Femme Fatale and other stories

sets breakfast in motion. She isn’t pretending to Annabelle that she spends the nights here. Her daughter knows that Gwen is staying at her grandfather’s house while he heals, but that she still wants to be here for meals, bedtime, and off-to-school. The charade, to use Karl’s word, is pretending that the household will return to normal after her father’s situation has been normalized.
    Charade
.
The mothers had played charades that night, first with their husbands, then alone after the men left. How innocent they had seemed in the candlelit living room, making the familiar, exaggerated gestures. Paging through a book, running a movie camera, flipping channels. She and Sean had watched them from the steps, feeling more akin to them than they did to the others by that point. They—well, she—honestly believed that they would get married, that they would one day be a couple among other couples, laughing and clowning. They—again, maybe just she—had been preternaturally attracted to adulthood, eager for it, in a way that Tim, Mickey, and Go-Go weren’t. They were the normal ones, trying to grow up, be typical teenagers.
    “I’m not sure what you mean,” she says, trying to be careful with Karl’s feelings but also her words. She doesn’t want to be drawn into making promises she can’t keep. But his eyes are sad and hurt. He clearly wants to ask other, softer, more vulnerable questions.
Why did she leave? Doesn’t she love him? Doesn’t she want to be with him?
But these are not the kind of questions that Karl will ask out loud because Karl does not know the answers and Karl never admits he doesn’t have answers. “That’s a surgeon’s personality,” her father, Karl’s onetime professor, told Gwen early in their courtship. “He’s used to being in charge, having authority.” Like most people in love, she ignored any observation that didn’t serve her vision of her romance.
    “Aren’t you running late? Go save lives,” she says now, not meaning to be cruel, only factual. But Karl takes offense.
    “It’s not—” he begins, then stops because Annabelle has entered the kitchen, frowning at the morning, slow and cranky, quite unlike both of them. Gwen is a morning person, while Karl, like many hyperachievers, permits himself no more than four or five hours of sleep.
    Annabelle, by contrast, is a night owl who fights bedtime and treats morning as a personal offense. Another reason for Gwen to be here for bedtime every night. Karl would never have the patience to cajole Annabelle through her nighttime routine. There are circles under Annabelle’s eyes, bigger and darker than usual. Gwen wonders if Karl knows that Annabelle sometimes creeps down to the kitchen with the earbuds from her little MP3 player and then watches the television on the counter, standing all the while. Once Gwen found her with her chin resting on the counter, asleep on her feet, while an infomercial touted the miracle of mineral makeup. She wonders at the secrets of her daughter’s DNA. Were her parents night owls? How had they coped? Given the remote orphanage where Annabelle spent the first eleven months of her life, her parents were almost certainly farmers. Did they frown at sunrise, did they stay up late, despite knowing the price they would pay come morning? Did they abandon their daughter to strike out for the city, find a life that suited them better?
    “Good morning, sweet pea.”
    “Peas are not sweet,” she says. Then: “Can I have pancakes?”
    “We’re a little pressed for time. But we can have them this weekend. I thought you could come over to Poppa’s, have a sleepover?”
    “You should check with me—” Karl begins, but Annabelle is already lighting up. “Can I have the princess room?”
    “Of course,” Gwen says. The princess room is nothing more than Gwen’s childhood room, virtually untouched since she left for college. If her mother had lived—but her mother did not live.
    “You didn’t ask me,” Karl says in a low voice after she sends Annabelle back upstairs to put on real pants. She was trying to coast by with her pajama bottoms. Plaid, they would have fooled her father. This is another reason why Gwen has to come by every morning; Annabelle gets too much by Karl. Their daughter is the one person impervious to his surgical authority and expectations.
    But for all the reasons Gwen can list for being here every morning and evening, none really matters. She’s here because