The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [18]
“Aren’t you running late? Go save lives,” she says now, not meaning to be cruel, only factual. But Karl takes offense.
“It’s not—” he begins, then stops because Annabelle has entered the kitchen, frowning at the morning, slow and cranky, quite unlike both of them. Gwen is a morning person, while Karl, like many hyperachievers, permits himself no more than four or five hours of sleep.
Annabelle, by contrast, is a night owl who fights bedtime and treats morning as a personal offense. Another reason for Gwen to be here for bedtime every night. Karl would never have the patience to cajole Annabelle through her nighttime routine. There are circles under Annabelle’s eyes, bigger and darker than usual. Gwen wonders if Karl knows that Annabelle sometimes creeps down to the kitchen with the earbuds from her little MP3 player and then watches the television on the counter, standing all the while. Once Gwen found her with her chin resting on the counter, asleep on her feet, while an infomercial touted the miracle of mineral makeup. She wonders at the secrets of her daughter’s DNA. Were her parents night owls? How had they coped? Given the remote orphanage where Annabelle spent the first eleven months of her life, her parents were almost certainly farmers. Did they frown at sunrise, did they stay up late, despite knowing the price they would pay come morning? Did they abandon their daughter to strike out for the city, find a life that suited them better?
“Good morning, sweet pea.”
“Peas are not sweet,” she says. Then: “Can I have pancakes?”
“We’re a little pressed for time. But we can have them this weekend. I thought you could come over to Poppa’s, have a sleepover?”
“You should check with me—” Karl begins, but Annabelle is already lighting up. “Can I have the princess room?”
“Of course,” Gwen says. The princess room is nothing more than Gwen’s childhood room, virtually untouched since she left for college. If her mother had lived—but her mother did not live.
“You didn’t ask me,” Karl says in a low voice after she sends Annabelle back upstairs to put on real pants. She was trying to coast by with her pajama bottoms. Plaid, they would have fooled her father. This is another reason why Gwen has to come by every morning; Annabelle gets too much by Karl. Their daughter is the one person impervious to his surgical authority and expectations.
But for all the reasons Gwen can list for being here every morning and evening, none really matters. She’s here because she cannot bear being away from her daughter. Yet she has chosen to be away from her daughter. No, she doesn’t understand it herself.
“I know we have no formal arrangement—” Karl continues.
“Yet.”
“But you didn’t ask me if you could have Annabelle this weekend.”
“I don’t have to,” Gwen says, putting bread in the toaster, getting out the cinnamon sugar that Annabelle likes. It comes in a plastic yellow sifter shaped like a bear, a relic of Gwen’s childhood. Her own did not survive, but she bought this one at an antique store, laughing at herself for paying seven dollars for a piece of plastic that used to cost less than two—and was filled with cinnamon sugar.
“If you are serious about this—”
“I am serious. Serious as a heart attack, as they say in your world. But then, my world doesn’t have metaphors or similes about what matters because, as you so often remind me, nothing matters in my world.”
“I never—”
“Always,” she says. She is aware that she is interrupting him, aware that she is enjoying it a little too much. “You always let me know how trivial my life is. Not in words. Through your lack of words, your lack of questions, your inability to feign interest. By your silence, you let me know every day that what I do and who I am is of absolutely no interest to you.”
Annabelle has returned and is standing in the doorway, regarding them. She is bright, exceptionally bright, although no child could be expected to compete with the brainiac powers of Karl Flores. Still, she is probably aware of more than they want her to be. Gwen hopes those