The Fence by Meredith Jaffe Read Free Book Online

June
    Frankie stares out the car window, blocking out the noise of the twins squabbling over their tablets as they try to keep them away from Marigold’s sticky fingers. Baby Bijoux sleeps through it all.
    Brandon has a John Butler Trio CD playing on low in an effort to bring the kids down a notch or two. God, it will be good when they have a proper yard to run around in and burn off this relentless energy, she thinks.
    Part of her wants to put her hand on his thigh, an act of reassurance, but she dares not. Throughout the morning, as the removalists heaved furniture into the van, Brandon’s mood darkened. So much so that she had been grateful she’d promised the children she’d take them to the park. When the removalists left, Brandon came to fetch them, which he needn’t have done as she saw the truck rumbling along Johnston Street on its way to the leafy north shore.
    The other part of Frankie resents Brandon’s sour mood. Neither of them wants to leave Annandale with its cafes and bars an easy stroll from the house, the children’s future school within safe walking distance, not to mention the suburb’s proximity to the city. They are leaving their lifestyle behind. After the twins were born, the Annandale terrace had been Brandon’s pick. As the stay-at-home parent, its renovation had been his major project, in-between looking after the kids and screwing the barista.
    At least it wasn’t the nanny. Those people uncomfortable that she chose work over staying at home with her children could never resist the joke about trusting Brandon around the nanny. She laughed along, recognising the price of being different. That TV comedy about stay-at-home dads makes everyone a comic but, at Klaussman & Sons, Frankie and Brandon’s living arrangements are unique. Staff share a morbid fascination with her personal life more than the other account directors’. Because she’s the only woman? It’s a depressing thought in this day and age.
    Like any woman, she endured nine months of pregnancy and gave birth naturally, despite the snide inferences that Frankie Desmarchelliers was definitely too posh to push. She breastfed all her children and continued to do so on returning to work, alleviating herself in the disabled toilet on level four, the only place clean and private enough in which to do so.
    Although she did all this, in this new millennium it seems it is still frowned upon for a mother to return to work after a mere three months maternity leave and still considered somewhat unusual to leave her children in the care of their father. Somehow people hold two points of view in perfect balance. One, that there must be something wrong with Francesca that she can sacrifice raising her children for the sake of pursuing her career, and two, that Brandon is some sort of domestic saint forgoing his career to nurture his offspring.
    Frankie turns and checks on the children now. Bijoux sleeps on and the twins and Goldie have reached a truce, sharing their headphones, their eyes glued to the flickering images on their tablets.
    She loves her children as much as any mother but the truth is she just can’t stay at home with them full-time. It’s not the amount of energy and time they suck up. The majority of which is spent feeding them, cleaning up after them and ferrying them around to play dates and activities with just the occasional reward of them not whingeing about being bored or not getting their own way. She should know, her mother basically anointed her as the surrogate mother to her five younger siblings. Frankie has already raised one family. She simply couldn’t do it again. Whereas Brandon is a qualified infants teacher. Entertaining children with the attention span of gnats is second nature. He has filled their house with crates stuffed with pipe-cleaners, stickers and sheets of coloured paper, boxes of crayons, pencils, textas, and rolls and rolls of butcher’s