“Saskia is following us again?” Ellen swung around in her seat and scanned the cars behind them. “Which one is she?”

“Yeah, that’s great. That’s fantastic. That’s one thing you really need, your ex following you to meet your girlfriend’s family for the first time,” muttered Patrick.

“Yes, but where is she?” The seat belt pulled hard across Ellen’s neck. Directly behind them was a man in a truck, his eyes closed, thumping his hands against the big steering wheel, his mouth moving as he sang along to an unheard song.

“She’s in the lane next to us, a couple of cars back,” said Patrick. “Don’t worry. I’m going to lose her.”

He slammed his foot down on the accelerator and the car shot forward. Ellen turned around in time to see the lights change from orange to red. When she looked back, they were crossing the intersection, leaving a bank of stationary cars at the lights.

“What color?” she said desperately. “What color car?”

“Lost her,” said Patrick happily. “Look. We’re moving again.”

“Great,” said Ellen, and rubbed at her sore neck.

I lost them at the lights and I couldn’t guess which way they were going.

Maybe they were meeting up with friends of hers. Patrick doesn’t know anyone down that way.

I saw her turning around in her seat. I wonder if she was trying to see me. Patrick probably knew I was behind. I know when he knows I’m behind him. He drives faster than usual, erratically. Sometimes he sticks his finger up at me. Once I saw him getting a ticket for doing an illegal right-hand turn trying to get away from me. I felt bad about that because he’d always been proud of the fact that he’d never got a ticket in over twenty years of driving. I sent him a bottle of wine to his work to apologize. I picked it out especially. A Pepper Tree white. We’d discovered that wine on a trip to the Hunter Valley during our last summer together. We bought a whole case and we got addicted to it. I don’t see how he could drink that wine without thinking of me. But I waited outside his office that night, and I saw one of the girls he worked with walking to her car carrying my bottle of wine. I recognized it because I’d wrapped it up in blue tissue paper. He didn’t even bother to open it. He just handed it to that girl.

I try to imagine how he describes me to the hypnotist. To Ellen. I guess he tells her I’m “psychotic.” He yelled that at me once. I was walking behind him at his local shops, when he suddenly swung around and walked straight back toward me. I stopped and waited for him, smiling. He was smiling too. I thought we were finally going to have a proper conversation. But then, when he got closer, I saw it was a sarcastic, angry smile. He stuck his finger in my face and yelled, “You’re a psychotic lunatic!”

Which … you know, might have been funny in other circumstances, except that I was worried he was going to hit me.

He was so angry he was shaking.

Actually, I sort of longed for him to hit me. I needed him to hit me. If he wasn’t ever going to hold me in his arms again, at least he could hit me. There would be a connection once more. Flesh against flesh.

But he didn’t. He locked his hands behind his neck and rocked his head like an autistic child. I just wanted to comfort him. He didn’t need to get so worked up. It was only me. I’m still only me. That’s what he can’t seem to get. I said, “Darling.”

He dropped his hands and I saw that his eyes were red and watery. He said, “Don’t call me that,” and he walked away, and I stayed where I was, looking at the specials pinned up on the window of the shop where we always got fish and chips on a Sunday night.

That’s the thing. I’m permanently stuck in this crazy person role now. He will always think of me as a crazy person. He used to think I was a “funny bugger” and I had “beautiful eyes” and that I was “one of the most generous people he’d ever met.” Those were all things he said to me, things he meant at the time.

But now I’m just crazy.

The only way for me to not be crazy would be to disappear from his life. Like a proper ex-girlfriend is expected to do. To discreetly vanish into the past.

And that’s what drives me … crazy.

Ellen could see Patrick’s “fight or flight” response kick in as soon as they walked across the doorway of her mother’s home.

Oh, my poor darling, she thought. She remembered the first time she’d taken Jon to meet her mother; the way he’d looked about with those lazy, hooded eyes, so certain of his own superiority. Patrick’s clear green eyes were darting about as if looking for possible escape routes, and he was clearing his throat over and over.

It mattered to him what Ellen’s mother thought. It mattered, and that meant Ellen mattered.

Poor man. It was understandable that he was nervous. Jon was an exception; most men would find this intimidating.

Three immensely elegant, immensely confident women in their sixties, all holding the delicate stems of their wineglasses with their fingertips, all bizarrely dressed almost entirely in white, to complement her mother’s all-white theme—white couches, white walls, white accessories—all swooping down from the high stools on which they’d been perched to kiss Patrick on both cheeks. And Patrick, who only expected to be kissed on one cheek and kept offering the wrong one, having to bend awkwardly at the knees so they could reach him.

“Why are you all dressed in white?” asked Ellen. “You’re blending into the furniture.”

There were peals of laughter.

“We couldn’t believe it when we saw each other!” gurgled Pip.

“We look like that Bette Midler movie. First Wives Club. Not that we’ve ever been wives.” Ellen watched her mother’s eyes rest on Patrick’s tradesman-out-on-the-town outfit of blue jeans and long-sleeved Just Jeans checked shirt rolled to the elbows. Jon wore Armani and Versace and some other Italian men’s designer label that was so very special Ellen had never heard of it.

“Ah, Anne, Mel is a wife,” pointed out Pip.

“Of course she is. I just never think of her as one. Which is a compliment, Mel.”

“I’m so flattered, Anne.”

“Who else was in that movie?” mused Pip. “Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and somebody else. Someone I like. Do you know, Patrick?”

Tags: Liane Moriarty Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net