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Fuck me.
15
THOMAS
Alice peeks around the corner into my den as I read the newspaper.
‘Thomas?’ Stepping fully into the room her hair wet drips onto the shoulders of yet another of my T-shirts.
‘Can we talk?’
Since getting off the phone with my lawyer I’ve been sitting here contemplating my life. I’ve never really done so before. Never needed to.
A few months ago I admitted to myself that I had been complacent in my father’s poor choices for too long and went about to correct it, but that’s about all the self-reflection I’ve done. Everything else in my life has been as it was supposed to be. How I chose it to be.
Until Alice.
I lower the paper I had been trying and failing to read. ‘Yes.’
There are things that cannot wait until the morning. The call with my lawyer did not go well – for him or for me.
After I informed him that I’d need to postpone said annulment or possibly change it to divorce proceedings I used his shocked silence to further explain that Alice and I were fostering a child in my home, or our home, as it will be listed on legal documents submitted to the state by child services.
In the resulting silence, I thought he might quit.
And when he did find his voice, I thought I might fire him.
We just finished securing Moores’ assets from your father and now you let in another threat?
The only thing that saved his job was my acknowledgment that even if it was unasked for, his opinion mirrored my own.
I am at fault. For my father. For Alice. For everything. It took me far too long to take action and remove my father. I won’t make the same mistake again. The sooner I remove Alice by fulfilling my end of our bargain, the better.
‘Oh good.’ Alice sighs in relief and steps into the room. ‘I hadn’t known what to—’
‘What—’ my eyes home in on the hem of my cotton T-shirt sliding across her bare thighs ‘—are you wearing?’
She freezes, her cheeks flushing. ‘Oh, I, uh, after dinner your mother suggested Mary and I use your T-shirts to wear for pajamas.’ She tugs the hem down, which is completely ineffective, before crossing one arm over her chest and hugging the other to her side. ‘She must’ve taken the rest of my clothes to be washed because when I got out of the shower they were gone. Even those in my duffle bag.’
‘Hmmm.’ I shake out the paper in front of me, needing a moment to internally curse my mother and rein in the violate emotions simmering to the surface.
I spent far too long this afternoon watching Ms al Abbas fawn over my mother whilst my mother fawned over her ‘granddaughter’. And while my mother’s presence did ease the awkward moments when the social worker noticed the complete lack of Alice’s clothing and toiletries in my bedroom – ‘Well of course her things aren’t here. You didn’t think she’d spend the night before they were married, did you?’ – to which the Emily Moore Fan Club of One took as gospel, I would’ve rather not have my mother intertwined in the complicated web I’m weaving.
More jarring was that she kept close to Mary, even at the dinner she had her personal chef bring, so I couldn’t probe as to why she wasn’t upset, or even surprised about my marriage.
‘Wow.’ Alice surveys the room as if just seeing the original marble mantel and half-wall of original twenties African Umbila millwork.
The designer I hired when I purchased the home wanted to paint it Pigeon Gray. I’d informed him that if he so much as neared the exotic wood with a paintbrush, he’d find himself with plenty of time to feed the real pigeons as he’d be without a job.
Alice drops her head from the inlaid coffered ceiling and assesses me in my wingback chair as if I were a part of a painting. ‘If it weren’t for your clothes, you’d look like something out of a Jane Austen film sitting in here.’ She huffs a laugh, the awkward joke doing nothing to ease my turbulent emotions.
My eyes flick to her thighs. ‘Edith Wharton.’
‘Who?’
I force my gaze to her freshly cleaned face. Alice must not wear much, if any, make-up. Her lashes are just as long and dark fresh out of the shower as they are under Moore’s overhead lights during working hours.
Something I hate myself for noticing.
