Chapter 12 – Cora #2
Pearl rises to kneel on her chair and stretches across the table to help herself from my plate. “I can have one, Mommy?”
“Please,” I remind her.
“Please,” she says with a mouthful of croissant. “Yum. These are good carbohydrates.”
I look at Adrian and arch an eyebrow. His smirk doesn’t falter. “If I have a basket of blueberry muffins and big croissants ready, will you come down for breakfast tomorrow, too?”
“Yes!” Pearl answers.
“We’ll see,” I say. “Mornings are hectic, and besides, you aren’t always here for breakfast.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Okay, Daddy,” Pearl accepts his invitation with no hesitation. He’s never broken a promise to her, and except for camping out in the hallway last night, he’s always been a predictable presence.
I could have done worse by her. The part of me that’s fixing my own past by making a good life for these little girls is proud. Grateful even. The part of me that is the little girl is still broken on the floor in pieces.
Couldn’t he have promised me?
Couldn’t I have been worth a promise?
My nose tingles. I blink away a tear. My eyes are so sandpaper dry from last night’s drinking, I can’t tell if it’s sadness or irritation. I ease the bottle from Winnie’s mouth as she conks out in a milk stupor. Adrian frowns.
“What’s wrong?” he asks me quietly, as if we aren’t all sitting right next to each other.
I ignore him, and Minh and Vera appear, Minh with a tray of eggs Benedict, bacon, and tropical fruit salad, and Vera, the goddess, with a carafe of coffee. Pearl has her own melamine plate with scrambled eggs and strawberries since she’s in her berry era and won’t touch pineapple or mango.
I dab away the tear with Winnie’s burp cloth, and we dig in. I cradle Winnie in my left arm and eat with my right. When Pearl wants her oat milk refilled, Adrian takes care of it. Except for the chef and housekeeper in the next room and the ungodly tension, we could be a normal family.
That’s what I always wanted, right?
I steal a glance at Adrian. He’s watching Pearl chase eggs around her plate and shovel more onto the table than onto her spoon. You can tell he wants to help, but he’s holding himself back.
I’m stuck here with him for eighteen more years. I’ve done time before, after a fashion. You get used to it eventually, and it’s better once you do.
“Here, baby,” I say, reaching over and setting my butter knife on Pearl’s plate so she has something to block the eggs while she scoops.
“Thanks, Mommy.” She gives me an eggy grin.
“You’re welcome.”
Vera returns with fresh coffee when we’re all pretty much finished. I don’t like asking for her help with the girls too much, but Adrian is always reminding me that’s part of her duties. He hired her because she has an undergraduate degree in child development.
“Vera, do you mind taking the girls up to the nursery? I just need a second.”
Adrian perks up, his own bloodshot eyes sharpening.
“Of course,” Vera agrees, setting down the carafe to accept a sleeping Winnie. “Ready, young miss?” she asks Pearl.
Pearl clambers out of her chair. “Ready.”
She loves hanging out with Vera. They have a similar taste in television shows, and Vera slips her the salted licorice she brings back from her trips home to Frankfurt. I can’t stand licorice, and I do not understand how salt makes it better, but Pearl would eat the whole bag if Vera let her.
“What are we watching these days?” Vera asks her as they leave. “Tow truck drivers? Goldminers?”
“Shrimp boat captains.”
“Oh, very interesting.”
“Yes, it is,” Pearl agrees.
Their voices fade as they walk down the hall. Adrian pushes his plate away, clasps his hands, and sets them on the table in front of him. All of a sudden, this feels like an interview.
I tuck a leg under my butt, sip my coffee, and consider him.
The stubble that scratched my face last night is gone.
His black-brown hair is shiny and styled again, and his camel cashmere sweater fits him like it knows exactly where to cling and where to drape so he looks like a Madison Avenue bus stop advertisement.
I miss messing him up, tearing his clothes off, dropping them on the floor, and leaving them inside out. I miss thinking that I was a good influence on him, that I loosened him up. Turns out he was loose all along.
“You have the leverage, Cora,” he says eventually, breaking the silence. “You make the opening bid.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say something nasty about transactions again, but I’m getting tired of sniping at him.
It doesn’t make me feel any better. I’m stuck here, trapped with him in my life for the foreseeable future until Drake Chambers pulls a rabbit from his hat.
I might as well ask what I really want to know.
“What did Delaney want last night?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t answer, and my phone is dead.” His mouth twists into a wry smile.
“We have a house phone.”
“I didn’t call her back.”
“She wasn’t calling about work, not that late.” Adrian is very, very good at his job. The only emergencies he has involve the entire financial market, and when those happen, his phone blows up.
He nods, but he doesn’t break eye contact. “Probably not.”
“Definitely not.” I cup my coffee. The heat warms my palms. “Are you still fucking her?”
“No. I fucked her once. That’s all.”
“Is there someone else now?”
“No.” He tears his gaze away and stares out the window at the gardens. The wind is whipping red and yellow leaves off the branches of the hawthorn and Japanese maple. It’s going to be a cold one today. “There was no one else before her. And no one now.”
That’s the lie that men tell when they get caught. It was only one time. They must think it makes it less bad, but I don’t see how. It’s like a murderer saying, “I only shot him in the head once.” Once is enough.
I don’t believe him on principle, but I actually don’t think what he claims is outside the realm of possibility. For one, I’ve never known him to lie to smooth over other people’s hurt feelings. For another, if he was happily banging someone else, he wouldn’t have so much time to be up my ass.
“So why her? Why then?” It doesn’t really matter, but I’m only human. I’m curious.
He lifts his coffee to drink and then blinks in surprise that it’s empty. He places the cup back in front of him on the table, rests his hands palm down on either side, and stares at the decimated bread basket between us.
I expect him to say she came onto him. He was drunk. Maybe he’ll say he was lonely, although he’s smart enough to know I won’t believe it. He’s always alone in his own way. It’s his preferred state of being.
“I was on edge,” he says instead.
On edge? “What does that mean?”
He turns his gaze toward the window, but he doesn’t seem to be seeing anything. “It means on edge.”
It’s like talking to a surly, entitled Pearl. “Okay. You were on edge. Why?”
He finally looks back at me. “I don’t know.”
“Because of me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Maybe? Are you saying you were mad at me? Why?”
“I don’t know.” His mouth draws taut. He’s getting frustrated, too.
“Because you think I’m a gold digger?”
“I don’t think that.”
I scoff. “You said so yourself. I married you for an easy life.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Is this easy?” My fingers tighten around my cup. I want to throw it at his head and watch the coffee splash in an arc, splatter the crème grasscloth wallpaper, and drip from the chandelier.
I want him to fall in love with me—fall in love for the very first time in his life when he didn’t think such a feeling was even possible—and then I want to rip his whole life out from under him and tell him that he didn’t really love me, he was only with me for the money.
And then I want to kick him in the nuts.
His brow creases, and before I can react, he scoots his chair around the corner of the table and drags my chair toward him so we’re sitting knee-to-knee and face-to-face.
“Why’d you do that?” I ask.
“You were thinking of throwing that cup at me.”
“Well, you’re an even easier target now.”
That surprises a chuckle out of him. “You know, you’re nothing like I thought you were,” he says. “How were we married so long, and I didn’t know who you were?”
“Same question, back at you.”
“You know me.”
I shake my head. “I was totally wrong about you.”
“You saw me how you wanted me to be.”
“Same.” We’re staring into each other’s eyes now.
Once, when I was inpatient at Bellamy Cross, Mrs. Flowers took me to the zoo on a day pass.
I sat for the longest time on a bench, eating a snowball and staring at an Amur leopard named Sofiya while she lazed on her side and stared back at me.
The way her eyes were shaped, she looked unbearably sad, like she saw the world as it truly was and despaired.
I knew it wasn’t real, but for a little while, I felt like there was someone else who knew what I did.
This moment isn’t entirely unlike that one.
“You want me to pretend that I’m happy with you?” I ask. “I’m not that good of a faker. You should give it up.”
“How can you love me and then stop just like that?” He snaps his fingers. “You never did. You pretended. So pretend again.”
“For the good of the kids?”
“Sure. For the kids. For yourself.”
“For you?”
“Yes. For me.”
“You want me to pretend that I love you?” I still have one leg tucked under my butt, but I do hot yoga twice a week. I’m flexible. I lean forward and brace my hands on his knees. “So you can have an easy life?”
He doesn’t move an inch. His right forearm rests on the table. His left hand rests on his outer thigh. His hard cock tents his zipper. I glance down at it and make it very obvious. He shifts in his seat.
“Wouldn’t that be better than this?” he asks.