Fall Love by Anne Whitehouse

Author:Anne Whitehouse [Anne Whitehouse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Gay, Romance
Publisher: Feedbooks
Published: 2008-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

On the Saturday following her weekend with Paul, Jeanne returned to Greenwich for her car. She had called her parents to tell them she would be arriving. After retrieving her car from the garage, she dropped by to see them.

Her parents kept the doors locked all day long. Even though she had a key, Jeanne didn't use it. She rang the bell and waited for her father to answer the door. He had been watching a football game in the den; she could hear the television. "Come on in," he said. "How's the car?" And without waiting for an answer, he continued, "Your mother's in the kitchen."

"It seems to be okay, but I've only driven from the garage. Maybe you'll look at it before I go back to New York."

"If you wait till after the game."

"How long is the game?"

"Another hour or so."

"All right."

There was a pause, in which he didn't seem to know what to say to her, and she realized that he considered their conversation had come to a close. "Well," he said, "I guess your mother's waiting to see you."

As she went back to the kitchen, Jeanne wondered why her father always seemed to want to hand her over to her mother as soon as he saw her. She felt resentful, and still she acquiesced. In fact, she, too, hardly knew what to say when they met. Their conversations were confined to concrete matters, like her car.

Her mother, however, wasn't in the kitchen. Instead of going to look for her, Jeanne filled a glass with water from the tap and plunked in a few ice cubes. She sat down at the table, thinking about her father, and remembering, in contrast, a scene that she had witnessed after leaving Block Island on Labor Day.

The ferry had docked in New London, and the passengers were lined up in the stairwell leading to the lower deck. She had forgotten her hat on a bench and had gone back to retrieve it, leaving Paul and Althea to see that her car was safely taken off the ferry. She had lingered to use the bathroom, and by the time she descended the stairs, most of the passengers had already disembarked. The dock bustled with the activity of people leaving.

It was just after seven p.m., the light already dimming. She thought of how it would be dark long before they got to New York. As she was looking around for Paul and Althea, she saw not far from her a young girl standing with an older woman at the edge of the blacktop.

The woman was dressed formally in a suit. The girl, who was perhaps fourteen and tall for her age, was wearing shorts. Jeanne noticed that they seemed quite separate from each other, a distance reflected in the difference between their clothes. Not mother and daughter, she decided; perhaps the girl is her godchild or her niece or the daughter of a friend. Just as she realized that the two were

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