The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (41 page)

‘– practically a family tradition,' Sara finished for her. But she didn't want to be unfair, so she added: ‘Maybe it's not only your fault. The times have changed. I guess it must be harder, being an outcast today.'

‘Tell me about it,' Grace said sourly. ‘Nothing is shocking any more. Being drunk, immoral, violent … it's all Hollywood's fault.'

‘That, and the fact that you're selling hamburgers nowadays.'

Caroline let him in the second time he came over. He had already been round later That Evening (she could still hardly think of it without shuddering), but she hadn't been able to bring herself to talk to him.

‘I know I made a fool of myself,' he said, running his hand uncertainly through his hair.

‘Yes,' she nodded. She wasn't angry with him, really. She couldn't muster enough energy for that.

‘I said you weren't in love with me.'

‘You said we had
sex
.'

‘I
know
.' He forgot to sound remorseful. ‘But they were provoking me,' he said angrily. ‘Maybe it's actually a good thing?' he tried. ‘The strong, older woman with a young man in tow –' He broke off at the look she was giving him. ‘Maybe not.'

‘Maybe not,' Caroline agreed. She hadn't left the house all day. She was seriously considering never leaving it again, but she noticed that he hadn't quite understood and felt that she should at least try to explain. She just wished that he had kept quiet so they could have carried on for a while longer, but it had been inevitable that it would come out eventually.

‘As a single, older woman …' she began.

He looked interested. As though her thoughts meant something to him. They wouldn't for much longer.

‘As a single, older woman, the only thing you can be sure of, even if you do nothing at all, is that you'll be ridiculed. People will laugh at you. That's what they do. And normally I don't care, because it's the choice I made. Do you understand?'

He clearly didn't.

‘People might not exactly like me, but I get things done. They laugh at me, I nag them, and in some way you might say that I've chosen what I'll let them laugh at. Everything goes smoothly. But now … the balance has shifted. They'll be laughing at me for other things. Do you understand that from now on I'm never going to be just Caroline?'

‘Who else would you be?'

She didn't quite know how to explain it. ‘Our former relations …' she started. ‘From now on, it's going to be part of who I
am
. I'll be Caroline-who-throws-herself-at-young-men or Caroline-did-you-know-she-has-affairs-with-young-men? You, I guess, will probably still just be Josh. And they'll be right. They'll laugh at it and I won't be able to say a thing. When they laughed at me for being determined or for nagging, I could defend myself. And I was still just Caroline.'

‘But why do we have to sneak about? Sara and Tom have been open about it, getting married in front of the whole town, proposing collectively?'

‘Firstly, because Sara and Tom aren't together, and they're also the same age.' She added, more quietly: ‘And because the world isn't fair.' She tried reasoning with him. ‘Though it's not right that you should have to hide it. I'm not going to go over to your house, storm in to your parents and start telling them about your boyfriends, am I?'

‘I haven't got any boyfriends, for God's sake.'

She didn't bother to reply. They were still standing in the hallway; she wasn't planning on inviting him any further in, but it meant that he was standing very close to her.

‘I'm sorry,' he said in an abrupt, angry tone which, again, didn't sound the least bit sorry. ‘Isn't there anything I can do to fix this?'

She wished that the world was better or that she hadn't needed to be the person who showed him what it was really like. She leaned back with one shoulder against the wall, slowly touching it with her hand. ‘This isn't something you can fix, Josh,' she said. ‘In a while, when they realise we're not together, maybe I'll get to be Caroline-the-poor-lonely-woman-who-thought-a-young-man-would-want-to-be-with-her, or Caroline-you-know-she-got-dumped-by-a-younger-man. Maybe they'll leave me in peace eventually.'

‘When they see we're not together?'

‘I'm not planning on seeing you any more,' she said as kindly as she could, even though she knew that he wouldn't care for much longer.

Josh went pale. His face went a worrying shade of white, and for a moment something almost ferocious appeared in his eyes. She took a step back, not because she was worried he would hurt her, but because she was worried he would touch her again and that she would like it.

But when he finally spoke, his voice was cold, almost expressionless with barely veiled anger. ‘Leave me if you want, Caroline, but don't pretend it's because of what people are saying. You might be Caroline-who's-just-been-dumped right now – hardly a fair title, is it? – but you've never just been Caroline. Before I came along, you were poor-lonely-Caroline or Caroline-the-walking-Church-cliché.'

She stared at him. ‘Goodbye, Josh,' she said, no longer friendly, pushing past him to tear the door open. She gestured towards the street with her head, and he backed out.

‘
Caroline
. I didn't mean it …'

But she had already closed the door.

It was when she was just about to change the piles of books by the armchairs that Sara's eyes fell on
Eragon
. She smiled to herself, suddenly inspired. A book for a girl who liked dragons. She put it under the counter to give to her next time she came by.

‘I guess you already know, but Amy and I were good friends.'

Sara looked up. John was standing in the doorway. The sun was behind him, so it was hard to see his expression, but his voice was slow and tired, his shoulders drooping. The time since Amy's death hadn't been kind to him.

She nodded.

‘You never met her, but she was a fantastic woman.'

‘I know,' she said. She thought about Tom's word in the car and added, without really looking at him: ‘Would she have liked me, do you think?'

‘She liked you.'

‘And … the bookstore?'

A flicker of a smile passed over his face. ‘The bookstore too.' He looked at her gravely. ‘But she wouldn't have wanted you to marry without love.'

Sara involuntarily clutched the books in front of her. ‘Of course,' she said. She didn't think John realised how completely unnecessary his warning was. She had been in love with both Tom and the town for a long time now. She found the courage to say: ‘I know how much you meant to her. Much more than her husband. You were her Robert Kincaid, standing out in the rain.'

He continued as though he hadn't heard her: ‘And she wouldn't have wanted Tom to do it.'

She wondered whether he thought she had tricked Tom into all this, whether he thought she was just using him.

Her anger made it easier to meet his gaze, and made her say: ‘Amy did it.' She couldn't stop herself from adding: ‘Why didn't the two of you just get married? How could Amy be so …
weak
? Why didn't she dare defy any of those prejudices?'

She couldn't understand it. Amy had taken care of Andy and been pleased to receive a postcard of a half-naked man. It was incomprehensible.

‘She knew what it was like to marry without love,' John replied, an admission of sorts, and one he seemed to have made very reluctantly. Sara found a certain comfort in that.
So what
, she wanted to say.
Amy did it
. Though even as she thought it, she knew that wasn't a good argument. Amy wouldn't have wanted her nephew to be subjected to the same thing that she herself had gone through and which, Sara was sure, she had regretted.

‘She wouldn't have wanted Tom to do it,' John repeated.

She sighed. No, she wouldn't have. It wasn't enough for one person in the marriage to love the other.

On his way out, he paused and turned around. She didn't dare look up from the counter, her eyes fixed on the pile of books in front of her.

‘It wasn't Amy who was too weak to get married,' he said. ‘It was me.'

GEORGE CAME HOME
from the improvised dress-fitting party to his own personal hell. It appeared in the unlikely form of a blue Suburban and a Taco John's manager named Ronald.

The car was parked in George's space, and beside it were two flowery bags, packed and waiting.

His first thought was: so, he did come after her. He was actually happy for her, that's how stupid he really was, he would think later. Just an old fool. Again.

The Taco John's manager came out of George's apartment as if he owned it, although to be fair he didn't seem that obnoxious. He smiled a lot, and greeted George with too much ease.

‘Ronald Lukeman,' he said. ‘I'm sure Michelle's mentioned me.'

‘Yes,' George said.

‘Women, eh?' and George said ‘yes' again, because he couldn't think what else to say.

Michelle came out next, dressed in tight jeans, hair all done up and freshly made up. She had too much eyeshadow on for Broken Wheel, but she looked better than she had since coming back. She also looked ever so slightly foolish, standing there next to Ronald, but pleased, too.

And then Sophy came. She had her jacket on and was holding a pair of gloves in one hand.

‘You're … you're leaving?' George said, and Michelle went from pleased to exasperated in two seconds.

‘Get it together, George,' she said.

‘But …'

He couldn't think what to say. Michelle just swept by him, leaving the oversweet smell of her perfume in her wake. Ronald stuck out his hand, and George shook it absent-mindedly.

‘Sophy,' he said, looking intently over Ronald's shoulder.

She stopped when she reached him. ‘He did come after her,' she said, echoing George's thoughts. She was smiling, like she was glad she'd been wrong.

George swallowed. ‘So,' he said. ‘You're …' He cleared his throat. ‘You're really leaving, then?'

‘Seems like it.'

‘Sophy!' Michelle called.

George turned and looked at them: Michelle and Ronald standing there beside the car, the bags already inside it … he tried desperately to think of something, anything, to say, and in the end he couldn't.

Sophy gave him a small hug, he blinked, and then they were gone. She was gone. Again.

When he went inside, the pale yellow apartment was empty of any sign they'd ever been there except for two short notes on the kitchen table.

‘
George, we're taking off
,' said one of them.

‘
Thanks for letting us stay
,' said the other.

And he realised two things, standing there by the refrigerator, the notes still in his hand. She hadn't left an address, and the darkness had caught up with him again.

Losing her was even more difficult this time around.

Perhaps it was because everything had been so much more uncertain the first time. It all came gradually back then; all the problems, the arguments, the packing of bags. The leaving. He hadn't allowed himself to think that it might be forever. Sophy would be back, he had thought, long after people started giving him pitying looks.

When he had finally been forced to admit that she wouldn't be coming back, he had already started drinking and it had helped. Drowned out the worst of his sorrows when he finally gave up all hope.

He had forgotten how much it had hurt. But even so, he couldn't remember it having been as bad as it felt now.

He knew without a shadow of a doubt that no father could be expected to lose his daughter twice. That realisation gave him a perverse kind of comfort. He had managed to cope with losing her once. He had no intention of doing so again.

Strangely enough, his thoughts didn't turn immediately to alcohol.

For the whole of the first day after Broken Wheel had gone dress shopping and Sophy had disappeared, he sat at the kitchen table thinking about how something as simple and automatic as breathing could suddenly feel so hard. He saw the darkness opening up once again and did nothing to protect himself from it.

But finally, his eyes moved from the notes on the kitchen table to Claire's open bottle of wine.

He wondered whether he should empty it.

Thinking about it didn't prick his conscience, despite the fact that he had promised Sophy never to drink again. It hadn't even been the real Sophy, he knew that now, just a voice in his head. Not even a voice, she had never answered him, and he couldn't talk to her any more. The real Sophy had taken the Sophy in his head with her when she left.

He couldn't muster enough energy to get up and reach for the bottle. Even sitting up felt like a struggle. He staggered off to bed and lay down, still dressed, without even taking a book with him.

Maybe he would drink it later, once he felt a bit better.

He spent the whole of the second day in bed.

He hadn't given up, he thought. Giving up implied that he had been trying at first. You had to give
something
up. Like before, when he had initially protested and lied to himself and then ultimately, during a long period of drinking, given up his illusions one by one. This time, though, there was nothing left to give up. He had simply accepted that he had lost her.

No denial. No anger either. That was something else he had experienced that first time, though it hadn't changed a thing.

Of course, if you looked at it from a different angle, then he supposed you could argue that what he was giving up now was the attempt at pretending he was capable of living a normal life without her. Maybe it was life itself he had given up, but he truly felt as though it wasn't something he had any choice over. It was more like life had given up on him.