Brain Child Page 0,6
age, you didn’t have nearly as much to do after school as he does, and since I was going to be in the village anyway, I might as well pick up the flowers.”
Marsh’s eyes narrowed, and the last trace of his smile disappeared. “And when I was a kid, my school wasn’t as good as his is, and there was no accelerated education program for me like there is for Alex. Except he’s probably not going to get into it.”
“Oh, God,” Ellen said, as the last of their moment of peace evaporated. Did he really have to convert something as simple as picking up a corsage into another lecture on his perception of Alex as an underachiever? Which, of course, he wasn’t, no matter what Marsh thought. And then, just as she was about to defend Alex, she checked herself, and forced a smile. “Let’s not start that, Marsh. Not right now. Please?”
Marsh hesitated, then returned her smile, though it was as forced as her own. Still, he kissed her good-bye, and when she left his office, she hoped perhaps they might have had their last argument of the day. But when she was gone, instead of going back to the work that was stacked up on his desk, Marsh sat for a few minutes, letting his mind drift.
He, too, was aware of the strains that were threatening to pull his marriage apart, but he had no idea of what to do about them. The problems just seemed to pile up. As far as he could see, the only solution was to leave La Paloma, though he and Ellen had agreed a year ago that leaving was no solution at all. Leaving was not solving problems, it was only running away from them.
Nor was Alex’s performance in school the real problem, though Marsh was convinced that if Alex only applied himself, he could easily be a straight-A student.
The problem, Marsh thought, was that he was beginning to wonder if his wife, like so many other people in La Paloma, had come to think that money would solve everything.
Then he relented. What was going wrong wasn’t Ellen’s fault. In fact, it was no one’s fault. It was just that the world was changing, and both of them had to work harder to adjust to those changes before their marriage was torn apart.
He made up his mind to get home early that evening and see to it that nothing spoiled his wife’s pleasure in their son’s first prom.
Alex Lonsdale leaned forward across the bathroom sink and peered closely at the blemish on his right cheek, then decided that it wasn’t a pimple at all—merely a slight redness from the pressure he’d put on his father’s electric razor while he’d shaved. He ran the razor over his face one last time, then opened it to clean it out the way his father had shown him. Not that there was much to clean—Alex’s beard, a month after his sixteenth birthday, was still more a matter of optimism than reality. Still, when he tapped the shaver head against the sink, a few specks appeared, and they were the black of his own hair rather than the sandy brown of his father’s. Grinning with satisfaction, he put the razor back together, left the bathroom, and hurried down the hall to his room, doing his best to ignore the sound of his parents’ argument as their raised voices drifted in from the kitchen.
The argument had been going on for an hour now, ever since he’d left the dinner table to begin getting ready for the prom. It was a familiar argument, and as Alex began wrestling with the studs of his rented dress shirt, he wondered how far it would go.
He hated it when his parents started arguing, hated the fact that as hard as he tried not to listen, he could hear every word. That, at least, would be something he wouldn’t have to worry about when they moved into the new house. Its walls were thick, and from his room on the second floor he wouldn’t be able to hear anything that was going on in the rest of the house. So when the shouting matches began, he could just go to his room and shut it all out. Every angry word they spoke hurt him. All he could do was try not to hear.
He finished mounting the studs, shrugged into the shirt, then began working on the cufflinks, finally taking the shirt off again,