Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Read Free Book Online Page B

Hallie doesn’t reply, Jesse says, “I think the truth is you’re secretly my mother. Like in those old movies—Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck. You know. You were pregnant, but you weren’t married and so what could you do? You slunk off to Jeff City to have me. And then you talked Mother into pretending I was hers and Dad’s. And all these years you’ve had to love me—tragically—from afar.”
    “Sweetie, if I’d had you, it would’ve been only the second virgin birth in history.” This is Hallie’s standard line, that she has led a celibate life, is on a high shelf above the sexual shenanigans of everyone else. Jesse knows this can’t be true, knows because she knows all the other pieces of Hallie. There’s a blank spot, but its shape is not denial. There is simply something sitting in that spot that Hallie has, so far anyway, chosen not to reveal. It’s okay. Jesse can wait.
    Hallie is the only person she has had the nerve to tell about Wayne, which is to say Hallie is the only person it didn’t take any nerve to tell. Her love for Jesse has always been unconditional. Jesse tests all the same. “Do you think less of me for this thing I’m doing?”
    “Your timing’s interesting, I’ll say that.”
    “I’ve got to stop it. We almost got caught Saturday. Well, I suppose we did get caught. But it was by Alice Avery and she’s so hip and all—”
    “And has her own mysteries, they say. Eyebrows are up around here, waiting to see who she’s bringing down to live with her. I think Opal Leach is putting a fax machine down at the post office so she can get the word out instantly.” Hallie kneads Jesse’s scalp for a few moments while suspended in reverie over something. Finally it comes out. “Goodness, I love the food that girl serves.”
    “I don’t even know why I’m doing it,” Jesse says. “It’s so dead wrong. You know I love Neal with my soul. And now the baby. I just don’t understand. It’s like something’s come over me.”
    “The devil,” Hallie says in a phony, horror movie way.
    “Could be. Honestly.”
    “We could take you up to Canaan. There’s an old guy there who’s a dowser, does exorcisms if pressed, I hear tell. Has something rigged up in the backyard. Electric currents and moonlight.”
    Jesse reaches up and, for a moment, holds on to Hallie’s wrist.
    “It’s just that I want to, isn’t it? It’s just that plain. I want something I can’t have but I want it anyway and so I’m taking it. And then, because I can’t stand seeming so selfish, I chatter away about how wrong I know it is. As if that gives me points.”
    Neither of them says anything for a while, then Jesse says, “Are you going hard on me today? I feel like you’re digging into my brain.”
    “Nope. This is just the standard treatment. I charge extra for the rough stuff.”
     
    But the next time she sees Wayne, Jesse just doesn’t have the heart to lower any booms. She’s over at his apartment in the middle of the afternoon. Both the Re/Max and UPS offices have little clock-face signs hanging on their doors, reading BACK AT 4.
    He lives in a development out by the county airport. The apartments are regular on the inside, but the exteriors are fixed up in this fake English way. The whole place is called Hampshire Mews.
    Wayne’s roommate, Stan Feder, works at the Ace Hardware and is out of town at a paint seminar in St. Louis. This is a big opportunity for them. Wayne wanted to fix Jesse dinner, but she wasn’t up to the amount of scheming that would have required. And so she’s here for tea, or at least his idea of tea, which comes from movies and books, she guesses. The tea itself is instant. The sweets are Little Debbie snack cakes, arranged on a scratched plastic plate. He has also set out colored paper napkins. The apartment has central air, which adds a hum and a chill factor. Jesse has to borrow a sweatshirt as soon as she’s through the door. Even though it’s huge, the