The Mother-in-Law(44)
“Hang on. Diana’s charity is the beneficiary of . . . ?” he starts.
“All of it.” Gerard glances up, locking eyes with each of us under his thick grey eyebrows. It is a look that tells me there is no joke, no misunderstanding, no confusion. “The houses, the cars, the share portfolio, the cash.”
Nettie inhales sharply. Patrick rises to his feet. Ollie’s head is cocked and he is squinting a little, the way he does when Edie is trying to tell him something and he just can’t understand her. We all look around the room and for the first time since arriving everyone meets each others’ gaze. Several seconds pass. But no one speaks.
25: LUCY
THE PAST . . .
I have two kids strapped into the back of the car, one of them wailing (Harriet), the other (Archie) trying to stick a grape up his nose. We’re stopped at a busy roundabout while the woman in the black SUV in front of us hands a tennis racket through the window to her sullen-looking teenage son then proceeds to start a conversation with him with no regard for the growing line of cars behind her.
Harriet lets out a newly emblazoned wail.
This kind of thing is rife in Diana’s neighborhood. We’re headed to Diana’s now—on Tuesdays, I drive them to her house at 10 A.M. where they stay until 2 P.M. when I pick them up again. Harriet is six months old now, and while I loathe the process of strapping both kids into the car, driving the twenty minutes to Diana’s house and doing the reverse journey again a few hours later, I am not so pigheaded as to refuse free child care. Even from my impossible mother-in-law.
“Archie, can you put Harriet’s pacifier in?” I say, glancing in the rearview mirror. Her pacifier is in his mouth and the grape is nowhere to be seen. “What happened to the grape?”
“I ate it,” he says, removing the pacifier and pushing it right into her mouth. I try not to think about his streaming nose and the cold that he has now almost certainly passed on to Harriet. It’s some consolation that she stops crying immediately.
“Are we at Dido’s house yet?”
“Nearly,” I say, and he settles down. As irritating as it is, he loves his grandmother. She’s good with him in her own, Diana sort of way. She doesn’t marvel over his artwork or beg for cuddles, but she does other things that seem to rank highly with kids . . . like looking him directly in the eye, challenging him, turning the television off and playing with him. And, of course, there’s the jar of Tim Tams on her kitchen counter that is always full when he arrives and empty when he leaves.
It’s a few minutes to ten when I pull into Diana and Tom’s pebblestone driveway (which I hate because Archie stuffs the pebbles into his pockets and they end up all over my house). There’s a battered yellow Volvo parked by the front door, one of the cleaners, probably. I park behind it and hoist Harriet’s baby seat out of the car. Archie unclicks himself and launches himself out of the car, immediately grabbing a fistful of pebbles. I walk up the steps and set the baby carrier down on the landing. The front door is ajar and an unfamiliar male voice comes from somewhere nearby.
“We have an expression in Afghanistan: in an ant colony dew is a flood. It means . . . a small misfortune is not small for one in need. I applied for many jobs, each time—not even a response. So what you did, this is not nothing. This is something.”
“Tom says you’re doing a great job.” It’s Diana’s voice now.
“Tom is very kind. And I am not as kind. I was rude to you. Forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” I hear Diana say. “Just go and take care of your family. I know you will do that, Hakem.”
“I will.”
There is movement, and I shuffle back and lift my hand to knock, like I’m just arriving. Archie is throwing rocks at Diana’s Land Rover. (“Stop that,” I whisper, as Diana appears in the foyer.)
“Lucy.” Diana frowns. Her gaze is panoramic, sweeping the front yard, stopping briefly at Archie who has frozen in a guilty stance. She gives him a stern look and he lets the rocks drop back into the driveway.
“We just arrived!” I say.
“I see that.” She turns away from me, to face the man who has joined her in the foyer. “Thank you for coming by, Hakem.”
“Thank you for seeing me. I will not forget your kindness.”
We watch the man get into his Volvo and roar away. Then I grab Archie’s hand and yank him off the pebblestones. Diana picks up Harriet, who has woken up and is watching us intently with blue startled eyes. Harriet doesn’t cry anymore when Diana holds her.
“Who was that?” I ask, guiding Archie up the front steps.
“Hakem is an engineer that works for Tom.”
“He seemed very grateful to you.”
“Did he?”
“Diana. Obviously you did something for him.” I’m venturing into pushy territory, but it’s not like I have a wonderful relationship with Diana that I could potentially destroy. Having nothing to lose has its upsides. “Tell me.”
Diana rolls her eyes. It’s as if I’m a pest that she doesn’t want to encourage. “He was having trouble getting a job, that’s all. He wasn’t being given a chance. I just made sure he was given one.”
“That’s wonderful of you.”