‘But what sort of a woman of forty-five years of age has sex with a seventeen-year-old though?’ I say.
‘I don’t know, a horny, drunk one?’ Josh answers with a serious expression that evolves into a slight smirk. ‘Hadn’t you ever heard Mum call Sarah Sue, as in Sue Hefner, and she thinks we don’t know what she means?’
‘I don’t know what she means, I thought it was just something to do with their younger days.’ I say.
‘I’ll explain it to you some day.’ Josh scrunches his forehead and shrugs off my inquisitive stare. When he doesn’t oblige my curiosity, I continue.
‘Whatever about Sue, or whatever that means, I think we should tell Dad at the very least. The entire line of questioning from the Gardaí last year was about packages and you have a picture of one there.’
‘I suppose,’ he concedes.
17.
One Day Before Jenny Died
At ten past ten Sarah pulled up outside Oakley Drive, snatched a last look at herself in her rear-view mirror and took a large breath before she undid her seatbelt. ‘Jesus,’ she remarked glaring into her brown, bloodshot eyes. ‘You’ll have to do,’ she sighed, appalled with the woman staring back at her. She slicked her long blonde hair from her face, twisted it into a knot and held it in place with a clip she had found in the dashboard. It’d be curly that evening given that it was still damp from the hurried shower she had, but that didn’t matter. She had no plans to do anything but get back home, strip the bed, tidy away the remnants of the night before and, as best she could, try to forget it even happened.
She rummaged inside her glove compartment for her emergency lip-gloss and mascara and, with a flick of her wrist, touched up her lips and eyelashes respectively. She exhaled, straightened down her red and white striped T-shirt and got out of the car. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have done what she did?
She took in a deep breath, pressed her hand on the handle of the red-painted door and let herself into Oakley Drive. There were three people that she would have rather not seen behind the door: Liam, because of how much she despised him; Jenny, because of how guilty she felt for what she had let happen the night before; and Josh, because she had slept with him and crept out of her own house to avoid talking to him this morning. She had never regretted anything as much in her life.
Jenny was sitting in the front lounge waiting for her when she popped her head round the door. Her heart raced into overdrive when she saw Josh standing there too.
‘Good morning,’ her voice wobbled a bit and she tried to mask it from Jenny. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ She scrunched up her cheeks apologetically before she stole her eyes in Josh’s direction. His eyes were hidden by the mop of unwashed hair on his head. Her stomach churned seeing them side by side, the boy whose hands she had let roam all over her body the night before and his mother, her best friend.
‘Ms Barry,’ Jenny said in a high-pitched tone. ‘Nice of you to join us, I thought that you had been abducted or something.’ She didn’t notice the panic or dismay in Sarah’s eyes. ‘Or worse still, I was beginning to think you had stayed away in protest.’ Jenny flashed her a lopsided grin knowing only too well how Sarah felt about Liam moving back in and thought it better to joke about it to ease the tension she had felt come in with her.
Sarah forced a smile in return, ‘I went into the office early this morning.’ That part of the explanation was at least the truth. When she woke beside Josh at seven that morning her stomach had flipped and not in a good way. The reasoning that she had applied to sleeping with Josh the evening before seemed utterly ridiculous in the light of the sober morning, and while the body that lay beside her was that of a man physically, she was old enough to be his mother. Not to mention that his actual mother was her best friend. How could she have been so stupid?
She blinked to banish the image of them entwined on her bed. ‘I had a mountain of paperwork,’ her explanation to Jenny was intended in a small way as an apology to Josh for the sleep-and-creep she had just pulled. Sleep-and-creep was a crass phrase that she and her college friends had coined to describe the process of sleeping with someone, regretting it after the fact, waiting for them to fall asleep and then creeping out silently to avoid having to talk to them again. She would never have thought she would have had to creep out of her own house, but when she woke and saw Josh’s naked, muscular body splayed face down across the crisp white sheets of her king-size bed, a groundswell of shame had practically levitated her off it, across the carpeted floor and down the wooden stairs to the kitchen. She had hoped that she had some clean laundry in the utility room, but all that she found in the dryer was Josh’s hoodie, so she pulled that out and left it hanging over the back of a kitchen chair. With no laundry in the utility room, if she wanted to leave, her only option was to put back on the clothes Josh had hastily removed from her the night before.
Her panties were wedged inside the leg of her running leggings beside the kitchen island and her T-shirt was draped across the back of stool at the island. When she had those on, she stepped into her runners in the hall and with nothing more than her purse, phone and keys she slinked out the front door and made her way to the office, knowing that on a Saturday morning there’d be no one else around. She’d wait there until Josh had left.
It was an agonising two and a half hours later when the house security notification flashed on her phone telling her the front door had been opened and closed and she raced back home knowing the coast was finally clear. She knew that she was already late, and that Jenny would be wondering where she was, but she needed a shower before she went over to help out with the move.
The first thing she saw when she opened her front door was the note Josh had left on the hall table. She picked it up, read it and sighed with relief when she realised that his thoughts very much mirrored her own: a drunken mistake that no one would ever know about and would never be repeated. Of all the outcomes her behaviour of last night could have generated, this was the best one. After her hurried shower and without drying her hair, she had pulled on jeans, T-shirt and pair of runners, typed in a message in her phone that she would use as an excuse for her tardiness and raced over to Jenny’s.
‘And I really needed to get on top of it, I just didn’t expect to get so bogged down…’ Sarah offered.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jenny replied, noticing Sarah’s unease. Schedule planning for Sarah was like a sport and she prided herself on always having a plan for carrying out her processes and procedures and lists for things that she needed to do. It was unlike her to be so disorganised and Jenny knew something big must have happened to throw out her normal routine. ‘Honestly it’s fine, Sarah.’ she said, ‘Relax.’
‘And I was wondering why you didn’t text me back,’ Sarah rummaged in her bag for her phone to show her a message that she had had the forethought to set up. ‘And I’ve just realised that the bloody text hadn’t sent,’ she moved further into the chaotic room, side stepping boxes as she waved the phone in front of Jenny’s eyes as though she was presenting it to the court. ‘See.’
‘Don’t worry about it, the guys have been great, as you can see,’ Jenny looked around the room. ‘And Josh here is just about to get stuck into the heavy lifting…’
‘I see that,’ Sarah chanced a brief look at Josh and offered him an awkward smile.
‘Even though he was late, too.’ Sarah turned to the window as Jenny joked, afraid that her face would give everything away. ‘He forgets that we were young once, too,’ Jenny kidded, the intonation in her voice was playful. ‘And that we are not that old that we can’t remember what young adults get up to.’ She winked at Josh who mumbled something inaudible in return before he left the room without looking back. She waited until she heard his footsteps on the landing upstairs before she continued.
‘Oops,’ Jenny grinned and pointed after him with a pleased expression on her face. ‘Looks like I might have hit a nerve,’ she waited for Sarah to turn to look at her. ‘He say
s he stayed at Mark’s last night,’ she added with an incredulous expression. ‘So did you get on top of it then?’ she raised her eyebrows laughing, letting Sarah know that she hadn’t believed a word she had said. Her reputation as the female version of Hugh Heffner would never leave her in peace. ‘Or were you underneath the whole time?’ she laughed.
‘Jenny don’t.’ Nerves shot through Sarah’s body like a bolt of electricity. ‘I was in the office,’ she whispered hoping that by example, Jenny would lower her voice too. She would have been mortified if Josh had heard Jenny’s innuendo. ‘I just got waylaid.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jenny began to laugh even louder and watched as Sarah’s cheeks grew redder by the second. ‘Waylaid?’ she blurted out loud. The unfortunate choice of words too funny to ignore. ‘So, spill, who’s the lucky paperwork that you got on top of and got waylaid by.’ Jenny giggled.
‘Jenny,’ Sarah shifted her weight, rocking back and forth from foot to foot, much like a mother would do with a baby in her arms. It was all she could do to move the energy that was surging through her like a wave, threatening to engulf her. ‘Seriously,’ she glanced at the ceiling indicating her discomfort at continuing the conversation. Would it be so obvious if she feigned illness so she could just bolt out the door? Her hands trembled, she could feel her heartbeat in her throat and, as though her brain was mocking her, an image of Josh’s naked body spread over hers flashed across her eyes. She squeezed them closed.
‘Sorry, I just presumed that you working on a Saturday morning was code for, you know…’ Jenny stopped, it wasn’t like Sarah to be so guarded or upset. She hadn’t intended to cause her any offence. Maybe she did read her completely wrong, maybe she actually was in work. ‘Did I offend you? Because I wasn’t being judge-y… I just thought that maybe one of your Tinder matches made the cut and got to stay over and that instead of organising my wardrobes, you were at home having blissful sex with said random hot guy. Because given half the chance, I would have done that myself.’ She smiled. If she had learned anything these past few years, it was that life was for living, and just because Jenny’s life didn’t work out the way she had hoped, it shouldn’t mean that Sarah should put a hold on hers.
‘It wasn’t that.’ Sarah blinked and straightened her lips, a sting of guilt washing over her at how harshly she had reacted.
‘Are you okay, Sarah?’ Jenny’s smile was slowly disappearing.
‘Yes, I am, I’m grand,’ Sarah briefly considered leaving, but Jenny was far too perceptive for her to swallow any old lame excuse, so instead she edged her way around the room picking up items that needed to be put away. ‘It’s this case I’m working on at the moment, I’m just all over the place with it, you know?’
‘Well no, I don’t know, but if it’s any consolation,’ Jenny nodded towards the mess that her front lounge had become. She wanted to continue the conversation, she wanted to say more and she knew that there was something on Sarah’s mind, but she knew that Sarah didn’t want to talk about it, at least not right then. ‘Your chaotic morning is what my life looks like every day.’ What was it that had thrown her through a loop, surely it wasn’t Liam moving back in… or was it? Jenny wasn’t finished mulling over whether she would say something or not when Abbie bounded into the room.
‘Mum,’ Abbie’s energy was in full swing and it was so reassuring for Jenny to see how happy the prospect of her dad moving back in had made her. ‘Aunty Say?’ Abbie exclaimed and reached up to her for a hug.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ Sarah answered, delighted with the distraction. It wasn’t unusual for Sarah’s conversations with Jenny to come to an abrupt end. In fact most of the time, with the coming and going of both Josh and Abbie at Oakley Drive, it was seldom that they got to finish a sentence, but this interruption was welcome and Sarah sighed with relief. ‘I see you’ve been busy.’
‘We are just the lifters and shifters, Mum wouldn’t let us start putting things away, said you were the organiser.’ Abbie followed Sarah’s eyes around the room. ‘She said you’d do a better job.’
‘I’m not sure about that, but I’ll try,’ Sarah smiled.
‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ Jenny said in response, it was one of the annoying things Sarah used to say when Jenny had lived with her in College Grove all those years ago.
‘Anyway,’ Abbie continued. ‘There is some leftover Chinese food in the fridge, but Dad said he’ll drive us to Tesco in a little while, we’re going to get hot counter food for lunch.’
‘Oh,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s nice.’ Already Oakley Drive felt more like a family home than it had done in years. She was doing the right thing. She could feel it in her bones.
‘So,’ Sarah waited to hear Abbie’s footsteps on the stairs before she continued. ‘Before the others come back in, you’re absolutely sure that this is what you want before we go any further?’
‘Yes,’ Jenny managed. She needed this to work, she knew as a family they all needed it to work, Josh most of all.
‘Okay then.’ Sarah answered. Having the ability to argue and control the narrative was a skill that she had always had, but knowing when to stay quiet and accept defeat was another. ‘I think then,’ she pulled a file out of her bag, she had taken it from the filing cabinet earlier when she was in the office. She had also logged on to her secretary’s computer and updated her appointment schedule. She had made an appointment for Jenny to come into the office Thursday the 18th at eleven in the morning, to complete the proceedings. She had been working diligently at Jenny’s request at getting her paperwork in order and it was important that there was a clear and present trail of paperwork in place. ‘Given the circumstances, we need to review this file and I’ve made an appointment for you to come into my office to sign everything off.’ She lifted her hand to stop Jenny interrupting. ‘And don’t worry,’ she had anticipated what Jenny was about to say. ‘I’ve also arranged for Easicab to collect you to bring you in and back, they’ll text you within twenty-four hours to confirm.’
‘Okay.’ Jenny answered.
‘So it’s arranged, I have the testimonies from your doctor,’ she turned the first page of the file to show her. ‘Your independent solicitor’s testimony,’ she turned the second. ‘So all we need then is to get your statement of intent.’
‘I have that done for you, I can give that to you know.’ Jenny offered, her eyes flitting over the boxes, wondering among the chaos where it would be.
‘Erm,’ Sarah thought for a moment. ‘Maybe just hold on to it until our meeting next Thursday and we’ll do it all then. And we’ll finalise your will then too.’ Sarah said. ‘It just makes sense – for you, the kids, even Liam.
‘Look, Jen, I know that you think that, no matter what, people are kind, but believe me, they aren’t. You’d be surprised at the number of spouses I get in my office stressing about how naïve they had been and that they regretted not taking my advice to protect themselves in the first place. And saying that it will all work out is all very well, but it might not and do you really want to take that chance?’
‘Listen, I know you just want to have everything in order and that you are just looking out for me, but I need you to know that, no matter what, Liam will look out for Abbie and Josh when I’m gone. This is not some Hollywood movie where there’s a massive plot to defraud the terminally-ill wife of all her millions. It’s the family home, Sarah, Liam is their dad. He’s not going to see them come to harm and, for what it’s worth, just in case your overactive imagination has painted the mistress as the criminal, I don’t think Alex would either.’
‘I know, but there’s more to this than who will look after the kids when you’re gone. You need to make sure that you are provided for while you’re still here and that’s why we’re doing the power of attorney.’
‘You are the person that will make decisions for me, when the time comes. I want it to be you.’ Jenny said.
‘Which is precisely why I want you to formalise it on
Thursday. That, what you just said, should be in your statement of intent,’ she paused for a second. ‘Are you sure you want it to be me?’
‘Of course it’s you, who else would it be?’
‘Well, if you don’t appoint anyone, it will automatically revert to being Liam’s responsibility, seeing as you are still legally married.’ Sarah said. ‘And in that instance, should you not be able to make decisions for yourself,’ she dipped her eyes awkwardly. ‘It will be him who gets to give authority on everything like personal care decisions, where or with whom you’ll live, who is allowed to see you and who isn’t – for Christ’s sake, Jenny, even what you wear.’ Sarah smiled at the comical side of it.
‘Seriously, Sarah, what I wear?’
‘Well technically, yes, he would have the authority to decide everything for you.’ Sarah said. ‘We could be talking full-on Handmaid’s Tale.’ They were both massive Margaret Atwood fans so the reference made both of them laugh.
‘Just as long as it’s not ski-pants, leg warmers, batwing jumpers and a perm.’ Jenny giggled.
‘See,’ Sarah smiled, ‘for the love of all that is fashionable we need to sort out your paperwork.’
‘I’d be lost without you, Sarah, you do know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, indeed I do.’ Sarah leaned into her and pecked her on the cheek. ‘Now let’s get some shape on this.’ She wasn’t sure where to start, but at least she had set wheels in motion to make sure everything worked out the way it needed to.
‘You know,’ Jenny grinned as she watched Sarah’s hands unfold the sheets and fold them again, this time more neatly. ‘Outward organisation could be a sign of inward chaos.’
‘That’d be right,’ Sarah replied, if ever there was a reason for inner chaos, last night was one. The best thing for both her and Josh was to keep their heads down and get on with the task at hand. The further away they moved from the events of the night before, the more comfortable each of them would be.
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