I used the school directory to find Rita’s number and I texted a message to her: Max can’t stop talking about Evan. Would he like to come over for a play date on Friday night after school?
She texted back quickly. Sure. I’ll pick him up after five thirty. What’s your address? She was quick, efficient, no-nonsense. I liked her. And I liked those handbags she made. I’d checked them out in a boutique on Brunswick Street. They had whimsical silhouettes on them of birds on a wire or dandelions blowing in the wind. I opened up the zips and checked the pockets and was impressed with the craftsmanship.
‘They’re designed by a local lady,’ the sales assistant said.
‘Are they?’ I asked, pretending to be surprised. ‘Where are they made?’
‘I think she gets them manufactured in Indonesia.’
‘They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?’ I put one over my shoulder and pretended to check myself out in the mirror. ‘What’s she like? The designer?’ I asked.
‘I’ve only met her twice. She set up a window display a couple of weeks ago. She must have changed it three or four times. She was very particular. But she’s lovely. There’s a separate compartment to keep your phone in. And you can adjust the straps to wear it long or short.’
I took Rita’s bag off my shoulder and gave it back to the sales attendant, saying thanks very much and I’d think about it.
***
Luke picked Max and Evan up from school on the Friday night. I’d made the boys white chocolate and raspberry muffins, as I wanted to make a nice first impression on Evan.
‘Mum doesn’t let me eat sweet stuff,’ Evan said, sitting at the kitchen bench, swinging his legs on the stool. ‘She says that sugar makes us hyperactive.’
‘Oh,’ I said, taken by surprise. ‘So you don’t want to eat one?’
‘Do you have fruit instead? I usually have fruit after school. Or carrot sticks with avocado dip.’
So, she was a sugar Nazi then. No wonder she was so thin. From my experience, sugar Nazis also had other issues. These women seemed to spend a lot of their time in the kitchen, preparing all their food from scratch, ignoring other areas of their life. It was as though if they could control what went into their children’s mouths, they felt they would be able to control everything. I knew the type. They were multiplying in schools at the time, speaking self-righteously and converting others like it was some sort of religion. They spent a fortune at organic supermarkets and had seven different types of flours in the pantry. I suspected that being so extreme in the food department meant they probably couldn’t relax about a lot of other things either.
Still, Evan handled the situation well, and I couldn’t help but respect him. I was pleased that he went along with his mother’s wishes, when he could just as easily have eaten the muffin. She must have been doing something right after all to raise such a compliant son.
I made the boys a platter of fruit and carrot sticks, and put a bowl of mashed avocado on the side. Max still wanted his muffin, which I now felt a little ashamed about, but he ate the other stuff as well. Perhaps Evan and his mum could be a good influence on Max. We’d lapsed into giving Max ice-cream every night after dinner, as a treat to coax him through eating his main meal. Maybe we could all learn something from Rita.
After their snack, I sent them both outside to play in the backyard. They kicked a ball around and then practised shooting goals in the basketball hoop. I watched them both from the window, wondering whether they’d make good brothers. They didn’t seem to talk much to each other, but a ball is a great equaliser for boys. I’d been amazed by this ever since Max was a small boy, since the first time we’d taken him out the back to have a kick around. He was maybe two, and he could hardly connect his foot with the ball. But he ran around laughing, giggling, his arms everywhere, his feet turned inwards. He’d fallen right over a couple of times in his attempts to kick the ball. Luke and I had both been there, adoring him, enjoying that special family time. We’d given each other knowing looks, sharing a love for Max that no one else on this Earth could have felt.
I grabbed a bottle of wine from the pantry. I never drank before dinner, but I had this great need for a glass of red, to take the edge off this sense of heightened emotion. I stood at the window, knowing that time was getting on, that I should have been preparing dinner. But I kept sipping on my glass of red, watching the two boys out the window. I couldn’t remember the last time the three of us had done something together and I had felt completely present in the moment. Nowadays I was always distracted, wondering when I’d receive the next message from Jarvis, planning my escape, feeling tired after a poor night’s sleep.
I took out my phone and, with the glass in one hand and my phone in the other, I checked my messages. There was nothing new there from Jarvis, but I started reading over old messages, as I liked to do all the time. I became lost in the moment, lost in his kind, passionate, lustful words. I must have had a lovesick expression on my face, because all of a sudden there was Luke in the kitchen, looking over my shoulder. I reacted poorly and snatched my phone out of sight and held it against my chest.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Why are you hiding your phone like that?’
‘Nothing, just looking at Twitter.’
‘Why are you drinking already?’
‘I don’t know, I felt like it. Can’t I just do what I feel like?’
‘Why aren’t you making dinner?’
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ I placed the glass of wine down and secretly used my thumb to turn my phone back onto the home screen, then placed it down on the bench. My heart was pounding, I was logged into my inbox, so all Luke had to do was click on my email app and he would have seen Jarvis’s colourful words. I hadn’t thought about being caught out before. Everything was there on my phone, every message Jarvis had sent me, every picture. All the evidence was right there. It was all so precious to me, I hadn’t been able to delete a thing.
We had a stand-off in the kitchen. Luke was looking at me suspiciously. The phone was right between us on the bench, like a secret diary left open and placed upside-down. Backing away, I tried to act normal, reaching into the fridge and pulling out some mince, and putting it on the bench. I opened up the pantry and grabbed an onion and picked some parsley off the plant by the window. And still Luke stood there, looking determined about something.
‘Evan’s a nice kid,’ I said, trying to sound like my usual self, putting the mince into a glass bowl. ‘His mum, Rita, is so nice. She designs handbags.’
‘You’ve told me that already.’
‘Have I?’ I truly couldn’t remember telling him. My conversations with Luke were always played out in such a detached manner. I really wanted him out of the kitchen. I didn’t want him standing there. And I wanted to delete everything off my phone, to destroy all the evidence. If it didn’t exist, then it didn’t exist. I had a horrible feeling of dread in my chest, like something awful was about to happen. I hadn’t been prepared for this to be the moment when everything would come crashing down.
But then Luke said, ‘I’m going to have a shower.’ And he slipped out of the kitchen. I waited. I took a sip of wine and calmed my galloping heart. I waited until I could hear the water running in the shower and I grabbed my phone and sat down on the floorboards in the kitchen, where the boys couldn’t see me, and started destroying every message that Jarvis had ever sent me or I had sent to him. Then I deleted everything from the trash box and checked in the ‘All’ mailbox, to make doubly sure that nothing remained of our secret life together. Then I went into my settings and applied a password to my home screen. I had been far too relaxed about all of this — and now had been one second away from being caught out. If Luke’s eyesight was any better, or if he hadn’t spoken when he did, he might have read some of the message. And it would have been over.
This horrible feeling in my chest made me question — again, like a broken record stuck on the same tune — what I was doing. I never, ever, wanted to face a moment of truth like that one. It was far too awful to even think about.
By the time Rita came to pick Evan up, the burgers were moulded into balls and were sitting on a plate on the kitchen bench. Luke was out on the deck, next to the lit barbecue, watching the boys play. As Rita had left Josh in the car, I could tell she wasn’t going to be expecting a cup of tea, so I tried to keep it quick. I walked her through the house, which I’d tidied up for her benefit that day. ‘Evan’s out the back, they’ve had a lovely time,’ I said.
‘Thanks so much, it’s so nice of you to have had him. We’ll have to have Max over sometime soon.’
I opened the back door and we stepped out onto the deck. ‘This is Rita,’ I said to Luke.
‘Hi,’ he said, his arms crossed, leaning back on the greyed deck railing he’d built himself.
Rita smiled at him, but she was in a rush. She called out: ‘Come on, Evan, let’s get going. It’s almost time for dinner.’
Then she turned to me. ‘Did he eat okay? I forgot to tell you that we don’t eat sugar.’
‘He was very good; he declined a muffin.’ I could see relief spread over her face, as though she had been stressing about it. ‘And don’t worry, we’re not a family that gives our kid Coke for breakfast.’ I leaned in to her, so that Luke couldn’t hear. ‘Actually, Luke is pretty health-conscious. He would prefer that Max didn’t eat any sugar. If he had it his way, sugar would be cut out completely. But I’m happy with everything in moderation.’ This wasn’t true. It was actually Luke who usually offered Max ice-cream after dinner, and he always had those four squares of chocolate with his coffee in the evenings, as though his life depended on it. But I was trying to make a sale here.
She looked over at Luke as though she had just discovered a kindred spirit or, more than that, a new species: a man who gave a shit about sugar.
‘And he just did the raw food detox,’ I said, taking it one step further.
‘Has he?’ By now she was almost breathless with awe.
‘He’s only started eating meat again this week,’ I said.
‘Evan!’ Rita yelled out again, in a rather forthright manner, breaking from under my spell. ‘We have to go! Josh is in the car.’
Evan passed the ball back to Max and walked over to where we were standing.
‘What do you have to say?’ Rita said.
‘Thank you,’ Evan muttered.
‘That’s a pleasure, sweetie,’ I said.
‘For what? And look at Luisa when you speak,’ Rita said, really wanting to push the point of politeness. It made me feel awkward for the poor kid.
‘Thank you for having me,’ Evan said, his hands on his hips, edging his eyes up to meet my stomach. I was a bit disappointed, to be honest. Rita had a bit of that authoritarian manner about her. I could never quite stand those parents that had to ram manners down their kids’ throats in a way that I actually found lacked any manners.
‘You’re welcome,’ I said. I walked them back through the house and found Evan’s school bag in the hallway, and bade them farewell.
Rita said one more time, ‘We’ll have to organise a play date at ours. Evan, say thank you again.’
I shut the door behind them and sat on a chair in the living room for a moment, wishing she hadn’t gone on so much about the manners thing. I’d forgiven her being a sugar Nazi, but the manners palaver was irritating. I wondered whether I should call off my courtship of her right then and there.
But then I thought about those handbags of hers, how creative she was, how I liked her sense of style. And I liked the way Evan read at school, so she obviously put an emphasis on their learning, and they read good books like Zac Power. I took a deep breath, settled my stomach, and thought that I’d give her one more go. Maybe we could all learn to love Rita.