What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [115]
“Oh. We’re done? Okay.” Luke stood up, towering over her. He seemed to be waiting for something.
Alice realized with a start that he wanted his money. She went inside and found her purse. It was physically painful to hand over two fifty-dollar notes. He actually wasn’t that good-looking at all.
Luke’s huge hand closed cheerfully around the cash. “Well, I hope you’re back to yourself next week, eh? We’ll do a killer session to make up!”
“Great!” beamed Alice. She paid this man over a hundred dollars to tell her how to exercise each week?
She watched him roar out of the driveway and shook her head. Right. Coffee. She looked at the step where Luke had done his push-ups and suddenly she was down on her hands and knees, palms flat, body horizontal, stomach muscles pulled in hard, and she was bending her elbows and bringing her chest smoothly down toward the step.
One, two, three, four . . .
Good Lord, she was doing push-ups.
She counted to thirty before she collapsed, her chest burning, arms aching, and yelled, “Beat that!” as she looked around triumphantly for someone who wasn’t there.
There was silence.
Alice hugged her knees to her chest and looked at the For Sale sign across the road.
She had a feeling the person she’d been looking for was Gina.
Gina.
It was very strange to miss a person she didn’t even know.
Chapter 24
Elisabeth’s Homework for Jeremy
Well, I don’t know, you seemed a bit grumpy this morning. Is that allowed? Are therapists allowed to have feelings? I don’t think so, J. Save them for your own therapy sessions. Not on my time, buddy.
I really wanted a bit more praise when I showed you how many pages I’d written for my homework. Couldn’t you tell that, as a therapist? I mean, I know you’re not meant to read it, but the reason I brought along my notebook was so you could say something like “Wow! I wish all my clients were as committed to this process as you!” Or you could have said what nice handwriting I had. Just a suggestion. You’re the one who is meant to be good with people. Instead you just looked a bit taken aback, as if you didn’t even remember asking me to do the homework. It always bugged me when teachers forgot to ask for the homework they’d set. It made the world seem undependable.
Anyway, today, you wanted to talk about the coffee shop incident.
Personally, I think you were just curious about it. You were feeling a bit bored for a Monday morning and thought it might spice things up.
You seemed quite testy when I said I preferred to talk about Ben and the adoption issue. The customer is always right, Jeremy.
This is what happened in the coffee shop, if you must know.
It was a Friday morning and I’d stopped in at Dino’s on the way to work. I was having a large skim cappuccino because I wasn’t pregnant or in the middle of the cycle. There was a woman at the table next to me with a baby and a toddler about two years old.
A little girl. With brown curly hair. Ben has brown curly hair. Well, actually, he doesn’t because he gets it cut really close to his head like a car thief but I’ve seen photos from before we met. When I used to imagine our children I always gave them brown curly hair like Ben’s.
So, there was that, but she wasn’t particularly cute or anything. She had a dirty face and she was being sort of whiny.
The mother was talking on her mobile phone and smoking a cigarette.
Well, she wasn’t smoking a cigarette at all.
But she looked like a smoker. That sort of thin, edgy face. She was telling someone a story on the mobile phone that was all about how she put someone in their place and she kept saying, “It was just too funny.” How can something be too funny, Jeremy?
Anyway, she wasn’t watching the little girl. It’s like she forgot the child even existed.
Dino’s is on the Pacific Highway. The door is always being opened and closed as people come in and out.
So I was watching the little girl. Not in a weird, obsessive infertile way. Just watching her, idly.
The door opened to let in a Mothers