“Her grandmother is in my book group.”
“Of course. Yes, Lily had a few days in hospital with a fever. Fully recovered, thank goodness.”
They talked for a while and then Jenna went to use the bathroom, but on the way something caught her eye.
“Hey, Mom.” She paused and called out to her mother. “What happened to the painting on this wall?” It was a beautiful seascape, painted by her mother early in her career and one of the few that had never been offered for sale. Her mother’s career as an artist could be divided into two distinct phases. Her earlier work was light and bright and her later work was stormy and dark. Lauren called it her depressing phase. The missing painting was one of her early works, painted before her mother had hit the big time. Jenna loved the wild swirls of blues and greens.
Surely her mother hadn’t sold it?
Her mother emerged from the kitchen. “I—” She stared at the faded space on the wall as if she’d forgotten about it. “I took it down. I thought I might…redecorate.”
“Do you want help? I could come over on the weekend.”
Her mother didn’t hide her alarm. “I don’t think so. I still remember the mess you made of the rug when you decided to paint Lauren’s room bright blue. I came back from a day at the studio and spent the next two days painting my own house instead of a canvas.”
Jenna remembered that incident, too.
Lauren had redecorated her bedroom at least once every three months. Any money she had, she’d spent on interior design magazines. She’d study them, and then use the ideas she liked best, enlisting Jenna to help transform her room to match her latest vision. They’d dragged furniture from one side of the room to another, painted walls and changed fabrics.
On one occasion Jenna, as dreamy as she was clumsy, had tripped over a tin of blue paint and sent it flowing over the floor.
With her usual artistic flourish, their mother had turned the streaked floor into a smooth surface of ocean blue. Then she’d diluted the color for the walls until the room looked like an aquarium complete with small fish and plants.
Jenna had loved the newly painted room so much she’d taken to sneaking in and sleeping on Lauren’s floor, settling herself between a friendly-looking octopus and a seahorse. She and Lauren had giggled and talked long into the night cocooned in their underwater paradise and when her sister had changed her room three months later, Jenna had felt bereft.
It was at least twenty years since the paint spill episode and yet her mother still talked about it as if it had happened yesterday.
“I’ve improved since then,” Jenna said. “I did most of the decorating in my house.” But her mother had already walked back into the kitchen and wasn’t listening.
Irritated, Jenna used the bathroom and walked back to the kitchen.
Her mother was staring at another set of papers but she quickly pushed them to one side.
“Have you spoken to your sister lately?”
“Last week. I thought I might call tonight, but then I remembered it’s Ed’s fortieth birthday party. She’s booked caterers and a string quartet.” Jenna tried to read the papers, but they were upside down. “If she still lived on island I could have loaned her my recorder group. That would have blown everyone’s eardrums.” She realized her mother wasn’t listening. “Mom?”
Her mother gave a start. “Sorry? What did you say?”
“I was talking about Lauren’s party. She was nervous something might go wrong.”
“Knowing Lauren, it will be perfect. I don’t know how she does it all.”
Jenna refrained from pointing out that Ed was seriously wealthy and that they could buy in whatever help they needed.
For the past couple of years Lauren had been studying for an interior design qualification, but study was a bed of roses compared with hauling yourself out of bed every day to deal with a bunch of kids with runny noses.
Her sister’s life seemed effortless.
“Mack has big exams this summer.”
“She’ll fly through them, as Lauren did.”
“I guess she will.” Did her sister have to be so perfect? Much as she loved Lauren, there were days when Jenna could happily kill her. And then she felt guilty feeling that way because as well as being perfect at everything else, Lauren was the perfect sister and always had been.
It wasn’t Lauren’s fault that her sister couldn’t get pregnant.
Feeling empty, Jenna reached for the tin on the table. The book group wasn’t going to miss one cake, were they?
She fought an internal battle between want and willpower.
Willpower might have won, but as she went to pull her hand back her mother frowned.
“Are you sure you need that?”
No, she didn’t need it. But she wanted it. And dammit if she wanted it, she was going to have it. She was thirty-two years old. She didn’t need her mother’s permission to eat.
She took a cake from the tin, so annoyed she took a bigger bite than she intended to. Too big. Damn. Her teeth were jammed together so now she couldn’t even speak. Instead she chewed slowly, feeling like a python that had swallowed its prey whole.
Her mother went back to sorting papers. “Mack is doing well. Like Lauren, she is very disciplined.”
The implication being that she, Jenna, showed no self-discipline at all.
She swallowed.
Finally. In the battle of woman against cupcake she was the victor.
“Good to know.”
“Lauren is lucky Mack hasn’t turned out to be a wild child like—” her mother waved her hand vaguely “—some people.”
“You mean me.” Jenna kept her tone light. “Thanks, Mom.”
“You have to admit you didn’t sit round waiting for trouble to find you. You went out looking for it and you dragged your poor sister into it with you. You, Jenna Elizabeth Stewart, were enough to give any mother gray hairs.”
“I’ve been Sullivan for more than a decade, Mom.”
“I know.” Nancy’s expression softened. “And you are lucky to have that man.”
Annoyed: irritated or displeased.
“He’s lucky to have me, too.”
“I know. But let’s be honest—you stopped getting into trouble the day you married Greg.” She glanced at the clock. “It will be dark soon. You should probably leave.”
“I can drive in the dark,
