Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [31]
Karen and he had met the summer he’d graduated from university. He’d taken a job with a company that ran sailing holidays on the Turkish coast. He’d grown up on the water, in Norfolk, and boats were his passion. He taught novice sailors. Karen worked in the office at the resort. She’d just graduated, too, in hotel management. It was one of those long, glorious summers, where their responsibilities were straightforward and their free time was their own. In the evenings, and on their days off, he would sail them to a nearby cove and light a fire on the beach. They fell in love that summer, he said. Karen was light and funny and free.
Lisa knew all of that already. A few months earlier, Andy had left her alone in his flat one night when he went to the off-license, and she’d gone snooping. She wasn’t a woman on a mission, but she was, by now, mildly curious about him. And he wasn’t a man who seemed to have secrets…but…he was gone, and Coronation Street had finished, and she was the sort of girl who snooped a little. She always opened people’s medicine cabinets, too, when she went to their loos. She’d opened a stiff desk drawer and found a shoe box full of photographs. They’d been taken somewhere hot and sunny—now she knew where. The girl was tall and lean and white blond. She was topless (and how Lisa stared at those innocuous breasts) and golden, squinting against the sunshine, her hand pushing her hair back from her forehead. She had looked exactly as Andy had described her, only now he didn’t say anything about how sexy she was. That had jolted her. She’d heard his key in the lock and pushed the drawer closed hurriedly so that he wouldn’t know what she had been doing. But, although pride and something like fear prevented her from asking questions, she couldn’t stop thinking about the pretty girl in the photographs.
Now, though, she was free to ask him whatever she wanted to know. And she wanted to know everything. She thought that if she probed every detail, understood everything, then she wouldn’t be able to imagine anything else. That knowing would enable her to put it away, that chapter of Andy’s life, and not worry about it.
It hadn’t exactly worked that way.
Karen had changed, Andy said, as soon as they left Turkey. Slowly, at first. He didn’t notice until after they were married. He hadn’t seen the ambition and the drive and the slight streak of ruthless selfishness. Maybe it hadn’t been there on the beach. Maybe she grew into it. Andy said he had almost admitted to himself that he wasn’t in love with her anymore when she’d gotten pregnant with Cee Cee. It had been an accident. (Lisa didn’t understand how that happened. She’d had a lot of sex, with a lot of guys, and she’d never come close to having “an accident.” She never entirely believed intelligent people who said they did.) For a few weeks a sullen and sick Karen had talked about “the pregnancy” and not “the baby,” and Andy suspected that if it were up to her she might not stay pregnant. He tried, he said, for Cee Cee. He said she did, too, although Lisa found that harder to imagine.
Lisa never worried that Andy still had feelings for Karen. That wasn’t it. She was just jealous of the feelings he had once had for her. Mum had told her off about it once. She’d said it was immature. That people were who they were and that included a part of all the people they’d loved before. And that you should be glad of someone’s capacity to love and then love again, not jealous. That virgins—emotional and physical—had far less to offer in an adult relationship. Lisa remembered telling her mum she’d been watching too much Oprah on cable TV.
Christmas Day
“Delicious. We did good!”
“No amount of chestnuts and bacon could ever make Brussels sprouts delicious.”
“And that’s why we made you carrots.”
“With maple glaze, if you please. Taking the vegetable as near to being a sweetie as the vegetable can get. Just for your sweet