Going Back by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online Page A

Brad did a better job than Daphne of acting as
if nothing of any significance had ever transpired between
them—which led Daphne to believe that to Brad, the incident had had
no significance at all. But even when he was pretending
friendliness toward her, he never looked directly into her eyes. He
always steered his gaze to just above hers, as though he were
fascinated with her forehead. And after he asked her one or two
banal “how’s-it-going” questions, he always shifted his attention
away, as if he couldn’t bear to hear her answers.
    She recovered. Daphne imagined that
most people had done some horrendous, mortifying, utterly moronic
thing at least once in their lives, and those people with a sane
approach to life ultimately put the memory of whatever they’d done
into deep storage and moved on. If it were possible to go back and
correct one’s mistakes, Daphne would gladly do it. She’d go back to
that night, refuse every glass of beer she was offered, talk for a
few minutes with Brad about how stuffy the basement room was, and
then, when he said he wanted to take his sweater upstairs, she
would respond, “Okay, Brad. See you later,” and march back into the
stuffy basement room in search of someone to dance with.
    But it wasn’t possible to go back,
so Daphne did what she could: she went forward.
    “When are you going to show me a
house?” Brad asked.
    Daphne shot him a quick look. He
didn’t appear bored as he lounged in the passenger seat next to
her, but he was obviously eager to see some residences. “Right
now,” she said, turning back onto Bloomfield Avenue and scanning
her wristwatch. A few minutes past eleven o’clock. They’d have time
before lunch to look at a six-year-old ranch house she’d recently
listed. At $410,000, it was absurdly overpriced, but then
everything in this part of New Jersey was.
    Maybe Brad would like it. Maybe
after looking at it and a few other houses Daphne intended to show
him, he’d think of her as a woman who was much too sensible to
drink a lot of beer and jump into bed with a man.
    Not that Daphne gave a damn about
what Brad thought of her, of course. Not that she cared the least
bit.
     
     
     

Chapter Three
     
    AS IT TURNED OUT, they managed to
look at two houses before lunch. They spent less than fifteen
minutes at the ranch house; Brad stalked through the six small
rooms, poked his head into the narrow bathroom, and stormed out the
front door, grumbling that anyone who’d pay in excess of four
hundred thousand dollars for such a tiny house had to have a screw
loose somewhere.
    “I warned you,” Daphne admonished
him. “The housing prices are really inflated around
here.”
    “It’s not that I’m unwilling to pay
four hundred thousand dollars,” Brad defended himself. “But I’d
like to get something more than a one-toilet shack for the
money.”
    His comment didn’t bode well.
Around these parts, a second bathroom could add upwards of fifty
thousand dollars to a house’s price.
    Hoping to put him in a more
receptive mood before they took a break for lunch, Daphne drove him
to a townhouse she had among her listings in one of the elite
condominium complexes. For a price comparable to that of the ranch
house, he could get two full bathrooms there. The master bathroom
even had a sunken marble tub.
    “Four-twenty, and you don’t get a
private yard?” he griped.
    “That’s the concept behind a
condominium,” she reminded him, her patience beginning to wane. “No
private yard means you don’t have to mow your lawn or weed your
flower beds.”
    “What the hell do I need a marble
tub for?” he muttered, marching out of the building and heading
down the winding front walk toward Daphne’s car. “I never take
baths. I’m a shower person.”
    In an effort to mollify him, she
brought him to one of the more expensive restaurants in Verona for
lunch. They didn’t have to wait long to be seated, and as soon as a
waitress neared their table,