Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [18]
Dad was more interested in her—that was how it felt. He talked to her about the news. He watched the programs she liked, with her, and got her to tell him about the characters and the plots. He’d never done that. She’d come home with all this careers stuff, and he’d read it with her, asking her lots of questions—about her A levels, and applications, and universities. She sat in the front seat of the car now, when they went somewhere.
Dad had always been the cook. Mum used to say if there was a pill you could take that meant you got all the calories and nutrition you needed, she wouldn’t bother to eat. Mind you, she used to eat what Dad prepared. Hannah didn’t think it was the actual eating, so much as the shopping and preparing and cleaning up that Mum hadn’t been so keen on. Dad was different. He loved it. When Mum was alive, she would sit, in the evening, with a bulbous glass of red wine, on one of the stools at the breakfast bar, and watch him slice and tenderize and whisk. She used to say she’d really won the lottery when she found him. Since she’d died—before that, really—since she’d been really ill, Hannah had helped him. He’d shown her how to cut vegetables, pivoting the knife up and down against the chopping board so that you could go really quickly, and how to mash garlic with the side of the blade, adding a little salt as you went, and how to make a smooth roux. They’d never talked about this shift of habit. One evening she had come to him, and started to chop something, and he had silently tied one of the oversize denim aprons that hung on the kitchen door around her neck and her waist, and then quietly told her what he was doing.
And now they cooked together almost every night. They’d started making desserts. And dips. Now when Hannah stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and stared at her naked reflection, her stomach was rounder. You could no longer see the hard muscles beneath the surface, and, sideways, there was a curve. She quite liked it.
She wanted to get her belly button pierced. Dad would never let her. She’d have stood more chance if Mum was alive. Mum would probably have said yes. She’d have said she should enjoy her flat stomach while she still had it. She’d have said piercing was better than tattooing, because you could always take a piercing out. She’d have said anywhere except the face. She especially hated those rods people had put through their chins and their eyebrows. But she’d have been okay about the tummy button. She could probably get away with it now, if she wanted to. She wouldn’t have to tell Dad. They didn’t do that naked thing anymore. He wouldn’t see it until next summer. It would be too late then to throw a wobbly. Maybe she would do it….
Life’s too short, after all, isn’t it? Not to do the things you want—the things that make you happy? Hannah had been thinking that quite a lot lately.
Mum had gotten really, really thin. This new little belly felt like health, and like life. And the cooking, she knew, felt a little like therapy.
Dad let her have a little glass of wine, too, sometimes. He once said that he felt better when there were two glasses.
Tonight they were making mince pies. From scratch. They’d made the mincemeat a few weeks earlier, when they’d made the cake and the Christmas pudding. That had been a real Martha Stewart day, and the kitchen had been full of the strange smells of candied peel and boozy currants. Now, in the glow of the Christmas tree, to the sound of the Jacksons singing “Rocking Robin,” they were rolling pastry on the gray marble slab, cutting out ivy leaves and stars to top their pies.
Everyone was coming. Hannah had insisted. When they’d all been together for her birthday at the beginning of October, she’d made them commit, marking it off in their diaries. She’d told Amanda that she absolutely could not