Page 33 of Unforgivable
I went to my bedroom and heard Jack come out of the shower, and I went in there looking for…I’m not sure what. Support, I guess. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and he was drying the back of his ears with another, and I opened the drawer of the vanity and rummaged for a lipstick. I didn’t need the lipstick, I just wanted something to do.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
Are you sleeping with her?
“Bronwyn won’t let me take Charlie to school,” I blurted. I sounded childish, whiny.
“Please, Laura. Not all that stuff again.” He, on the other hand, sounded weary.
“It’s just…” I couldn’t get the right words. I was still rummaging around the drawer and I pulled out a peach-colored tube which was worn out all the way down so that when I tried to put it on, nothing came out, just the bottom of the tube scraping my lips.
He met my eyes in the mirror. “She’s her mother. Surely you understand that, don’t you?”
Surely you understand that, don’t you? Even you, who is not a mother, must surely understand that?
“Did you ask her?” I blurted.
“Ask who what, Laura?”
“Ask Bronwyn about the divorce? Is it ever going to happen?”
He picked up his electric razor and turned it on. “Yes, we’re doing it next week.”
“Next week? I thought it was this week?” I closed the tube of lipstick.
“She had to postpone it.”
“Yeah, right,” I snorted.
“You’re going to do this the whole time?” he said, shaving.
I’d run out of self-control by then. My mouth was snapping without me having to do a thing. “Do youwanther here? Seriously, Jack. Do youlikehaving her around? Please tell me, because it’s a lot of work for me and I need to know that it’s worthwhile. Is it like the old days, maybe? Is that it?” I was shaking. Although to be fair, I was also massively hungover so it could have been that. I also knew I should shut up around about now. I wasn’t ready to open Pandora’s box, because I was fairly certain I wouldn’t be able to shove Pandora back in it. But my mouth had other ideas. “Do you guys like, play happy families when I’m at work? Is that it? Is it fun?” I had found another tube of lipstick in the drawer, a bright red one, not empty. I brought it to my lips but I was shaking so much when I applied it that I made my mouth both enormous and lopsided.
Jack put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Jealous. I just don’t want any trouble from Bron, that’s all.”
“How can she possibly give you any trouble?” I muttered. “When she gets her own way every single time?”
* * *
I don’t notice it right away, the new work hanging on the back wall. Probably because I walk in with my sunglasses on and a pounding headache. I go out the back to put my coat away. I can hear laughter in the storeroom and when I open the door, I find Summer and Bruno chatting.
“Hi Laura!” Summer says brightly.
“Hi, we should probably get working,” I say. They exchange a look, and I turn back and walk to the main gallery.
And it’s when I reach the passageway that I see it. It’s the change in the layout on the wall that draws my attention. The violin we hung yesterday has shifted further to the right and in the newly created space, in all its glory—How could I miss it really? I need my eyes checked—is an enormous print of the photograph she showed me under a sheet of glass. Nicely framed too. And below it, the poem, also under glass.
“What do you think?”
I turn around. Summer stands there, admiring her own work, her arms crossed over her chest.
“But we never discussed it!” I blurt.
She opens her eyes wide. “But we did, Laura!”