Free Delusion Road by Don Aker Page A

the space nearest the entrance to the house. Willa sighed, hoping her mother’s mood had improved since that morning. Despite the size of their house—nearly six thousand square feet spread over two and a half storeys—Willa had easily heard her parents arguing again before she’d gone down to breakfast.
    Willa passed through the mudroom into an enormous kitchen containing sleek modern cabinetry designed and installed by Ferrari, the same company that produced precision-built cars. One of the first of its kind in the province, the kitchen hadbeen featured in
Atlantic Home and Garden
the previous spring. Dropping her books on the large quartz-surfaced island, she opened the commercial-size refrigerator beside the equally large upright freezer and reached for a bottle of orange juice. For all the grocery shopping they did—which wasn’t much, since the staples in their house seemed to be juice, yogourt, and cottage cheese—a small bar fridge would have met their needs. But really, how would a bar fridge have looked in a Ferrari kitchen featured in
Atlantic Home and Garden
?
    “You’re home.”
    Willa turned to see her mother in the doorway, an empty crystal tumbler in her hand. During the past few weeks, Lenore Jaffrey had taken to delivering cryptic second-person proclamations—
You’re home, You’re early, You’re late
—in lieu of actual greetings whenever her daughter appeared, as if Willa needed play-by-play commentary to narrate her own movements.
    “Mm,” said Willa, twisting the bottle’s cap.
    “How was your first day?”
    “Same as every other,” Willa replied, taking a couple of swallows. Her answer, of course, wasn’t entirely true, but she knew her mother wasn’t entirely interested. The empty glass told her the reason she’d come to the kitchen.
    As if to confirm that deduction, Lenore moved to the refrigerator and placed her tumbler in the ice dispenser, which dropped three perfect half-moons into her glass, and then opened a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Grey Goose. As her mother poured herself a generous amount of the expensive vodka, Willa couldn’t help seeing the changes in her looks. A stranger would no doubt see only a striking, slender woman who still lookedyouthful despite having celebrated her forty-third birthday in January. Her shoulder-length blond hair was thick and shiny, and between the trips she made to a salon in Halifax, only a few roots ever showed traces of grey. And to anyone else, Lenore’s oval face probably still looked as fresh as ever, her smooth features seeming to mirror those of her daughter. But it was the way she now achieved this smoothness that Willa had noticed. Her mother had begun to apply more makeup than usual, to conceal the lines around her mouth and her eyes. Not that it was unusual for the face of a woman her age to begin showing the passage of time, but Willa didn’t think the lines were entirely due to aging. She’d first noticed them during the summer when tension between her parents had developed. And those lines hadn’t been helped by the glass that, lately, never seemed far from her mother’s hand.
    Lenore raised the crystal tumbler and took a long swallow of the vodka, then turned to her daughter. “Did you have the new teacher today?”
    Willa nodded.
    “What’s he like?” asked her mother, bringing the tumbler to her lips again.
    “I like him. Actually seems to enjoy his job.” But she didn’t want to think about school anymore. “How’d you spend
your
day?” she asked, although she was pretty sure she knew.
    “With Rachel on the links.” Lenore and Celia’s mother had been friends for years, and the two had taken up golf after Rachel’s divorce.
    “How’d you do?”
    “Kyle says my backswing is improving,” her mother replied,the edges of her words softer than usual. She drained the rest of the vodka.
    “Who’s Kyle?”
    Her mother blinked at her, which made Willa wonder if she was having trouble focusing.