Free The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall Page B

whole bag into her mouth and puffed out her cheeks like a squirrel. The light changed and he pressed on, following the familiar yellow lines that curved through downtown and then around the lake.
    He pulled into the Coffee Hut and looked at his phone, surprised to see that his hands were still shaking. Four texts from Jared. I want to know you’re ok. Will u just text me back a simple ok? I know it’s hard. He texted back an okay. He read the texts over and felt a bit calmer. Jared really did ground him. He followed it with an I Love You . He perused the screen of emoticon options and decided on a simple pink heart.
    He’d been feeling guilty lately for leaving Jared hanging, and for being a bad boyfriend, even before this happened. He’d been taking him for granted. No more. He was lucky to have found Jared, and he shouldn’t forget that.

FIVE
    JOAN STOOD IN the ensuite shower stall for several minutes, watching patchy scenes from a nightmare trapped in a looped refrain in her mind. Water on the edge of painfully hot pulsated between her shoulder blades. She opened her eyes to thwart the dream memories, staring instead at the stone bench along the perimeter that had seemed ostentatious when the designer had suggested it. The master-bathroom renovation had been a fiftieth-birthday gift from her husband. The room had originally been designed to suit George’s mother in the 1970s, complete with hideous floral wallpaper, sink the colour of Yardley rose soap.
    The claw-footed tub was the only thing that remained of his parents’ era in the house, and Joan rarely used it. Relaxing in a bath for too long made her feel she was waiting for a late train and couldn’t quite settle.
    The new shower stall could comfortably fit five people, had three types of shower heads, a sauna function, and all sorts of bells and whistles. She made the water even hotter, aiming it at her neck, and hung her head like a broken tree limb. Images of a panther jumping into the lake to eat her children played over and over in her head. In her dream they were twin toddlers despite their age difference in real life. She could only stand on the beach, helpless. Such an obvious metaphor, for god’s sake. A single sob, and then nothing. Empty. Her neck raw. A half-hearted shampoo. Squeezing the conditioner bottle hard but coming up empty, chucking it to the ground and watching it roll. This shower is too large , she thought. Who would need such a thing? It was a sign that her values had been distorted somewhere along the way.
    GEORGE LOVED TO make breakfast. But when Joan got out of the shower this morning, she wouldn’t smell coffee brewing downstairs, or hear the spoon clank against the side of a pot of steel-cut oats. George often made fresh bread in the bread-making machine the night before, got up early to go for a walk, and by the time Joan roused from sleep he would be toasting almonds for their hot cereal, or chopping fresh mint into bowls of mixed fresh berries.
    What would she do without him? What if this wasn’t temporary?
    Getting out of the shower, she felt a surge of betrayal so forceful that she had no time to towel off before leaning over the toilet to throw up. She flushed, knelt, and gripped her fingers to the edges of the seat. For the first time she missed the softness of the ugly dusty-rose toilet seat cover from the pre-reno years.
    Eventually, when she couldn’t feel anything in the lower half of her legs, she stood and wrapped herself in the white plush robe hanging from the back of the door. She knotted a towel around her head and dotted serum under each eye. Her mind felt sticky, like it was stuck on one note in a melody, and she remembered the pill Andrew had given her with a glass of water before bed.
    Coming down the stairs, she smelled coffee and was momentarily hopeful it had all been a dream, but of course that only happens on TV . In the kitchen, faced with its stale air from the unwanted parade of bodies the night