A Lady Under Siege(26)

“If somehow it had been my fault, you’d be telling me it’s excruciating,” Meghan teased her. “You’d be writhing around on the floor right now.”

“Maybe it hasn’t hit me yet,” Betsy answered, then worried it might actually be true.

“Oh, it’s hit you,” said Meghan. “Unless it gets infected. But let’s not go there.”

They were silent again for a minute.

“Mum?”

“Uh huh.”

“Before you were married, did you desire Daddy?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Just asking.”

“Uh huh.”

After a pause, Betsy said, “Derek’s been married twice.”

Meghan’s hackles went up. “Oh?”

“He says sometimes people fall in love because they desire someone. But once you have the person, the desire can go away,” Betsy explained. “He told me the difference between desire and love: you can only desire something you don’t have, but love is when you love what you have. I think that’s what he said.” Betsy, feeling very grown-up discussing such a topic, didn’t notice that her mother was fuming. “He says what happened to his first marriage, it was all desire, no love. But his second marriage, that was love—but then his wife just disappeared. She just vanished. Why would a wife do that?”

Meghan threw her fork to her plate and rose from the table. “Wait right here,” she demanded. This has crossed a line, she told herself. It needs to be stopped, now.

She strode out of her house and was quickly back at Derek’s front door, ringing the bell. She could hear music inside, the thump thump thump of hard rock, not a genre she took much interest in, so she didn’t recognize the song, even though she could hear Derek singing along, off-key but with serious passion. She caught fragments of it—something about suffering through life without love—and then, through the heavy front door, she heard him howl like a wolf at the moon. She rang the bell again, then rapped her fist on the door until her knuckles hurt. She was livid. She thought, The bastard is going to make me wait until his idiotic song ends. When the song ended she rang the bell again, and soon the door opened, and there was Derek, looking at her sympathetically through a cloud of tobacco and marijuana smoke. She could hear other voices from within, then laughter, then a new song came on, drowning out all else.

“Just a minute,” said Derek, and he disappeared, leaving her to stare down a long narrow hallway with a bare hardwood floor scarred by deep random gouges she couldn’t begin to imagine the origins of. She heard the blare of music lowered just enough to allow conversation on the doorstep. Coming back down the hall toward her he said, “I yelled for you in back earlier, don’t know if you heard me—wanted to tell you I couldn’t get a piece of glass cut to size on such short notice, the store was closing by the time I got my shit together. It’ll have to be tomorrow. Your back door won’t exactly be secure, but what the hell, it’s only one night, and nobody knows about it except you and me.”

“I want you to stay away from my daughter,” Meghan said.

“Yeah, sorry about the little accident. Bit of a disaster, I did tell her not to touch that glass—”

“I’m not talking about the glass, or the accident, which wasn’t an accident so much as an inevitability, given the hazardous things you keep encouraging her to do. I’m talking about discussing who you desire and how you desire them with a ten-year-old girl who’s home alone.”

Her words sobered him—in fact he looked as though he’d been slapped. “But she asked me,” he protested. “She asked if I’d ever been married, and I said, Yes, twice, and she asked Why didn’t any of them last, and I said, You’re too young to understand.”

“Right,” said Meghan caustically. “Then you went ahead and explained anyway.”

“No, I tried to put her off,” he replied, “But she told me she was plenty old enough to understand, that her dad says she’s wise beyond her years and knows lots of things she shouldn’t. And I said, Like what? And she said, My homeroom teacher’s bisexual, which means he can fall in love with a man or a woman.” He raised an eyebrow and asked, “Did you know her homeroom teacher is a bisexual?”

“No, I didn’t, in fact,” she said through clenched teeth. “Anything else I should know about her?”