Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [26]
“No. Not at all. Nor is gawping at obvious women in coffee shops. Incidentally.”
His face was so open. She didn’t know what to say.
“Can I buy you a coffee? Go back to the scene of the crime? Penance?”
“There’s no need.” She couldn’t decide whether she was intrigued or exasperated. But either way, she was still late. She looked at her watch.
“Tempted?”
“No. Not tempted. Just wondering exactly how late I’m going to be.”
“Late for what? What do you do?”
“I’m temping.” Why was she even answering?
“They won’t fire a temp. Not this close to Christmas. Not because they’re all heart. Just because there isn’t time to get anyone else.”
He wasn’t like anyone else she’d met lately. And it was pretty obvious that he was being a pain in the arse because he liked her—liked the look of her, or liked the way she’d sized him up the day before, or something. And that was flattering, damn it. And after all, she’d accepted stranger invitations, in weirder places. Sometimes you wished you hadn’t. And sometimes amazing things happened. And the filing was seriously, seriously dull….
He sensed her waver.
“Come on. A coffee…”
“I don’t like Starbucks.”
“God—me, neither. Evil. Scary. Like plastic bags. And disposable nappies.” He shuddered theatrically. “And that stuff you spray out of an aerosol to get the smell out of your curtains and stuff. Yewk!” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “Bloody good coffee, though.”
Jennifer
Jennifer loved her husband’s mother. It was her father-in-law she couldn’t stand. Kathleen was warm and funny and had always made her feel welcome. Brian was cool and sharp and left her, each time she saw him, with the impression that he was disappointed by her. Actually, as the years had passed and the feeling went from being uncomfortable to upsetting to habitual, she began to realize that Brian was disappointed by life, and not just by her.
This year he was disappointed by having to have his family Christmas celebration the week before Christmas. Which was her fault. She wanted to be with Hannah, and Mark, and the others. That felt like the right thing to do, and it would sure as hell be more fun, her poor dead mother notwithstanding. So her in-laws had brought the whole Christmas thing forward a week. No one had asked them to do that. Kathleen said she loved to see everyone together. Or, at least, that domestic disturbance was what Jennifer supposed might be the problem, as she stood in the door frame between the kitchen—Kathleen’s feminine, inclusive domain—and the living room, where Brian held court, sat old-man wide-legged in his armchair, watching his grandchildren play on the rug.
Stephen’s sisters, Anna and Joanne, were there. Their husbands were not, being, respectively, an ex and estranged. And Brian was as sure as hell disappointed by that. Anna’s husband had left his pregnant wife for his pregnant girlfriend three years before, and Joanne’s had walked out on her and their two children almost exactly two years later.
Although Jennifer supposed that, in reality, this family simply reflected national statistics, it seemed a singular failure to her. Two out of three of your children in a failed marriage. Mustn’t that have had something to do with the parents, even if it was nominally the fault of the deserting husbands? What had it been like here, when Stephen, Anna, and Joanne were young?
Stephen was the middle child. Joanne was older by thirteen months; Anna, younger by two years. Kathleen loved to talk about the time when she had three children under five—two of them in terry nappies. It was clearly when she had been happiest. Stephen remembered a tired mother, an absent father, but nothing, he said when Jennifer asked him, that made him any different from any of his mates. When she had questioned him more closely, he’d shrugged, and answered, “They’re still married, aren’t they?”
If that was Stephen’s measure of success, it was no wonder that she couldn’t get