The Love Market Read Online Free PDF

watching our every move, while the Gypsy Kings sing Bamboleo.
    I kept her off school today. Not that I make a habit of encouraging my daughter to play hooky. But sometimes they call it retail therapy for a reason. And I know from experience that satisfying Aimee’s addiction to shoes once in a while has healing powers that all the mothering in the world can’t compete with. ‘It’s about your dad and me, isn’t it?’ I ask the top of her head as she stares for a disproportionately long time at the four lunch specials on the menu. She could be me, twenty-four years ago. Although my mother never took me out for my favourite food and asked me how I was doing.
    She shakes her head. I look at her shiny mane of hair; the porcelain skin like my mother’s, her lowered gaze and the heavy Garbo-esque sweep of her eyelids. My daughter, who turns herself out like a rebellious street urchin, in her new habit of wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt over the top of a long-sleeved one, denim skirts, and colourful chequered tights—sometimes with holes deliberately poked in them. ‘If you want to talk about it, we can.’ The waiter swoops, brandishing a note pad. We both order the lasagne.
    And then she says the words that cut me open. ‘Why don’t you love him any more?’
    I close my eyes, and it’s a moment or two before I can look at her again. ‘I do love him, Aimee. Probably as much as you do. But the love between a husband and a wife is different. It’s not quite as unconditional as the love your dad and I have for you.’ In the way she looks at me now, I can tell that explanations are just fancy word games to her. She’s asserting that one selfish right we both know she has: to have us be a family. And I know that because I’ve been there.
    ‘Aimee, I have never stopped loving your dad. I’m just trying to learn how to live without him and it’s very strange place to be. I may have to figure it out as we go along. Other than loving you very much, that might be the best I can offer you right now. It might be all I have.’
    Nothing. I can’t read her. I sometimes want to beg her to cry, scream, anything. Not this. This flatness. She used to be such an expressive child. Then Mike left, she fell, and a part of her has stayed fallen. ‘We tried, Aimee, that’s what I’m trying to say. We tried to make our marriage work. But sometimes you realise it shouldn’t require all that effort.’
    The Gypsy Kings are singing Volare now, and the waiter sets down garlic bread that we didn’t ask for, angling for a flirtatious glance. Aimee stares at the top of the table. I can almost see her young little mind grappling its way around adult truths.
    But am I lying to both of us? Now that my daughter is the very thing I hated being—a fixture moved back and forth between two parents; no longer part of a mathematical set determined precisely by what’s in it—did we try hard enough?
    ‘ We didn’t really split up,’ Mike said, shortly after we split up the first time. ‘We were just taking a little break from each other.’ He rubbed the tear off my cheek with his thumb. ‘I’ll never part with you,’ he said, as though I was his favourite record from his prized seventies collection. I can still feel the way his thumb stretched the skin under my eyes.
    I never had to ask myself if Mike only came back for Aimee. In Mike’s mind I knew he’d never really left.
    ‘I hate this dumb song,’ Aimee says. The waiters are leaning up against the nearby wall, watching us, in competition for our attention. ‘Who are they?’ she asks. ‘Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest?’
    I have a small chuckle at her childish cruelty. Looking at her, it’s like living my life over again, analysing myself. ‘We could go shopping after this for something for you to wear to Rachel’s party.’
    She lifts a sheet of bubbling mozzarella with her fork, her long T-shirt sleeve coming to knuckle-level. ‘I’ll get third degree mouth ulcers if I eat