and she is moved by the pain and confusion she sees in Jess, the pain and confusion she remembers so well from her own adolescence. “I do. I think this must be incredibly hard for you.”
“And my mom doesn’t understand any of it,” Jess says bitterly, taking a bite of her doughnut. “She just shouts and screams and I hate living with her.”
Carrie smiles. “I was a bit like that with my mom at your age. Not the shouting and screaming, we didn’t shout in my house, but I didn’t like my mom for a long time either. Although as I got older I realized she was just doing the best she could.”
Bond, she is thinking. Bond, but don’t drop Daff in it, for Daff deserves nothing but support from Carrie, and how hard it must be to be a single mother of an angry teenage daughter.
“Are you and Dad going to get married?” Jess asks suddenly, catching Carrie off guard.
“I . . . don’t know. Maybe. I think it’s probably too early to be talking marriage, but we’re spending a lot of time together and I think right now we’re quite happy and don’t want to change anything.”
“But you’re kind of living together, aren’t you?”
“Well . . . I’m spending a lot of time at your dad’s place.”
“You’ve got stuff there now.” Jess looks straight at Carrie, who feels her shoulders tense, preparing herself for an onslaught. “First you just had a toothbrush but now you have clothes there. Have you moved in?”
Carrie laughs nervously. “No, I still have my own apartment.”
Jess gazes at her coolly. “I was thinking that I might move in with Daddy,” she says, waiting for Carrie’s reaction. “He misses me a lot and I’m his daughter. No one can look after him better than me.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Carrie says, in a falsely bright tone. “But I’m sure Mommy would be upset.”
“Upset?” Jess snorts with derision. “She’d be thrilled. I think she’s going to talk to him about it.”
Carrie keeps smiling, but her stomach is turning. I can just about cope with this every other weekend and one night during the week, she thinks. How would I possibly cope if this were all the time?
“Can we go to Kool Klothes now?” Jess says, standing up with a bright smile. “I can’t wait to show you this blue top I saw in there last week. It’s just like the one you have with the sequined flowers. We could be twins!” And linking her arm through Carrie’s, they walk out, Carrie floored once again by her mercurial behavior.
“Hi, darling.” Daff opens the front door and Jess pushes past her and marches upstairs with carrier bags full of clothes. “What do you have there?”
Jess ignores her and Daff turns to Richard, helpless. “Is she in a mood?”
“No,” he says, marveling again at how he and Daff can stand here and have these polite conversations as if they were strangers who barely know one another, as if he hasn’t seen her shave her bikini line in the bath, sit on the toilet for half an hour with a magazine, as if he doesn’t know what she looks like just at the moment of orgasm.
“Has she been okay this weekend?”
“She was great. A little rocky when she arrived, but I think these transitions are always hard. We went shopping.” He doesn’t mention Carrie, not yet. He doesn’t want to rub Daff’s nose in it, for he knows from Jess that Daff has no one, and he suspects she would not be ready to hear about Carrie yet.
Richard doesn’t know that Jess, in one of her rare moments of treating Daff like a human being, has told her all about Carrie. In one breath she will say she hates Carrie, hates her for stealing her father, that she never gets Daddy-daughter time anymore, and in the next she will say that Carrie took her for a manicure, or did something fun with her, or talk proudly about something that Carrie has done.
Her conflict is clear, and Daff is careful not to show her pain at hearing about Richard’s girlfriend. It is also clear that this girlfriend is different. Daff Googled her and found a picture of her from the local paper. She looks normal. Pretty. Nice. She looks like the sort of woman Daff could see Richard with.
Although she asked for this divorce, although she was the one who asked Richard to leave, she didn’t expect him to find happiness