Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [112]
“I’m all right.”
Mark knew she needed to wait until she got here.
“I’ll be there in half an hour or so. Okay?”
“Okay. You drive carefully.” It was what Barbara would have said.
What Mark was doing could wait, but he needed to make a few phone calls himself, so he went back to the office to work through them while he waited for Lisa, wondering what was going on.
He felt exhausted before she even arrived. He felt that they were falling apart more now than he had last summer, when Barbara had died. It was like everything stopped working when she left them. Jennifer, then him, Hannah, now Lisa. It was like her going had upset the natural order. She was emotional El Niño. Everything was going to hell. He felt like a juggler whose brightly colored balls were speeding up, veering out of control, and tumbling to the ground.
LISA HAD CLEARLY BEEN CRYING. A LOT. HER FACE WAS PALE BENEATH the angry red blotches of a prolonged bout of sobbing. Something really bad must have happened. Not an accident or an illness. That she could have said on the phone. Something inside. He was glad she’d felt she could come to him. But part of him wished, like with Jennifer, that his stepdaughters had had better friends. Weren’t women supposed to tell all to their girlfriends, not their stepfathers?
“I’d have gone to Anna’s, but she’s away.” That much was true. Anna was Lisa’s best friend from university, and she was away. She worked in fashion journalism, and she often was. She always said it wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded, but no one ever believed her. Lisa had other friends, but they were Andy’s friends, too. She didn’t want them to feel awkward, and she certainly didn’t want to tell them the truth.
“What on earth has happened?”
“I think Andy and I have broken up.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, MARK EXCUSED HIMSELF NOT LONG AFTER dinner and went to bed, claiming to be deeply involved with the thriller he was reading. He didn’t read a page. He and Lisa had talked until Hannah came home from school, but he wasn’t certain he understood everything that had happened and was even less certain that he could see how they would resolve it. Lisa had sat at the breakfast bar, and between sobs and loud sniffs, had spilled out all that had happened. The affair, the proposal, the rejection, the revelation…Mark was shocked, though he tried hard to keep that reaction off his face. She had been really stupid, that much was true. Andy’s reaction to being cuckolded was predictable, and deserved. It was asking a lot of a bloke—getting past that. And he saw now—now that he knew what had been going on—that she’d been stringing him along, accepting his proposal months ago, wriggling out of commitment, and then dropping this complete bombshell on him. What did she expect him to have done?
By mutual agreement, they changed the subject when Hannah came in, refreshingly chatty for a change, full of the school play and the auditions that had been scheduled for the following day, and she hadn’t noticed that anything was up. She’d assumed Lisa had come home to hang out. Kids took everything at face value. She didn’t notice the puffy eyelids because she wasn’t really looking. When boys went through puberty and their voices were breaking, there was that disconcerting period when you never knew whether it would come out deep and chocolatey or smurfy and squeaky. Hannah was like that. Sometimes very much a kid. Sometimes not. She and Lisa were downstairs watching TV now. Hannah was sitting on the floor between Lisa’s knees, and her sister was putting her hair in small, tight braids, so that it would be curly for her audition. He could hear Hannah shouting at Alan Sugar on The Apprentice.
As he often did, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine what his wife would say. It occurred to him that this thought process was definitely different now, because he knew now that Barbara had been unfaithful once, too, even if it wasn’t while she was married to him. Whatever the back story, and however he felt about it, it meant she