The River House Read Online Free Page B

me, unsure suddenly. She’s never had Amber’s certainty.
    “Is it OK? D’you like it, Mum?”
    I realize I’ve just been standing here, staring.
    “Molly, I love it. It’s wonderful.” Instinctively, I put my arm around her, then remember she will hate me doing this in public.
     But she tolerates it for a second or two before she slides away.
    “Mr. Bates asked if my grandparents were coming,” she says. “He kind of blushed when I said that grandad was dead. It was,
     like, really embarrassing. … Mum, make sure Dad sees it.” She moves off with Amber toward a gang of her friends.
    I go to find Greg.
    “You have to come and see Molly’s work,” I tell him.
    He says good-bye to the earnest philologist. I take him to see the canvas.
    He has an appraising look, one eyebrow raised, the look he has when he’s reading a student’s essay.
    “Goodness,” he says. “It’s quite in-your-face, isn’t it?”
    “Don’t you like it, though?”
    But I see that he doesn’t, that he wouldn’t.
    “It’s rather raw,” he says.
    “Yes. But isn’t that good? All that emotion? I love it.”
    “Her plant drawings are great,” he says. “But it takes a bit of maturity to draw people. Maybe she should stick to plants
     for now.”
    “For God’s sake, don’t say that to her,” I tell him.
    I feel a pulse of anger: Why can’t he just be generous?
    I go to find the girls, to say it’s time to leave. Amber has moved away from her friends, from Jamila and Katrine, and is
     talking to someone Molly knows, a boy about three years older; she’s standing close to him, her head on one side, and flicking
     back her hair. She mutters to me that she’ll make her own way home.
    “What about your Graphics?”
    “Mum, for God’s sake.”
    It’s dark on the street now. There’s an edge to the air, a smell of autumn, a hint of frost and bonfires. We stand by Greg’s
     car in a pool of apricot lamplight.
    “Did you like it, Dad?” says Molly.
    I’m worried about what he’ll say.
    “Sure, it was great,” he tells her.
    I remember her when she was little, thrusting some drawing she’d done at me: “But d’you
really, really
like it, Mum? Say it as though you mean it. …”
    Now, she doesn’t say anything.
    “Mum, I’m coming with you,” she tells me.
    We go to our separate cars. I notice how scruffy my Ford Escort looks beside all the other cars, and that moss is growing
     in the rubber around the passenger window. When I turn the ignition, there’s a grinding sound from under the car, and it’s
     hard to get into gear.
    I glance at Molly. The lamplight leaches all the color from her face, so you can’t see most of her makeup; her face looks
     rounder, more open, as though she is a child again. A bit of glittery eye shadow has smudged under her eye.
    “He didn’t look at it, Mum,” she says.
    “He did, sweetheart.”
    She chews at a strand of her hair.
    “Not properly,” she says. “He didn’t look through my sketchbooks or anything. I was watching. Well, why would he want to look
     at it anyway? It’s a load of crap.”
    “That’s nonsense, Molly.”
    “No, it’s true,” she says. “I don’t know why I got such a good mark. It must have been a mistake.”
    There’s a tug at my heart.
    “Don’t say that.” I want to stop the car and reach out and hold her, but I know she’d hate it. “Sweetheart, you’ve got to
     have faith in yourself. Everyone loves what you’ve done.”
    But the shine has gone from the day for her, and I know she isn’t listening.
    I wake in the night with a start, from some indeterminate dream, feeling the thickness of the dark against me. Greg is snoring
     quietly beside me; I can sense the sleep-warmth coming off his body. I press the button that illuminates the face of my alarm
     clock. 4:15. Shit. This happens over and over, this sudden waking at three or four, and the thoughts are always the same.
     Thoughts of dying, of endings, when death seems so real