The Pretend Wife by Bridget Asher

Author:Bridget Asher
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2009-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

IT’S HARD TO SAY if I fell in love with Elliot first or his family or both at the same time. I loved the way his mother turned conversations into something that rose up and out of the everyday into something charged—or strangely holy. I loved the way Elliot and Jennifer bickered in the kitchen and drank from whatever wineglass was sitting on the table and picked off each other’s plates; the way they pointed at each other and laughed when one of them said something funny, and how they listened to Bib when she told long stories about things she’d poked with her sticks. I loved the way Porcupine was passed from one person to the next—including Bib, who held him in his tubby middle, his legs dangling the way a cat’s would if held like that—and how he was passed without comment even to me, how he’d land in my arms and stare at me, his toothless mouth open, eyes wide.

Elliot spooned his mother sweet potatoes while Jennifer and I stood in the kitchen boiling shrimp, their dark gray bodies pinking and rising to the boiling surface. Jennifer told me about her wedding to Sonny in a park. Bib had worn a blue dress that she and her grandmother had made together with the sewing machine in the attic.

Elliot walked in and found his place in the conversation. “And they made my tie out of the same material. It was crooked, but perfectly crooked.”

“The tie was Bib’s idea,” Jennifer said.

“We were matchers! Weren’t we, Bib?” Bib was walking by with her pellet box.

“Yes,” she said, a little shyly. “And we danced a lot. We got really sweaty. It was a sweaty wedding.”

“It was. Wasn’t it?” Jennifer said.

“Too bad we didn’t know Elizabeth back then. She’d have made us matching knit hats!” Elliot said.

“I panicked,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“It was fine,” Elliot said. “Turns out, my mother has always loved hats.”

I asked Jennifer more questions about Sonny. He was a drummer who was on tour with a band that had a small cult following in the folk world. Jennifer said, “I found him in a lost and found, literally. He’d lost a wallet, and Bib had lost a journal at a concert. Neither thing showed up so we got married as a consolation prize.”

“You found what you were supposed to find,” I said, thinking of Elliot ordering two scoops of Gwen Merchant and getting more than he’d asked for.

Sometimes the only thing that would make Porcupine stop crying was if someone took him outside to pace. Jennifer had to help her mother to the bathroom, and Elliot was fixing a salad, so I was in charge of Porcupine and Bib, who was already out on the deck wearing latex gloves and a face mask. Tweezers and the owl pellet were sitting on a flattened paper bag in front of her. I was holding Porcupine and pacing, as instructed.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

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