Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [133]
“There are a few possibilities in here. I’ll make a couple of calls later. Go and see some places, maybe.” She sounded halfhearted, even to herself.
“I’ll come with you, if you want. Second pair of eyes.”
She squeezed his forearm. “Thanks, Mark. I know.” It was neither an acceptance nor a refusal. “You’ve been a bloody star, letting me stay, listening to all my bleating.”
“I think the bleating has been fairly mutual.”
“Maybe. See—we’re manic depressives anonymous. Got to shake it off.”
“You’ll be all right, you know?”
“I know I will. Eventually.”
He pulled her into a sudden, fierce hug. Lisa let herself be held for a while. He felt her relax into him.
“I miss my mum.” She sounded muffled and instantaneously tearful in his sweater, like she was five years old again.
“I miss her, too.”
They felt themselves teetering on the edge of an abyss they had both fallen into too many times in the last few months. They both smelled the self-pity in the fibers of each other’s clothes and the air around them.
Lisa moved first. She pushed herself back from her stepfather, open palms on his chest. “Right,” she said, her tone no-nonsense. “Come on. Enough of this wallowing.”
He aped her tone. “Okay. What’s on your agenda today, Gidget?”
“Well…I’ll be procrastinating a little bit on phoning the estate agents. So, I’m going to meet Jen for lunch. She just got back from skiing, so there’ll be venting to do! You?”
“Not a lot. Thought I’d try and engineer some ‘quality time’ with Kevin.” He grimaced. He and Lisa had recently started calling Hannah Kevin behind her back, after Harry Enfield’s belligerent, monosyllabic teenage character. Having your own Kevin wasn’t quite as funny as watching one on television. “A bit of gardening, maybe. It’s all about to go crazy out there.” It had been raining for what felt like weeks. Spring was about to spring in a big way.
“Do you want to come with me? We’re going Chinese, in town. The one next to Tesco. You haven’t seen Jen for a while, have you?”
“No. No. You go. Girls lunch.”
If Lisa noticed a tightening in his tone, she didn’t say anything.
As he watched her drive away, he wondered whether he should have gone. Faced Jennifer. It had to be done at some point. Otherwise there would be a rift, and that rift would have to stop being a secret and then it would have to be explained to Hannah. Everyone else had sorted themselves out. He knew it was up to him to offer Jennifer absolution. He sighed. Speaking of Hannah—he glanced at his watch. Eleven thirty A.M., and, as far as he knew, she was still snoring upstairs. It seemed to be what she wanted to do these days—stay out, sleep late, watch Channel 4 in her pajamas all afternoon, and go out again. He put the kettle on. Perhaps she would respond to a cup of tea….
JENNIFER ARRIVED FIRST AND CHOSE A TABLE IN THE WINDOW of the restaurant. She sat, watching the world go by from behind a red-and-white gingham café curtain, and sipping a Diet Coke. While she waited, she thought about her sister. Sentences she wanted to speak formed in her brain, and she rehearsed them quietly. She supposed she must get this urge to want to fix things from their mother. It was her big theme, this year. She’d fixed herself, or at least she believed she was on the way. Now she wanted to fix Lisa. She’d never realized how much alike they were. Both, in their way, commitment phobes. Nonbelievers. She hadn’t recognized it in herself as readily as she had seen it in Lisa. You could see Lisa holding herself back from Andy. She might blame all sorts of things. Andy had been married before. Weren’t the statistics for second marriages always lousy? Andy had a child. All of that. But that wasn’t it. She wasn’t prepared,