I watch her face carefully. She’s not lying. For once her expression is something other than disgusted – it’s pained. A torrent of emotion is warring in her, and it hurts like hell. I know the feeling.
I get out of the car and shut the door behind me.
The Hunters’ gate is intimidating – all wrought iron curves and curlicues painted a fresh white – but it’s open. I stride up the driveway and smile at the gardener, who tips his hat to me. I ascend the steps and ring the doorbell, and a woman in a canary-yellow sundress answers. She’s so beautiful I’m struck dumb for approximately point five seconds – her hair is soft and tawny, kept short and bobbed. She’s maybe forty, with a brilliant smile and delicate ivory skin. She’s holding a glass of dirty water in one hand and a dripping paintbrush in the other. Her eyes are the same almond-shaped, piercing, lake-ice blues as Jack’s, but hers are joyous, whereas Jack’s are always dimmed by boredom.
“Hi! How can I help you?” She beams, slopping a bit of water as she balances the door open with one foot. Her socks are rainbow-striped, and it somehow puts me more at ease.
“Uh, hi, Mrs. Hunter? I’m Jack’s lab partner in Bio, Isis Blake. We were supposed to work on a project together today?” I brandish the papers. Her face falls.
“Oh, horseshit! I-I mean, darn!” She corrects herself quickly. “You know what? Jack left a while ago, but he’ll be back soon. Why don’t you come in and have some tea. Do you like tea? Or are you a coffee person? I can make coffee, just be warned it tastes like ass and looks like ass – I mean, butt.”
She struggles to hold open the door, and I open it for her. She smiles.
“Thanks. Come on in!”
I can’t help the whistle that escapes my lips when I see the foyer. A massive flight of stairs leads up, the carpets are rich and red and probably Turkish, not the Turkey kind, but the country kind, because turkeys can’t make rugs and there are hardwood floors and huge French windows letting in light and everything smells like lavender and is that a picture of Jack in his diapers oh my god he looks like a fat little Buddha –
“He looks like a fat monk,” Mrs. Hunter says, hovering over my shoulder.
“I was – I was just thinking that!” I say. “Like a Buddha, or something!”
“I used to call him all sorts of horrible names,” she sighs. “He was too young to understand them, of course, and I was so sleep deprived because of his crying I was ready to strangle someone, so instead of committing homicide I’d threaten him in a sickly sweet voice and he’d just smile and coo at me. Horrible of me, I know. Maybe that’s why he’s turned out the way he is.”
“Weird?” I offer.
“Oh, definitely weird.” Her eyes twinkle as she leads me into the airy, bright kitchen. “He was such a happy baby. But I worry, now. He’s become mostly just sad.”
She shakes her head as if to clear it and fills a kettle with water. “Is mint tea okay?”
“Yeah.” I settle on a barstool. “I mean, I don’t want to intrude, you seemed really busy -”
Mrs. Hunter laughs. “Busy? Not to brag, but I can afford to never be busy, ever. Though I admit, I miss the office sometimes.”
She places the paintbrush and the water down, and it’s then I notice the canvas in the room, facing some windows. Paints smear over a pallet, dozens of paintbrushes sticking up here and there in jars of half-dirty water. The painting itself is pretty – a horse of some kind. Mrs. Hunter rushes over to it and turns the canvas around.
“Oh no, no, no! It’s not finished yet! You can’t look.”
“Right, sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. It’s me – I have this stupid thing where I get nervous when people see my unfinished works. Not that they’ll be any good when they’re finished, either.”
“That one was beautiful, though.”
She flushes. “Thank you. I started taking classes a month ago. I like them, but I dropped out because all the teacher wanted me to paint were ugly, soulless little watercolor landscapes. No feeling! No passion!”
“Horses have tons of passion. Like, seventeen whole passions.”
“Exactly!” She claps. “You understand. It’s more fun to paint them than a bunch of boring trees.”
A tiny whirling dervish of canine madness streaks into the kitchen, making soft ‘whoof’ noises at me and wagging his tail. He’s pitch black, with cute button eyes and a damp nose he mashes against my ankle in an attempt to either gauge how long it would take for him to chew through my Achilles heel, or to discern what other dogs I’d passed in the street in the last seventeen years of my life.
“Darth! Down!” Mrs. Hunter snaps. The dog obediently wags its butt hard and jumps on the barstool next to me. Mrs. Hunter grabs a dishrag and whips it at him, and he jumps off and excitedly barks before doing several determined laps around the kitchen for no apparent reason.
“He’s so cute,” I say. “Darth is his name?”
“Short for Darth Vader. I mean, he’s all black, I’d just seen The Return of the Jedi, it made perfect sense at the time!”
“It’s way better than Fluffy.”
“Exactly!” She smiles. “He’s a mutt. Half Yorkshire Terrier and half sugar high chipmunk.”
The kettle dings, and Mrs. Hunter pours two cups of tea, and slides one to me.
“Your kitchen is amazing. The whole house is,” I try. She sips and smiles.
“You think? Truth be told I don’t use the kitchen much – it’s Jack who does most of the cooking. I just burn things and get paint everywhere. It makes him so mad.”
She laughs, and I laugh trying to imagine Jack’s screwed-up, exasperated face as he cleans paint off the counters. I burn to ask her a bunch of questions about Jack – here she is, the woman who bore him for nine months and put up with his crap for sixteen more years. She knows everything about him, I bet – how often he wet himself, what he was afraid of as a kid, what stupid-looking costumes she forced him into for Halloween. She probably knows about Sophia, too. My fingers twitch around my cup. Shut up, reflexes. This is no time to act up. Keep those wanton desires for knowledge inside, where she can’t see.
“So you and Jack must be friends, then?” Mrs. Hunter clears her throat. Darth Vader, finally exhausted by his valiant efforts, plops down at her feet.
“Ah…hahaha.” I smile. “Not exactly.”
She nods sympathetically. “I understand. He’s really hard to get along with, very withdrawn, a little snappish sometimes. He wasn’t always like that, but somewhere around middle school he started changing. Hormones, I guess. And without a father –”
She cuts off, staring at a space over my shoulder for a few moments. She shakes her head and sighs.
“I’m sorry. I’m babbling.”
“No, it’s okay,” I rush to say. “I mean, it’s not okay he doesn’t have a dad, or that your husband died, I mean, uh, crap.”
“It’s alright,” she chuckles. “No need to be careful on my part. I miss Oliver, god knows I do. But after seventeen years, I can say his name without breaking down. That’s an improvement, right?”
“Definitely.” I nod. “I’ve…I’ve got someone like that too. Someone whose name I can’t say.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. What idiot boy would purposefully break your pretty heart like that? One who doesn’t deserve you, that’s who.”
I pull my sleeve down over my arm, and force a small smile. Pretty. She said it so off-handedly, like it was true. But it’s not. Of course it’s not.
“I have to use the restroom,” I start. “Do you know where –”
“Oh! Sure.” She gets out of her chair and gestures. “Right down the hall, through the living room, and to your left.”
“Thanks.”
“When you get back, let’s open this bag of Milanos! You like cookies, right?”
“I never want to meet the person who doesn’t!”
She smiles, and I trot down the hall, making a show of walking with loud footsteps so she thinks I’ve gone down it all the way. I climb the stairs as silently as I can, and inch the second right door open, sliding through when it’s just big enough to accommodate my fat butt.