did it not matter? She didn’t need to hear him talk about his passion for his car. He could talk about his car with his mates. She could talk about her memories of Nathaniel’s Kiss with her girlfriends.
Ben took a giant bite of the apple. Jessica couldn’t do that anymore, not with her new capped teeth. The dentist wanted her to wear some sort of a mouth guard at night to keep her expensive crowns all safe. It was annoying that the better stuff you got, the less relaxed you could be about it. It was like the new rug in their hallway. Neither of them could bear to walk on something so astoundingly expensive. They shuffled down the sides and winced when their guests marched straight down the middle in dirty sneakers.
“That smoothie was pretty good,” said Ben, his mouth full of apple. “But I’m starved. I don’t know if my body can cope without pizza for ten days. I don’t see why we even have to do that part! What’s that got to do with marriage counseling?”
“I told you,” said Jessica. “It’s, like, a holistic approach. We have to work on everything: our minds, bodies, and spirits.”
“Sounds like a load of—” He cut himself off and walked over to the row of light switches by the wall and started playing with the one that made the ceiling fan work.
He put the fan on to cyclonic speed.
Jessica put a pillow over her face and tried to go for as long as she could without saying, “Turn it off.” Once, she wouldn’t have thought about this. She would have just yelled, “Oh my God, turn it off, you idiot!” and he would have laughed and kept it on, and she would have tried to turn it off, and he wouldn’t have let her, and they would have pretend-wrestled.
Did they laugh more before?
Back when she was working in admin and he was an auto-body mechanic working for Pete, back when Ben drove a V8 Commodore that didn’t make anyone look twice, and she had B-cup boobs that didn’t make anyone look twice either, back when they thought going to a movie and the local Thai restaurant on the same night was splurging and when the arrival of the credit card statement each month was, like, really stressful and even once made her cry?
She didn’t want to believe it was better before. If it was, then her mother was right, and she couldn’t stand it if her mother was right.
Ben turned the fan down to a gentler breeze. Jessica removed the pillow from her face, closed her eyes, and felt her heart race with fear of something unnamed and unknown.
It made her think of the vertiginous fear she’d felt the day of the robbery. It was two years ago now that she’d come home from work to discover their ground-floor apartment had been robbed, their possessions strewn everywhere with aggressive, malicious abandon, every drawer open, a black footprint across her white T-shirt, the glint of broken glass.
Ben arrived home just moments later. “What the hell?”
She didn’t know if he immediately thought of his sister, but she did.
Ben’s sister, Lucy, had “mental health issues.” That was the euphemism Ben’s lovely, long-suffering mother used. The truth was that Ben’s sister was an addict.
Lucy’s life was an endless roller coaster and they all had to take the same ride, over and over, without getting off. Lucy was missing. No one had heard from her. Lucy had turned up in the middle of the night and trashed the house. Ben’s mum had to call the police. They were planning an intervention! But they were going to handle this intervention differently from the last intervention; this time it would work. Lucy was doing well! Lucy was talking about rehab. Lucy was in rehab! Lucy was out of rehab. Lucy had been in another car accident. Lucy was pregnant again. Lucy was fucked up and there would never be an end to it, and because Jessica had never known the Lucy of before, the Lucy who was supposedly funny and smart and kind, it was hard not to hate her.
Lucy was the reason for the underlying tension at every event with Ben’s family. Would she turn up demanding money or screaming insults or crying crocodile tears because “she just wanted to be a mum” to the two children she was incapable of bringing up?
Everyone knew Lucy stole. You went to a barbecue at Ben’s place and you hid