Your Roots Are Showing Read Online Free

from The Wisteria Rooms. Much better to concentrate on her new neighbor.
    She loved the picture Ingrid was scrutinizing so frankly. It was the only decent shot of all of them together, and she was darned if she was going to put it facedown in a drawer, let alone tear it up, as she believed was de rigueur in this sort of situation.
    It wasn’t the usual sort of family portrait. It had been taken by a photographer who worked only in black and white, with an old- fashioned manual camera. The woman had come to Mill House in Laingtree late in the afternoon one midsummer’s day, more than half a year ago now. “Let’s see what the light’s like outside,” she’d suggested.
    The light had been like honey, or well-steeped tea held up to sunshine. The photographer asked them to group themselves as they might after a picnic. James lounged on his elbow, elegant and obliging. The children, bandy-legged toddlers then, immediately began to jump and climb all over him. Lizzie sat behind James with her legs folded to one side, looking busty and slightly awkward because of the effort of holding her back straight and sucking her stomach in.
    About thirty photos had been snapped machine-gun style, but Lizzie and James had chosen this one, which caught him smiling up at her through his floppy fringe in a moment that looked like the sharing of a secret joke, while the children used his long body as a hobbyhorse and climbing frame, their baby faces full of wicked delight at having Daddy at their mercy.
    James was the center of that picture. Every eye was on him, every family member touched him, every twinkle and sparkle was aimed at him. James. How on earth was she living and breathing here in this strange house without him? The ache of missing him was constant, underlying all the rest: the anger, the confusion, the out-and-out fear.
    “When I was your age, people had more respect for marriage,” Ingrid said, setting the photograph back in its place. “Single women didn’t feel they had the right to go after family men the way they seem to nowadays.”
    Lizzie had to smile at her visitor’s convoluted way of asking whether James had run off with another woman.
    “Oh no, it was nothing like that,” she said. Would everybody assume she was the scorned wife? “It was . . . well, it was me. I was the one who ended it.”
    This wasn’t strictly true, if you were going to split hairs. James had been the one to pack his bags and go. All the same, Lizzie had definitely caused him to leave.
    The whole debacle had started with a blunder. One tiny, irreversible blunder, like a misplaced chip with an ice pick that sends out a spiderweb of cracks and causes the whole glacier to come crashing down.
    If Lizzie hadn’t been so useless with computers, she’d probably be in her kitchen at Mill House at this very moment, doing something happy and domestic, like sanding away the scratches Alex had made on the kitchen table.
    If she hadn’t woken up that day with a sore head and a sense of grievance because the four hours of sleep she’d snatched between Alex’s nightmare and Ellie’s bed-wetting incident had been marred by James stealing the duvet and then not-quite-snoring every few seconds . . . If she hadn’t looked out the window to see yet another iron-gray sky brooding over trees bent double by the wind . . . If she hadn’t felt a pimple forming like a unicorn’s horn between her eyebrows . . . If Ellie hadn’t insisted on wearing her sparkly cowboy boots to nursery school . . . If Alex hadn’t found a rusty compass somewhere and started gouging out train tracks on the table for his Thomas the Tank Engine . . .
    The ifs were endless. The long and the short of it was, everything had conspired that morning to propel Lizzie into a heaving great huff.
    But the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was probably the sight of her mother-in-law, dressed in some sort of oilskin overcoat, traipsing through Lizzie’s own private