Free My Husband's Wife by Jane Corry Page A

hurt others too. It will not happen again.’
    Kevin wasn’t there. So she was safe to bring Charlie into school! A warm feeling of thanks wrapped Carla up like a woolly cloud blanket.
Grazie! Grazie!
She would be like all the others.
    Well, not quite. Carla eyed her reflection in the bus driver’s mirror as she and Mamma got on. She would always be different because of her olive skin, her black
hair, and her eyebrows, which were thicker than anyone else’s.
Hairy Carla Cavoletti!
    â€˜Carla,’ said Mamma sternly, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Do not jump up and down like that. It will not make the bus start any faster.’
    But she was looking for Lily. Not long after her poorly eye, Mamma’s boss had told her she had to work on a Sunday. ‘What am I to do?’ Mamma had said, her eyes round with anguish. ‘I have no one to leave you with,
cara mia
.’
    Then her gaze had fallen on the photograph of the hunched woman in a shawl with a face that looked like lots of little crinkly waves made out of stone. ‘If only your nonna were here to help.’
    Carla had been ready with her idea. ‘The lady who took me to hospital, remember, from number 3. She said she would help any time.’
    As she spoke, she remembered Charlie. Supposing Lily with the golden hair told Mamma that Charlie the caterpillar was not a present after all?
    Too late. Mamma had already written a note and slid it under Lily’s door. All Saturday night, Carla tossed and turned and worried in her little narrow bed with the simple cross above, made of wood from the Holy Land. Poor Charlie was scared too.
I do not want to leave you
, he said.
    In the morning, Carla woke to find Mamma’s eyes sparkling over her. ‘The nice lady and her husband are going to take you for the day. You must be good. Yes!’
    Charlie’s heart was beating as they walked down the corridor. Hers too.
    Please don’t let them be found out.
    â€˜I will be back as soon as I can,’ Mamma was saying to Lily. ‘You are so kind. I must thank you too for the present you bought her.’
    There was a silence. So loud that everyone had to hear it. Slowly Carla looked up and met Lily’s eyes. She was wearing trousers that made her hips look very wide, and she did not have lipstick on. Instinctively, Carla knew this was not the kind of woman who would lie.
    â€˜Present?’ Lily said slowly.
    â€˜The caterpillar pencil case.’ Carla’s voice trembled as she fixed her eyes on Lily’s while crossing her fingers behind her back. ‘You bought it for me after the hospital to make me feel better. Remember?’
    Another long silence. Carla’s fingers fell over themselves in her attempt to squeeze them even tighter. Then Lily nodded. ‘Of course. Now, why don’t you come in. I thought we might make a cake together. Do you like baking?’
    Mamma’s voice sang out in relief. Carla’s too. ‘She loves cooking!’ ‘I do. I do!’
    No school now, Carla told herself as she skipped inside. Instead it was a wonderful day! She and Lily got flour all over the floor when they weighed the cake ingredients. But her new friend did not get cross like Mamma. Nor did she have to have ‘a little rest’ with her husband, a tall man called Ed who sat in the corner of the room doing something on a pad of paper. At first she was scared of him because he looked like a film star in one of the magazines that Larry brought Mamma. His hair reminded her a bit of Robert Redford, one of Mamma’s heroes.
    She was also a little alarmed because Ed asked Lily why
she’d moved his paints ‘again’ in a fed-up voice, just like Larry’s when he came over and found that she was still up.
    But then Ed asked if he could draw her, and his face seemed to change. He looked much happier.
    â€˜You have such wonderful hair,’ he said as his eyes darted from the paper to