A Small Indiscretion Read Online Free PDF Page A

overnight in Gold Hill. I had been crying earlier, and before he arrived, I looked at myself in the mirror—really looked—for the first time in months. I smoothed the wrinkle between my eyes. I put drops in to clear away the red. I put on lipstick and mascara. I ran a brush through my hair, wishing I’d taken the time to wash it. I studied my profile, then my back side, in a hand mirror—the curves I’d always tried to camouflage, which your father had claimed to love, and the hair he’d claimed to love as well. Welsh hair, from my mother’s side, straight and long and still a dark brown, except underneath, where the gray threatened. The face was my mother’s, too—thick black arched eyebrows, the eyes beneath the same as yours, a fiercer, lighter green than people expected to find in our olive-skinned faces. A narrow nose flanked by what your father had once called “discriminating” cheekbones. Fullish lips and straight front teeth. Crooked bottom teeth I’d long ago learned to hide when I smiled.
    I forced my face into a smile now, looking to see if whatever your father had first fallen for was still there, but my relationship to my overall appearance was as erratic as ever. I looked once, and glimpsed the old prettiness, but when I looked again, from another angle, it seemed to have been a trick of the light, and I could find only a series of small but certain flaws—in the skin, the shape, the hair—that were growing in strength and number as time marched on. I fell back into the tired script I’d been running all my life: If, when I looked, I was not perfect, how could I be beautiful? And if I was not beautiful, how could I be loved? I was not the only woman who ran that script. A worldwide industry promoted and supported its story. But since last summer, it had reached deeper for me. It had moved from the skin and the shape and the hair straight to the heart.
    Polly appeared in the doorway as I was staring at my face.
    “What are you looking for?” she said.
    I turned away from the mirror. How ridiculous to indulge in vanity with the question of your well-being hanging in the balance.
    “Nothing,” I said to Polly. “Nothing at all.”
    J ONATHAN DID NOT ring the bell or knock. He opened the door with his key and came in. Polly pushed past me down the stairs. Clara emerged from her room and followed. I watched as your father embraced them.
    “Hey,” I said.
    “Hey.”
    The girls went to collect their things, and your father stood for a minute with his hands in his pockets, surveying the room as I came down the stairs. He walked into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water.
    “What’s that whirring noise?” he said.
    “It’s the refrigerator.”
    “Why is it making that sound?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How long has it been doing that?”
    “I don’t know. Awhile.”
    His tone was vaguely accusing, vaguely annoyed, which I took as a good sign—he was still territorial about this house. He dragged a chair over and lifted a panel at the top of the refrigerator and peered inside.
    “Do you have any tools?”
    “I guess I have whatever you didn’t take.”
    He found an old toolbox in the garage and stood on the chair again and lifted off the panel. He stuck one tool in, then another.
    “There,” he said, putting the panel back and returning the tools to the toolbox. He was so appealing, standing there, so useful and solid and familiar, I wanted to fall into him and demand to be forgiven. But Polly and Clara came into the kitchen with their backpacks, and Polly wrapped her arms around your father’s legs and he laid his hands on her head. I could tell he was taking sustenance from Polly’s embrace just as I so often have, especially since your accident. Even before it, in August, when I dragged myself downstairs the morning after my return from London, and Polly looked at my face and opened her arms and squeezed me while I cried. Which is not to say that Polly is always kind. Or