Sefira and Other Betrayals by John Langan

Author:John Langan [Langan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2019-04-19T18:30:00+00:00

III

One week after her lunch with Aunt Veronica, well before she had come to terms with much if any of what they’d discussed—well before she’d shared the details of Elsie Durant with Dana—Gert found herself opening the front door to her parents’ house. She had spent the day a few miles up the road, surrounded by the luxury of the Mohonk Mountain House, at which she’d been attending a symposium on estate law that seemed principally a tax-cover for passing the weekend at Mohonk. While Gert could have stayed at the hotel—which would have allowed her to continue talking to the attractive young law student with whom she’d shared dinner and then an extensive conversation at the hotel bar—she had arranged to stay at her parents’, whom she’d felt a need to see in the flesh since Aunt Vicky’s revelations. That need, together with a sudden spasm of guilt over having spent so long in the company of another woman so clearly available when Dana was at home working, sped her to the hotel’s front portico, where a valet fetched her Prius without remarking the lateness of the hour. Her reactions slowed by the pair of martinis she’d consumed, Gert had navigated the winding road down from the mountain with her palms sweaty on the wheel. With the exception of a pair of headlights that had followed her for several miles, while she worried that they were attached to a police car, the drive to her parents’ had been less exciting.

Now she was pushing the door shut behind her, gently, with the tips of her fingers, as she had when she was a teenager sneaking home well after her curfew’s expiration. She half expected to find her mother sitting on the living-room couch, her legs curled under her, the TV remote in one hand as she roamed the wasteland of late-night programming. Of course, the couch was empty, but the memory caused Gert to wonder if her mother hadn’t been holding something in her other hand, that weird little statue that seemed to follow her around the house. She wasn’t sure: at the time, she had been more concerned with avoiding her mother’s wrath, either through copious apologizing or the occasional protest at the unfairness of her having to adhere to a curfew hours earlier than any of her friends’. Had her mother been rolling that small figure in her palm, or was this an image edited in as a consequence of Auntie V’s disclosures?

The air inside the house was cool, evidence of her father’s continuing obsession with saving money. His micro-management of the heating had been a continuing source of contention, albeit of a humorous stripe, between him and the rest of the family. Shivering around the kitchen table, Web and she would say, You know how much you’re worth, right? which would prompt their father to answer, And how do you suppose that happened? to which Web would reply, You took all those pennies you saved on heating

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