I was babbling. I was embarrassed. I drank some more wine. I knew too many doctors with too much education. I’d assumed.
“Daisy.” Gray was smiling, fortunately. “I’m not fussed about it. I’ve done all right.”
“Oh. Good.” Well, obviously, this house and all. I was still flustered. Possibly that was because I’d drunk all my wine, had somehow started on Fruitful’s glass, and may have been eyeing Obedience’s.
I didn’t do that sort of thing. That was letting down your guard, and I did not let down my guard. But somehow, I was. I told the girls, “But you should. Go to University, I mean. You’re going to finish high school, at least. There’ll be heaps to learn, all the things you didn’t know about before. You’ll see.”
“Maybe you’ll be able to tell us, next time you come to visit,” Honor said, “what the food of the gods is. And you can make that slump thing for me, teach me how,” she told Obedience. “I’ll enjoy that.”
“I’d love to do that,” Obedience said. “It tastes so much better than alcohol. Truly.”
“But,” Gray said, “does it taste better than tiramisu?”
Yes. He’d bought five servings.
It was a good thing I was wearing a dressing gown.
18
Revelation
Gray
I shouldn’t have been relaxed. All my problems were still waiting for me back in Dunedin. I was relaxed anyway. How could you not be? They were all just so … funny, and Daisy was so bloody cute in that enormous dressing gown. She ate every bite of her tiramisu, and she sighed over it, too. A woman born for pleasure, if she’d allow herself to drop the discipline and let a man help her feel it.
I was mulling over that delightful possibility when my mum got up and began gathering pizza boxes, and the girls jumped up with her. And Fruitful choked off a cry and grabbed for the table.
“What’s wrong?” Daisy asked. “Your ankle?”
“Yes,” Fruitful said, clearly mortified. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine. I just wrenched it more, maybe, running. To spit out the alcohol.”
I would’ve taken a look at it, but Daisy was the professional, so I left her to unwrap the bandage and feel around the swollen, bruised flesh, which had turned purple. She said, “You need to be in bed, love, with this elevated, and some more ice on it. Let’s get you up there.”
She hauled Fruitful to her feet, and I said, “I’ll carry her up.”
“No,” Fruitful said. “I can walk, with Daisy helping. I can hop.”
I shouldn’t push it. I knew it. I pushed it anyway. It felt important. “I carried you to the fence just this morning, remember? I can carry you upstairs now, too, save you the pain of hopping with it. That’ll hurt, because you’ll be jarring it, and put more strain on it, too, for no reason.”
Fruitful didn’t say anything, and Daisy told me, “Your husband’s the only man who’s supposed to touch you.”
“Oh, for …” I started to say, then stopped myself and asked Daisy instead, “How about you, then? You were married. Has your husband been the only man who’s touched you? Tell them.”
The color was rising in her cheeks, and both her sisters were looking at her. Mum said, “Gray …” in the sort of despairing tone that means, This is how I raised you? I thought I was right, though, so I ignored Mum and focused on Daisy.
“No,” she said, “but it’s … sexually …” And then didn’t go on.
“So tell your sister,” I said, “that a man can touch a woman for a non-sexual purpose, and it’s all right. You know the difference, so tell her that I can carry her upstairs for no reason but to help her, and that a man over thirty-five isn’t attracted to a seventeen-year-old girl anyway, unless there’s something wrong with him. I’m going to have to carry her downstairs in the morning, and lift her into the ute, too, so let’s get it sorted now.”
Daisy didn’t answer me. Fruitful did. She said, “But a man who’s over thirty-five is attracted to a seventeen-year-old girl. Of course he is. Daisy knows that, because she was sixteen when he married her, too.”
I was used to being calm under stress. That was my job. That was my life. I’d been calm, or something close to it, escaping from my car. When I’d almost drowned. Why couldn’t I be calm now? Instead, the skin