For the Girls' Sake - By Janice Kay Johnson Page 0,62
had to drop a sleepy Rose off at day care, where she cried. Ditto Friday, except that instead of the two of them sharing a solitary dinner, they grabbed fast food and headed for the coast and their home away from home.
Where Rose got to sleep cuddled up to her new sister, while he got the couch.
After dinner, while he and Lynn companionably cleaned the kitchen, she told him that Brian’s mother had called.
Brow crinkled, she said, "I think she was ashamed of herself. And maybe ashamed of Brian. She regretted not being more supportive—quote unquote. It was a strange conversation. I haven’t heard from her in months."
His basic cynicism asserted itself. "What did she want? Rose?"
Lynn paused with her hands in a soapy pan, her lips pursed. "You know, I really think she was genuine. She said that, when we think the time’s right, she and Walt would like to meet Rose and see Shelly again. She said as far as she was concerned, Shelly would always be her granddaughter. It sounded a little pointed, which is what made me think she was disillusioned about Brian."
"Her contrition is a little late," Adam growled.
"Isn’t it better late than never?" Lynn suggested gently.
He took one last swipe at the counter. "Yeah. Probably. Whatever you want to do about them is okay by me. I can be nice."
Her smile was quick, amused and approving. "I know you can."
Thanks to that smile, he was in a very good mood when he started the dishwasher and watched Lynn pour two cups of coffee. He enjoyed their evening talks. To his surprise, she’d shown real interest from the beginning in what he did, how he made decisions on what companies were going to make money for his clients, what triggered his gut feelings. He’d noticed that she was reading a book on investments plucked from her bookstore shelf, which pleased him unreasonably.
Jenny had laughingly declared that his work was boring. "You don’t even see real products or real money. It’s all on paper. Numbers." She had delicately shuddered. "I don’t know how you can make yourself care."
Adam remembered arguing. "It’s real, all right. Think of the buying and selling of stocks as the blood running through the veins of the economy. That—" he’d melodramatically stabbed a finger at the open page of closing stock prices "—is the report from the lab technicians who just ran tests on the blood."
She pouted prettily. "Oh, fine, but we don’t have to talk about it, do we?"
The subject had been turned that time, and Adam found that he rarely commented on work. Personalities in the brokerage firm where he was now a senior partner, sure. Jenny liked office parties and gossip. The guts of his work, she didn’t want to hear about.
The memory bothered him, but he excused her. She’d been young, probably no more than twenty-two. A kid, she would seem to him now. He probably had been prosing on as if some rise or fall in prices was the be-all and end-all of the universe. As if the stock market wouldn’t plunge up and down as often as a frisky colt out to pasture. Of course, it was relatively new to him then. He hadn’t been that much older than Jenny, twenty-five when they set up housekeeping. They were newlyweds, and other topics of conversation hadn’t been hard to find.
Jenny would have matured if she’d had the chance. He didn’t want to compare her to Lynn. It wasn’t fair. If nothing else, circumstances had been different. Jenny hadn’t needed to take a crash course in her husband’s interests and character. She knew him.
Except, a disquieting voice murmured in his ear, for the facets of him that didn’t interest her.
She never suggested he change jobs, Adam argued with himself.
She liked the money.
She just didn’t want to be bored by a blow-by-blow account of his day at the dinner table every evening. So what?
Shouldn’t she have loved the whole man? whispered that insidious voice.
Maybe, Adam thought, beginning to be irritated. But he didn’t love her any less because she was possibly a little self-absorbed. She’d been spoiled as a kid. When he met and married his Jenny, she was young and beautiful, the center of a crowd at every party. Motherhood would have changed and enriched her, just as loving Rose had irrevocably changed him.
He’d be willing to bet Lynn had been considerably more frivolous before she’d had a child, too.