She tried to shut the door in Jack’s face, but he stopped her by putting his foot in the opening and shoving it open again. ‘Linda, it’s me! Jack!’ he cried.
Putting her shoulder to the door, Lisa shoved harder but he forced it open. ‘Linda! What are you doing?’
‘Please go!’
Lisa tried to gather her wits. What would Sherry do in a situation like this? Probably kick him right in the balls.
‘But we need to speak,’ he was saying. ‘You can’t imagine what it was like knowing you were with Dan and how much you hated him. So many times I wanted to come and take you away.’
Lisa’s brows lowered, her temper sparking at the criticism of Dan. ‘I don’t hate Dan! What I don’t understand is how Linda could ever have preferred you over him. She must have been nuts.’
‘What?’ Jack seemed stunned.
‘If you don’t get out, I’m going to ring the police.’
He looked bewildered. ‘What’s happened to you? You’ve changed!’ he frowned. ‘I don’t like what you’ve done to your hair either.’
‘You think I care?’ Lisa yelled. ‘Get out of here now! Or I swear I will phone the police.’
They were both so intent upon one another that neither of them heard the car pull into the driveway.
When he showed no sign of leaving, Lisa snatched the phone from the glass-and-wrought-iron table by the front door and began to dial 111. Jack went slack-jawed with astonishment when he realized she was making good on her threat. He lunged at Lisa and tried to wrench the phone out of her hand.
They were tussling for possession of the black handpiece when Dan suddenly appeared, his expression turning lethal when he saw Lisa struggling with Jack Millar, who was winning the battle for the phone. Lisa clung to it with both hands, but her ankle had twisted beneath her and she was in pain.
Lisa looked up and cried ‘Dan!’ with heartfelt relief when she saw him.
Jack looked over, blanched and mouthed ‘Oh fuck.’
Dan grabbed him by the collar of his expensive jacket, hauled back his right fist and hit Jack in the middle of the face. There was a satisfying crunch as the other man’s nose broke and bled all over his blue-and-grey tie.
Jack dropped like a stone to the tiled floor, clutching his nose.
Lisa’s eyes were like saucers. She looked from Dan’s snarling face to Jack’s prostrate form and back again. ‘Have you killed him?’ she whispered.
‘I should be so lucky,’ Dan snarled, rubbing his bruised knuckles. ‘Get up, Millar.’
Jack tried to staunch his nosebleed with his tie. ‘Gno. You’ll only hnit me agnain.’
‘Your hand!’ Lisa cried. ‘Have you hurt your hand?’
Dan jerked away from her when she reached out to touch him.
‘Hnith hnand! Wha about muh fucking gnose?’
‘Get yourself a plastic surgeon,’ Lisa said nastily. ‘And see if he can do some work on your morals while he’s at it.’
‘Gnu bitch.’
‘Open the door,’ Dan snapped.
Lisa hastily opened the door.
Dan scooped Jack off the floor and flung him outside.
When Lisa turned back after closing the door, Dan had gone. She found him in the bathroom soaking a facecloth in cold water for his hand.
‘Will it be alright?’ she asked quietly. She felt drained and shaken.
Dan wouldn’t look at her. ‘Fine,’ he replied curtly, wrapping the fluffy blue cloth about his hand.
‘Here, let me help—’
The coldness in his eyes stopped Lisa in her tracks. She shrank back against the towel rail and wrapped her arms about her waist.
‘What are you doing home so early?’ she asked, hoping he’d tell her it had been to try to straighten things out between them.
His mouth twisted. ‘Yeah, sorry about that, did I ruin the big reunion?’
Hope shrivelled and died to be replaced by razor-sharp pain that sliced at her insides. ‘Did that look like a reunion to you?’
He shrugged. ‘Hell, what do I know? Perhaps you and Millar get a kick out of tearing each other to shreds before you get down to business.’
Lisa choked on a sob.
She had fooled herself. He couldn’t care—not really care and casually talk about her having sex with another man. But where Dan was concerned she had come to realize she was a masochist, so she tried again to make him see the truth.
‘I didn’t invite him here, Dan. He just arrived on the doorstep. I didn’t even know who he was.’
Dan smiled grimly, his eyes glittering with suppressed fury. ‘But you worked it out, didn’t you?’
Lisa shook her head frantically. ‘Please don’t do this, Dan! I know we have a lot of things we need to work through, but I want to be with you.’ She swallowed and whispered, ‘I love you.’
He stilled. ‘Don’t give me that crap!’
‘It’s not crap!’ Lisa cried, closing the distance between them to look up into his face. ‘I’ll do anything! Anything! Just give me a chance!’
He stared hard at her. ‘Anything?’
She nodded, her lips forming a silent yes.
Turning on his heel, he stalked towards the bedroom. Lisa followed him into the big walk-in wardrobe that contained Linda’s clothes. Stopping at the doorway, she watched as Dan went to the large, black-lacquered jewellery case standing on the lowest of a tall row of open shelves. Opening it, he scooped something into his palm. Turning back to Lisa he extended his open hand towards her. ‘Put them on.’
Linda’s diamond engagement ring and platinum wedding band lay in the palm of his hand. Lisa stared at them, her eyes huge and her heart sinking as tears turned her vision blurry.
‘You won’t, will you?’ Dan taunted her. ‘I’ll do anything, you said, but that doesn’t include wearing a sign of your commitment.’
Tears slid down her cheeks. Lisa knew it was hopeless.
‘How can they be a sign of my commitment?’ she asked. ‘They belong to Linda, they’re a symbol of your marriage to her—not me. You’re not being fair.’
Dan’s mouth twisted. ‘Hell. Who said life was fair?’
It was two days before Lisa left Dan’s house. Two days before she found somewhere to go.
She knew Sherry would have taken her in, but it would have been far too awkward for her sister to explain the presence of Linda Brogan in her house and Lisa didn’t want to force her into the position of having to try.
It was Edie Cruickshank who solved her predicament when Lisa went to her in desperation and said, ‘Edie, I really need your help. I need to get away and I have nowhere to go.’
Edie took one look at Lisa’s wan face and unkempt appearance and ushered her into her brown-and-orange lounge.
‘I know just the place,’ she said.
It took Lisa the best part of a day to write Dan the letter saying she was leaving and thanking him for all he’d done for her. Her dyslexia made letter-writing extremely hard and she’d never written a Dear John letter before. She hesitated a long time before deciding to leave the small gift she had bought him for his birthday the following week. A chance phone call from Dan’s brother, Glenn, had yielded the information that Dan’s birthday was coming up on 1 July, and Lisa had gone to great lengths to find just the right gift for him.
It was the first time Lisa had spoken to Glenn Brogan, and she had decided she could have liked him if she’d had the chance to get to know him better. He sounded a lot like Dan, although Lisa had the feeling a far more flamboyant personality lurked beneath the cool, polite voice on the other end of the phone. Lisa liked him even more because it was obvious that Glenn was protective of his brother and hadn’t liked Linda. She’d told Dan about the call and what she thought about Glenn when he got home, but hadn’t mentioned she knew about his birthday.
Lisa left the small, gift-wrapped package and the yellow envelope containing Dan’s birthday card beside his computer along with her front-door key.
&n
bsp; And her heart.
26
Esmeralda Moody was Edie’s younger sister by three years. But she was in worse shape than her big sister and couldn’t walk without the aid of a walking frame due to arthritis in both her hips. Lisa had heard about Esme, as she was known, because Edie had called her to locate the birthday present Lisa wanted for Dan.
‘I’m on the waiting list for hip replacements, but who knows when that’ll be,’ Esme said.
She was a small, frail woman with a bubble perm dyed ginger-brown and eyebrows she drew on each morning with a matching ginger-brown pencil.
‘I may be old and crippled, but I like to keep myself looking nice.’
When Lisa saw Esme’s little two-bedroom house, she smiled faintly. The front garden was filled with gnomes of every description doing a variety of things. She and Sherry had often speculated about just who the house’s manic gnome owner might be, and Sherry had a theory that the occupier was really a mad axe murderer who buried the bodies of victims under the gnomes. Each time a new gnome appeared in the garden, Sherry promised she was going to interview the person who lived there. She would kill herself laughing if she knew Lisa had ended up moving into the ‘gnome house’.
The inside of the house was filled with lots of little ornaments that collected dust, and in the back garden was Esme’s prized Disneyland collection, complete with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Bambi, Thumper, Flower and several of the characters from Cinderella.
‘They’re collector’s items, you know,’ Esme informed Lisa proudly. ‘All I need is the wicked stepmother to finish off my Cinderella collection and then I’m going to make a start on Sleeping Beauty. I’ve seen Prince Charming on Trade Me.’
‘You don’t say?’ Lisa replied faintly, edging carefully around Sleepy and Doc and imagining the havoc that sleepwalking outside might cause.
Lisa was given the use of the second bedroom, which was just about big enough to swing a mouse. She agreed to do shopping, run errands and do the household chores that Esme found too difficult, to top up the small amount of rent she would be paying. Fortunately her jobs didn’t include dusting, which was just as well because in her current mood Lisa suspected the ornaments would have come off second best. The only things she had taken from Dan’s house were the clothes she’d bought during her stay and Linda Brogan’s passport which held a work permit.
The morning after she moved into Esme’s, Lisa got herself a job as a waitress at Flavasum, the café attached to the garden centre. It was only for thirty hours a week and the pay wasn’t great, but at least she would earn enough to cover her rent and eat, provided she was careful. Esme’s house was close enough for her to walk to and from work.
The owners were a husband-and-wife team named Anton and Susie who had just had their first baby, a boy named Jonah but who everybody called Joey. Lisa’s biggest fear was that her dyslexia would make her too slow at writing down the orders legibly in the busy little café. At her interview, sensing Anton was just about to offer her the job, she blurted out she was dyslexic.
‘Are you? Me, too,’ Anton replied without missing a beat. ‘Can you start—’
‘But I might not be able to write down the orders fast enough.’
‘Yes, you will. We have a system.’ Anton pointed at the menu chalked on the big blackboard covering most of one wall. ‘See? A star and a hook for vegetable frittata, a moon means a side salad, muffins are circles, a circle with a dot is a scone.’ He shrugged. ‘Easy.’
Lisa scrutinized the menu in amazement. There was a God.
‘You’ll soon memorize the symbols. There’s a spot prize of a latte and muffin for whoever thinks up something for anything new we add.’ His smile held a wealth of understanding. ‘So, do you want the job?’
‘Yes, yes, please.’
Edie had told her sister enough about Lisa’s situation for Esme to know to give her new boarder space, but the old lady’s heart went out to the lovely young woman with her big, sad, blue eyes and lost expression. Esme still missed her husband, Leonard, who had died over forty years ago, but for the first time she considered herself lucky that it was death that had parted them. It was a whole lot better than being rejected by the living.
Working at the café and Esme Moody’s unfailing kindness were all that kept Lisa putting one foot in front of another in the early days after she left Dan.
Anton was struggling to run the café and help Susie out at home with their new son, so everybody took turns looking after Joey, who spent some of the time asleep in his pushchair in a corner of the café when Susie came in to cook. Lisa was always the first to offer to take the baby for a walk when he and his mother got too cranky.
Lisa struck up a friendship with Starr Warrender, one of the other waitresses. Starr was a tiny elf of a girl with rich mahogany-coloured hair that she wore an inch long and gelled into tiny spikes all over her head. Her huge eyes were a gorgeous shade of lavender-blue and framed by thick sooty black lashes. She wore a tiny silver stud nestled in one corner of her nose, shiny black Doc Martens on her little feet and rode a motorbike. Starr was completing a midwifery degree, and waitressing helped pay for her tuition and books.
Lisa worked hard because exhaustion made it easier for her to fall asleep at night. Starr and Anton made a point of insisting she sit down at least once a day and tackle some of the rich café food, while privately wondering about the man who caused the circles under Lisa’s eyes and the forlorn droop to her soft mouth.
‘Bastard,’ Starr muttered to Anton as she swiped tabletops with a wet sponge. ‘I’d like to get my hands on him. Lisa’s as nice on the inside as she is on the outside.’
‘It might not be a man,’ Anton felt compelled to point out.
‘Lisa’s not a lesbian,’ Starr replied firmly.
‘How would you know?’
‘Because my mother is.’
Whilst Lisa was deeply grateful for their kindness, the biggest comfort working at the café gave her was being close to her father. The café had bi-fold doors that opened out onto the plant-filled courtyard at the back of the shop, and in good weather patrons sat beneath amber canvas umbrellas at tables and enjoyed the smell and sight of the plants and the water fountain with its four small rearing horses spouting water from their mouths.
Brian seemed pleased to see Lisa. He looked at her black skirt and the long black apron tied about her waist and raised a brow. ‘Working at the café now, eh?’ He was transferring tiny seedlings from trays into individual pots.
Lisa smiled. Just seeing his kind, misty-blue eyes and calm face eased some of the emptiness in her chest. ‘Yes.’
‘Given up saving all your neighbour’s dying plants, then?’
Mention of her former neighbours made Lisa feel like crying. She wished she could lay her head on her father’s shoulder and cuddle into him as she had done so many times before.
Brian’s smile faded. ‘Are you alright, love?’ he asked, taking in the brittle thinness of her slender frame and the sadness in her eyes.
Lisa bit her lip and nodded. ‘Yes.’ She shook her head. ‘No. I don’t know.’ She swiped at her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I…I’ve just had some things happen lately.’
He nodded understandingly.
She looked at the seedlings he was planting in individual pots. ‘You have a school visit, don’t you?’
Brian was surprised. ‘Yes. How did you know?’
Her father always presented each child with a seedling to take away and nurture.
‘How did you know that?’ he repeated, a seedling suspended over one of the small black pots filled with rich potting mix.
Lisa smiled faintly. ‘Lucky guess.’
Leaning across the potting table, she carefully slid her little finger into the soil in one of the pots. She pulled it out again, leaving a perfect-sized channel for the little seedling just the way Brian had taught her, Sherry and Ben when they were small and excitedly preparing their own plants.
Brian stared down at the little pot before slowly raising his eyes to Lisa’s face. ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked unsteadily.
‘Because that’s the way I was taught to do it.’ Lisa replied softly.
Wiping her hand on her apron she walked slowly back to the café, leaving him staring after her.
There were few other high points that first week when Lisa walked about in a daze. Time became her nanny. It told her when to get up and when to go to bed, when to take her shower and, less successfully, when it was time to eat. Esme was a good, plain cook and enjoyed having somebody to fuss over, but more often than not her efforts were only picked at by Lisa, who steadily lost weight. She also began to walk in her sleep again, which alarmed Esme and unnerved Lisa whenever she looked at all those little ornaments. Esme was no Dan; she didn’t have his strength or tolerance for dealing with Lisa’s nocturnal wanderings.
Fearing she might smash some of Esme’s prized ornaments, or even worse a gnome and get evicted before the week was out, Lisa admitted defeat and made an appointment to see a doctor to get some sleeping tablets. She deliberately avoided her own family doctor, because her mother worked as his medical receptionist and Lisa knew the sight of Jill would shatter her already fragile composure. She was lucky to get an appointment at another practice on the same day she called.
When Lisa told the receptionist she had never visited the doctor before she was given a registration form to fill out. The receptionist had bleached-blonde hair and a fake tan. She looked like she’d been left out in the sun too long. Her name badge read Lexie. ‘If you’ve moved house or married recently make sure you put down your old address and maiden name,’ she told Lisa.
Lisa wondered what Lexie would think if she gave the details surrounding her recent changes of address and ‘marriage’.
After she’d completed the form, she took it to the counter and returned to her seat in the crowded waiting area to try to get interested in a woman’s magazine. Yet another movie star was pregnant. Lisa stared at the photos and sadly thought about the pregnancy Dan had been so worried about. When she’d got her period the day before, she’d cried.
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