Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Read Free Book Online Page A

schools. Jesse will be on the guest list (she and her mother try to hold their breach beneath the notice of the town gossips), but she isn’t being included in any of the planning.
    When Hallie hangs up, she pulls a flat box from the bottom shelf of the glass counter, opens it, and offers Jesse a chocolate-covered apricot. She keeps these—a childhood favorite of Jesse’s—around for whenever she stops by. Neither of them says anything for quite a while. Hallie dips up a bit more ointment and goes back to work on Jesse’s scalp. Finally she says, “I’m trusting you to handle this information with a gracious touch.”
    “I’m the soul of graciousness,” Jesse says, pushing herself up straighter in the chair, improving her moral posture.
    “The fact is—and it’s not all that flabbergasting if you really think about it—your mother has found herself a boyfriend.”
    “Oh my.” Jesse tries to imagine this, tries to see her mother on a date. To Jesse’s knowledge, Frances has never dated anyone except Jesse’s father, and that was before Jesse was even around. In the more than twenty years since his death, she has continued a social life of Thursday-night bridge, a subscription to the Lakeside Players summer theater, and occasional lunches at the Tea Caddy with one or another of the same small retinue of friends she has had since she graduated from college and came back and slid into the middle of the middle class of New Jerusalem. Methodists as opposed to Episcopalians or Baptists.
    Like many other wives she watched as her husband went into business, began to go bald, and read more and more of the newspaper, and developed firmer and firmer opinions on what he read, and then died sooner than anyone expected of cancer, liver problems, or a heart attack. In her case, the business was the drugstore on Willow, where Ray Austin dispensed medical advice as though he were an M.D. And his opinions became not just firmer, but more and more eccentric as time went on. By the time he died—way earlier than anyone would have expected, of a massive heart attack while he was playing the tuba in the Fourth of July parade—Jesse suspects her mother was exhausted with the effort of nearly twenty years of not being embarrassed by him. After that, she folded up her marital and sexual tents and settled into a social life among the widows, a full calendar of nothing, which nonetheless seemed to leave no room for “boyfriends.”
    “His name is Darrell,” Hallie says, still serious, as though she’s talking about someone dying rather than someone falling in love. “He plays with a rock band over at the Blue Light. They played at the church dance awhile back is how she met him. He’s not who you’d expect. I just want you to be nice to her around this if you run into her.”
    “I’m always nice.”
    “In your heart you’re always nice, but in your mouth there’s sometimes just the tiniest touch of sarcasm.”
    “And this Darren will sorely provoke me.”
    “Darrell. Just remember, Frances is really happy about this.”
    “He has a giant wen,” Jesse guesses. “On his nose. Or, no ... wait. He wears a drool cup.”
    Usually she can draw Hallie in right off the bat, but today she can feel resistance tugging through her godmother’s fingertips before Hallie caves in and says, “It’s an extremely small hump.”
    They are quiet for a time, the silence filled with their thoughts.
    “A boyfriend,” Jesse finally says. “A rock and roller. I’d have thought she’d had enough of oddballs with Dad.”
    “Come on,” Hallie says, picking up the hairbrush and tapping Jesse’s head with the back of it. “This guy’s a real Romeo, they say. Your old mother’s kicking back.”
    “She’s such a puzzle. I thought genes were supposed to give you some affinity, but ... I mean aside from all the trouble between her and me, I’ve just never really felt whatever connection you’re supposed to feel. Is that awful?” When