Someone Else's Shoes(47)

“So where are you living?”

“In a hotel. But . . .” She doesn’t want to admit it.

“But what?”

Nisha sighs. Stretches her arms above her head. “They want the room back. And I can’t afford to stay there anyway. I was going to ask you . . . about that little back room at the Bentley. Where you went when you had stomach-ache that time.”

“Oh, no.” Jasmine shakes her head. “Forget that. They use it for the night-shift workers. There’s people in and out of there all night. Two hours is the limit.”

“Well . . . do you think I could use a guest room? Just, you know, sneak in? Like if we checked whether it had occupants that day and—I mean I’d lie on top of the covers. There’s nothing I couldn’t fix up in five minutes.”

Jasmine’s look tells her what she thinks of that idea. “Seriously,” she says, “what are you going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

Jasmine pushes herself up from the table. “Well,” she says eventually, “I guess you’ll have to stay here.” She says it like it’s already decided.

“What?”

“Well, where else are you going?”

“But you don’t seem to . . . have a lot of room.”

“I don’t. But you have none. So there we are. I’m not offering you room service and a five-star massage, Nisha. Just a bed. Till you can get yourself sorted. You can help mind Grace for me when you’re not on shift. Cook some meals. Pay me back that way. Hah! Unless you’re going to tell me you had a private chef and you don’t know how to cook.”

There is a brief silence. They gaze at each other.

“Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Nisha shakes her head slowly.

Jasmine’s eyebrows shoot upward. And suddenly the mood shifts and Jasmine erupts into fits of laughter. Nisha feels something quite alien. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what to feel. She is in a tiny apartment with a woman she barely knows and she is beyond grateful for a bed she wouldn’t have been caught dead in a couple of weeks ago. And this woman is laughing at her.

“Oh, my days. You’re unreal, Nisha.” Jasmine is wiping her eyes. “Seriously. You are unreal.”

“I’m going to fix this,” Nisha says seriously. “I am. I’m going to make a plan and I’m going to make that man pay. For all of it.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it.” Jasmine leans back in her chair. She is still laughing, as if this is the best thing she has ever heard. “And I am here with the popcorn for when that happens. Front-row seat. Family-sized carton. Ohhh, yes.”



* * *



? ? ?

The spare bed sits a full two and a half feet above Grace’s. Nisha will be sleeping on the top berth of a chipped blue bunk bed covered with stickers from some previous occupant and under a My Little Pony duvet cover. Nisha stares at the little room, which is dominated by the beds, beside which a wardrobe and a small desk jostle for space under a wall covered with posters of singers she doesn’t recognize. Grace turns from her desk to look at her.

“You need to get your stuff off the top bunk, baby,” says Jasmine, pointing.

Grace turns to her mother, and her face is a mute protest.

“I won’t be here for long,” Nisha says, trying to sound conciliatory.

She imagines Ray’s response if she told him a stranger would be staying in his bedroom. His expression would be a close variation of Grace’s. “I promise I don’t snore.”

Grace lets out a low harrumphing sound.

Jasmine hands Nisha a towel. “She doesn’t like being here by herself. So it’ll all work out fine.”

Forget Grace. Nisha wonders briefly if she’ll be able to tolerate this. She and Carl had their own dressing rooms and bathrooms. She hasn’t spent time in such close contact with other people since she was at school.

“Oh,” says Jasmine. “And I got something for you.” She disappears as Nisha stands there, holding the small yellow beach towel that will be hers. She returns with a plastic supermarket shopping bag and holds it out. “T-shirt?” Nisha asks. They have discussed the fact that she will stay tonight and return for her things first thing in the morning.

“Open it,” says Jasmine.

Nisha hesitates, then peers into the bag. And slowly pulls out three pairs of her black silk La Perla knickers and her dark blue Carine Gilson lace bra. She stares at them, her fingertips registering that she knows them, that these are her things. Her underwear. She runs her hand across the silk, and looks up at Jasmine.

“Well. A woman can’t feel like herself in someone else’s undies, right?” And, abruptly, for the first time since this whole stupid mess began, Nisha bursts into tears.





seventeen


She’s acting weird.”

“What do you mean acting weird?”

“Like she’s never home. And when she is home she seems to spend as much time as she can away from me. She’s always walking the dog or upstairs sorting laundry.”

“Are you sure these aren’t just things that she feels she has to do . . . if you’re not doing them?”

“Well, maybe. I guess. But normally when she’s home she just feels more . . .” Phil scratches his head “. . . present? And there’s the makeup.”