Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [30]
Cee Cee loved Andy, her dad. She loved her mum, too, of course, but her mum was less fun. She lived with her mum all the time, so her mum was the person who had to shout at her in the morning, when she was eating her Cheerios one at a time and hadn’t even brushed her hair yet. And who put her to bed when she wasn’t finished watching her program. And made her tidy her room. All of that stuff. Her dad was her hero because he didn’t have to do any of those things. He was her every-other-weekend, half-the-school-holidays, two-weeks-in-the-summer, and each-second-Christmas daddy.
Cee Cee was no fool. She had already worked out what the older children of divorcing parents sometimes took much longer to figure. She had the “two Christmases, two summer holidays” thing all taped up. She knew that Mum was happy with Steve, who was very, very tall and strong, and could fly her around the room, balanced on the palm of his hand, making airplane noises, and that Dad was happy with Lisa, who couldn’t, and that this was a much better scenario—for them and for her—than both of them being unhappy together. Which was what they had been, apparently, and why they decided not to live together anymore. She didn’t remember that, of course. She’d only been two when they split up. But she’d heard that all her life. From Mum, and from Dad, and from her granny Joan, who was Mum’s mum. She’d also heard, about ten times a day, how much they both loved her, and so, having never knowingly lived any other way, she believed them, and accepted it, and was happy.
She could be a little manipulative, but then, who wouldn’t have learned to be under those circumstances?
Lisa might not go so far as to say that she loved Cee Cee, but she had perhaps recognized that she might, one day. She liked her a lot, at least. They’d gone ice-skating together the first time they’d ever met. Lisa—too keen to impress—had fallen so soon and so heavily on the ice that she’d been afraid her coccyx would come out through the top of her head. She’d cried fat tears of pain and humiliation, and Cee Cee had cried, too, and Andy had hugged them both to him and laughed. He’d been so thrilled that day, watching them skate tentatively around the rink, hand in hand. She remembered his grin.
Cee Cee wasn’t the problem. At least, not entirely. Although Lisa had been a little surprised, and even ashamed, the first time she had realized that she was capable of being jealous of a six-year-old child, it wasn’t that.
It was Cee Cee’s mother. Karen. Andy’s first wife. That…she…that was what Lisa could not move past.
Andy’s previous marriage had never been a secret. When they started working together, there was a picture of a baby Cee Cee on his desk. She’d known it before she got to know him, before the day that led to the night that led to the beginning of the two of them. Of course, it was a while after that that Lisa really started to care about Andy. At the beginning it was just fun, which was all she was ever really looking for. He’d insinuated himself under her skin, though, and within a couple of months the casual thing had become more serious—more serious than anything she’d been involved in. That first year, for her birthday, he had surprised her with a weekend away. He’d booked a little bed-and-breakfast in the Cotswolds, in Bourton-on the-Water, and not told her until the day before. They’d slept, and eaten, and read the papers, and laughed, and walked. On Sunday, driving back leisurely, unwilling to let the weekend go, they had parked and walked again, spread a blanket under the sunshine on a quiet hillside, and made love. Afterward, dressed again and lying spent (a phrase she had often read, but believed she never fully understood until that day), perpendicular to each other, her head on his stomach, she had asked him to tell her about his marriage.