Page 146 of The Housekeeper

Chapter Fifty-seven

“God, what amI going to do about this hair?” I wailed, looking in the bathroom mirror, watching my husband shake his head behind me in the reflection.

“What’s the matter with it?” he asked.

“It looks awful.”

“It looks the same way it always does.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did a combination of both.

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about,” Harrison said. “You look fine.”

“Fineisn’t exactly the response I was hoping for.”

“It’s just a family dinner, for heaven’s sake. I don’t recall you getting this worked up over my annual barbecue.”

I walked out of the bathroom, sank down on the bed. Here we go again, I thought. Harrison was still upset because he’d had to postpone his barbecue for a week because of my father’s birthday. I’d wondered which of this year’s crop of students he was trying to impress, but dismissed such thoughts as unnecessary and even unkind. Besides, I had bigger things to worry about. Much as I’d tried to convince myself that tonight’s dinner was “just a family dinner,” I suspected that it was really apretext for whatever bomb Elyse was about to hurl at me next. I pulled at my hair. The least I could do was look good when she dropped it.

The last thing I needed were more comments about how tired and pale I looked. Since my hair was one of the few things in my life that I felt I had any control over, it was where I chose to concentrate my energy. If I could just get my hair to behave, then maybe I could magically get the rest of my life to follow suit.

“Mommy!” Daphne cried, running into the room. She was wearing a pink party dress and she looked as delicious as always. “Are you ready yet?”

“Almost,” I told her. “I just need to fix my hair.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Harrison answered, scooping Daphne into his arms. “Where’s your brother?”

“Watching YouTube.”

“Great,” Harrison said, shaking his head at me in dismay as the phone in his side pocket pinged with an incoming text. He promptly lowered Daphne to the floor. “Go get Sam. Tell him to get off YouTube, we’re leaving in two minutes.”

Daphne was halfway out of the room when she stopped and ran back to where I sat perched at the edge of the bed, her head tilting from side to side as she examined my wayward locks. Slowly, she lifted her hands to my hair, brushing several strands away from my face, tucking several more behind my ears, then stepping back to examine her handiwork. “Beautiful,” she pronounced. “Go look.”

I walked back into the bathroom and stared at my reflection. While “beautiful” was perhaps too strong a word, I had to admit that whatever she’d done was a definite improvement. “Thanks, doll,” I said, watching her little face beam.

“Sammy!” I heard her call as she ran from the room. “Daddy says to get off YouTube. We’re leaving in two minutes.”

I smoothed out the skirt of my blue-and-white-striped dressand adjusted my gold hoop earrings, deciding this was as good as it was going to get. “Okay,” I said, glancing at Harrison as he finished typing in a text of his own before returning his cell to the side pocket of his black pants. “Who was that?”

“Not important,” he said.

I decided not to pursue it. “How do I look?”

“Fine.”

Again, not exactly the response I’d been hoping for.

“You ready?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Then let’s get this show on the road.”

—

We were stopped at a red light when Harrison’s phone pinged with another incoming text. He quickly withdrew the phone from his pocket, glanced at the message and then dropped the phone to his seat. Seconds later, it pinged again.