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and denied her nothing—which was quite funny really, Ana thought, given the fact that she’d been a complete bitch to him while he’d been alive.
    Gay had never really gotten over the departure of her glamorous, talented, and gruffly handsome first husband and had always seen Bill very much as a consolation prize. But as wonderful and unusual as Bill might have been, he was still just a man, and had loved his beautiful Gay to the point of spoiling her, shell-shocked until the end that he’d ever managed to persuade a woman like her to marry a “wrinkly old beanpole” like him.
    Bill wasn’t alone in his adoration of his wife. Everyone in Torrington loved Gay Wills. Ruddy-cheeked gentlemen who remembered Gay as a young girl, the town beauty who looked like Elizabeth Taylor, with her hand-span waist, gleaming black hair, and violet eyes. Before she’d become agoraphobic she’d been a familiar sight in Great Torrington, spinning around the town on her old black bike, a basket full of flowers draped artfully across the handlebars, embroidered skirt flapping about in the breeze, rising tantalizingly to mid-thigh every now and then. She was a woman who knew exactly the effect she had on men and played it to the max—she was happy only if there was at least one person miserably in love with her. She was charm personified. A bit scatty—yes. A bit odd sometimes—

    undeniable. But such a beautiful, charming, engaging woman.
    Really. An angel. A delight. To everyone.
    Except her children.
    “Really, Anabella,” she would often sigh in exasperation,
    “how a girl as unattractive as you could possibly have come from my body, I have no idea. That’s the risk one takes when one mixes one’s genes with a man’s, I suppose. You never know what’s going to emerge.”
    Gay didn’t say things like this intentionally to upset Ana—
    she genuinely didn’t see that there was anything wrong with what she was saying. As far as she was concerned, it was just a statement of fact. Gay was far too wrapped up in the Wonderful World of Gay Wills to realize the implications or consequences of her comments. She had much more important things to worry about than her daughter’s feelings—things like picking leaves off the lawn in their backyard by hand, one by one, or embroidering cushions with Turner landscapes, or obsessively counting every last calorie she consumed in a day to ensure that her intake never exceeded 1,500.
    As well as her basic agoraphobia, which had set in shortly after Gregor’s funeral in 1988, Gay seemed to develop a new neurosis every day and now refused to answer the phone, answer the doorbell unless she was expecting a visit, eat red meat, drink tap water, take off her shoes except to go to bed, touch anyone she didn’t know, allow any animals in the house, use the Hoover, the dishwasher, the microwave, or the drier (though she did still use the washing machine), or comb her hair with anything other than the old horsehair comb her hair with anything other than the old horsehair brush that used to belong to her grandmother and smelled disgusting. She also had some strange little rituals, like having to walk across the living room with the same amount of footsteps each time, having to water the houseplants in exactly the same order every day and wearing the same seven cardigans in weekly rotation; and the slightest interruption to any of these practices could send her over the edge into a momentary hysteria.
    Ana had moved back home last year, shortly after Bill’s funeral, and she’d soon become accustomed to these “quirks” in her mother’s behavior, mainly because they really didn’t impinge on her very much. She wasn’t expected to do anything more than let Gay get on with it and not disturb her more than necessary. All Gay asked from Anna was that she drive into Bideford once a week to do the shopping, that she pick up odds and ends from town occasionally, and that she answer the telephone when