Life Sentences by Laura Lippman Read Free Book Online

us. It continued to sing for almost a minute and Mr. Joe decided to investigate. I could hear him walking around the floor below, then continuing down the steps to the first floor. He returned a few minutes later and announced that would be all for today. My father arrived, but not Miss Jill with the sandwiches.
    â€œWhat about tea?” I asked.
    â€œThere will be no tea today,” Mr. Joe said.
    â€œDid the kettle run dry?”
    â€œDid the—yes, yes, it did.”
    â€œAnd the sandwiches, the cakes?”
    â€œCassandra, your manners,” my father said.
    I was almost fifteen before I figured it out. By then, I knew my father had lots of romances—“Not romances! Dalliances. The only romance I ever had was with Annie, and I married her.” But I didn’t know about any of the others until he left my mother for Annie and I started piecing together my father’s long history of infidelities. He rejects that word, too. “I was never unfaithful or faithless where your mother was concerned. Sex meant nothing to me, it was a bodily function. That was the problem. I didn’t know you could have both, sex and love, until I met Annie.”
    We had this conversation a few days before I headed to college. My father had decided to lecture me on the double standard, persuade me that my own virginity was precious. He was a little late.
    â€œAnd Miss Jill?”
    â€œMiss Jill. Oh, the redheaded Brit. Yes, she was one. But not right away. It wasn’t a plan. Well, maybe it was a little bit of a plan.”
    â€œWhat did her brother think?”
    â€œHer brother? Her brother?” My father was genuinely puzzled.
    â€œMr. Joe.”
    â€œMr.—oh, honey, he was her husband. Where did you get the idea that they were brother and sister?”
    To this day, I comb my memory, certain I will find the moment ofthe lie. Perhaps it was my father’s insistence on calling them Mr. Joe and Miss Jill, a localism that my father normally belittled. But what would have been the point in deceiving me? A sibling relationship may have kept Mr. Joe from being a cuckold, but it would not excuse what my married father did with Miss Jill while “making tea.” A tea, I see now, that required no preparation—the cakes were store-bought, the sandwiches made well ahead of our visit, the crustless bread dry from the air yet damp from the cucumbers that had sweated on them.
    Why did I think they were brother and sister? Because even my five-year-old self sensed something was off. My language lessons ended when the Lovejoys went back to England that summer. Miss Jill— Mrs. Lovejoy —sent us Christmas cards for several years, but my mother never added them to our list. I spent my junior year abroad in London and discovered I hated the social convention of tea. But I loved Englishmen, especially redheaded ones—gingers—and fucked as many of them as I could.

CHAPTER
5
    CASSANDRA HAD BEGUN HER LAST two projects by packing a laptop and retreating to a weekend resort, attempting to replicate the serendipitous origins of her first book. My Father’s Daughter had started almost by itself, an accident of heartbreak and idleness: A romantic getaway, planned for West Virginia, had become a solitary one when her first husband left her, walking out after revealing a gambling addiction that had drained their various bank accounts, meager as they were, and saddled their Hoboken condo with a second and a third mortgage that made it practically worthless, despite the robust real estate market of the mid-nineties.
    Disconsolate, terrified of the future, but also aware that the room was prepaid, she had driven hours in the wintry landscape—God helpher, it was the weekend before Valentine’s Day—thinking that she would spend the two nights and two days crying, drinking, and eating, but she ran out of wine and chocolate much faster than anticipated. The second night, a