Free Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon Page B

pockets, the slight stoop he always affected when he was feeling uneasy. He looked tired. She called Suzanne to let him in and take him up to the living room, then she slipped out the front door. She didn't even want to say hello.
    * * *
    To Helen, it felt like she had gotten her old life back for a couple of hours. She lay on the sofa reading a book, reveling in the silence. She knew she should be trying to clear more space to make room for Matthew's things, but she couldn't be bothered to move. She wondered idly how he was getting on, then dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come.
    At about five o'clock, she heard his car pulling up outside and started to drag herself toward the front door. She stopped as she heard Matthew's voice talking to…who? She pulled back the curtain a fraction and dropped it back again when she saw Matthew, flanked by two small pre-teenage girls, each carrying a box. Fuck! He'd brought Claudia and what's-her-name. Helen rushed to the mirror and started tweaking at her frizzy Saturday afternoon hair and wiping away at yesterday's smudged mascara which was encrusted underneath her eyes.
    How could he do this to me? she thought. Without so much as a phone call. Had he no idea that adolescent girls valued appearances above all else? She had already planned what she would wear on their first meeting—FCUK jeans, high brown boots from Aldo, and the baby-blue Paul Frank hoodie which, she knew, was way too young for her, but which she was hoping would make her look "cool." Labels that adolescent girls had heard of and would admire. She had decided to go for the big sister approach—admittedly a scarily old big sister (it was all a bit Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? ) but anyway. Now the only clean item of clothing to hand was an age-appropriate fitted light-gray sweater which she wore to work, but it would have to do. She was pulling the clean top on over her head when she heard his key turning in the front door. Affecting an air of what she thought looked like sophisticated nonchalance, she managed to arrive in the hall seemingly unruffled as he led the girls in.
    Matthew was in overcompensatingly jolly father mode.
    "Look who I've brought to meet you," he said.
    "What a lovely surprise," said Helen, almost convincingly.
    "They've been dying to see you for themselves, haven't you girls?" From the looks on his daughters' faces, any idiot could tell that this was a lie.
    "This is Suzanne." He indicated the taller, slightly less sullen-looking of the two.
    "And this is Claudia."
    Claudia looked Helen up and down as though she were sizing up a rival.
    Helen smiled in what she believed was a youthful, pally manner. "It's so great to meet you. Your dad talks about you both all the time, so I feel like I, kind of, know you already. And I'm really hoping we can be, like, friends."
    The girls looked at her blankly.
    "Do you know you've got your sweater on inside out?" Claudia said, and then immediately turned back to her father. "Can we go home now?"
    "No, Claudia. Don't be rude, say hello to Helen."
    Suzanne muttered an almost inaudible hello while Claudia fixed Helen with a blank stare.
    "It'll take them a bit of time to get used to you," said Matthew apologetically. "Come into the living room, girls, and you can chat to Helen while I get you a drink."
    "This is a dump," Helen thought she heard Claudia say as he ushered them on through.
    * * *
    When Sophie first brought Suzanne home from the hospital, Matthew had told her that he saw it as his second chance to prove himself as a father. His relationship with his son, then twenty-six, had always been fairly formal—Matthew had not taken easily to parenthood first time around and had always been slightly afraid of the judgmental gaze of his eldest child—but it had deteriorated to almost nonexistent following Matthew's abandonment of Leo's mother. Bizarrely, Leo had always gotten on well with Sophie, whom he saw—quite rightly, it now seemed—as