Free Angels by Marian Keyes Page A

think I've a touch of the flu.”
    “Your mum says you've split up with Garv.”
    “Oh…yeah.”
    “And that you've lost your job.”
    “Yes,” I sighed. “I have.”
    “But…” She sounded both astonished and helpless. “I've been E-mailing you at work. Whoever has taken over from you will have gotten the finer details of Brett and his penis enlargement.”
    I managed to say, “Sorry. I haven't really been in touch with anyone.”

    ANGELS / 59
    A silence while static hopped and blew on the line. I knew she was dying to ask questions, but she satisfied herself with “Are you sure you're okay?”
    “I'm fine.”
    More static. “Look,” she said slowly, “if you're not working and…stuff, why don't you just hop on a plane and come out here for a while?”
    “What's out there?”
    “Sunshine,” she cajoled. “Fat-free Pringles, me .”
    It was a measure of how far gone I was that I suspected she didn't mean it. That she was only saying it because she felt she had to, that it was what a good friend should say. But all the same, something sparked in my deadness.
    Los Angeles. City of Angels.
    I wanted to go.

CHAPTER SIX
    WE WERE SPENDING an alarming amount of time flying over the suburbs of Los Angeles. They just kept unscrolling beneath me, grid after grid of dusty, single-level houses, the neat squares occasionally interrupted by a huge concrete freeway snaking violently through them. From far away in the distance came the diamond glint of the ocean.
    It was barely a week since the phone call from Emily and I could hardly believe I was here. Almost here—were we ever going to land?
    There had been strong opposition to my making the journey.
    Especially from my mother.
    “Los Angeles? Why Los Angeles?” she had demanded. “Didn't Rachel say you could stay with her in New York? And didn't Claire say you could go to London and live with her for as long as you wanted? And what if there's an earthquake in that Los Angeles place?” She turned to Dad. “Say something!”
    “I've got two tickets for the hurling semifinal,” Dad said sadly.
    “Now who'll go with me?”
    Then Mum remembered something and addressed Dad. “Isn't Los Angeles the place where you hurt your neck?”
    About twenty years ago, Dad had gone with a load of other accountants on some junket to Los Angeles, and had come back with a sore neck from the log flume at Disneyland.

    ANGELS / 61
    “It was my own fault,” he insisted. “There were signs saying I shouldn't stand up. And it wasn't just me, the whole seven of us got our necks dislocated.”
    “Oh mother of God!” Mum interrupted, clapping a hand over her mouth. “She's taken off her wedding ring.”
    I'd been kind of experimenting, to see what it felt like. The missing rings (the engagement ring went too) left a very obvious indent and a circle of white skin like uncooked dough. I don't think in the nine years I'd been married I'd ever taken them off. Being without them felt strange and bad. But so did wearing them. At least this way was more honest.
    Next to register his displeasure at my departure was Garv. I phoned to tell him I was off for a month or so and he'd come hotfooting it to the house. Mum ushered him into the sitting room.
    “Now!” she declared triumphantly, her entire demeanor saying,
    “Time for this nonsense to stop, young lady.”
    Garv said hello and we both looked at each other for far too long. Maybe that's what you do when you split up with someone: try to remember what once welded you together. He'd gone slightly raggedy and unkempt. Even though he was in his work clothes, he was wearing his off-duty hair, and his expression was grim—unless it was always grim? Maybe I was reading more into this than I should.
    Indeed, he didn't look as if he was fading away from sorrow; he was still, to use a phrase of my mother's (except she never said it about Garv), “a fine figure of a man.”
    Hazily, I suspected that these weren't the right thoughts to be