had someone standing by him as he waved to them. Sienna had come to mean something to him. It had been just a matter of weeks, she was a bit younger and those around him, except Mary, felt he was too vulnerable to be serious but they were wrong: he had never felt stronger. He put his arm around Sienna as he watched his children disappear and she snuggled in tight.
“They’re nice kids,” she said.
“They are, even if they were little bastards to you,” he said. Chris had practically ignored her and Justine had followed his lead, and when they weren’t ignoring her they were either staring at her suspiciously or replying to her attempts at communication sulkily or sarcastically.
“They’ll get used to me,” she said, laughing.
“They have plenty of time,” he ventured.
“Yeah.”
Ivan sniffed a happy sniff and they made their way to the car park.
16. Digging for digging’s sake
It had been two weeks since the kiss that had never happened. In that time Mary and Sam had bumped into one another and behaved politely, embarrassed and yet maintaining the façade of normality. This polite distance was annoying to both parties who, although they were unwilling to admit to feelings beyond friendship, missed each other. Sam was particularly freaked and for many reasons, the first being his near-inability to control the impulse to kiss Mary. What the hell was that all about? Not to mention his suffocating jealousy of Denis. So she slept with the guy – big deal. Her sex life, now revealed, had been a shock. Ivan had painted her