Free Goodbye To All That by Judith Arnold Page B

could go during the day while he’s at work.”
    “That’s not the point,” Jill argued. “The point is, she’s tired of the fact that Dad never says, ‘Okay, if you want to see that new French film, we’ll go see it.’”
    “Why should he, if he doesn’t like subtitles?”
    “They could see a dubbed version,” Melissa suggested.
    “I don’t like dubbing,” Jill’s mother announced. “The actors’ lips never match the sounds coming out of their mouths.” She sighed. “We didn’t get together with you kids so you could tell us how to not do what we’re planning to do. We’ve already decided. I’m moving out. Your father is staying in the house. We’re keeping the same cell phone service for now, so you can reach me. I’ll let you know once I’ve got a regular phone.”
    “Where is this apartment?” Doug asked.
    “Ten minutes from the house. Fifteen if it’s snowing.”
    “Overlooking a highway,” Jill’s father muttered. “Like a slum.”
    “It’s nothing like a slum,” Jill’s mother protested. “It’s very nice. Clean, secure, ample parking. I’m taking a few pieces of furniture from the house, and I ordered some things at Ikea. It’s a small apartment. I don’t need much.”
    “What about the piano?” Jill asked, swallowing the tremor in her voice. Her mother was the only pianist in the family. She’d tried to teach all three children how to play. Each of them, starting at age six, had spent two years working through piano books with names like “I Can Play” and “Beginner’s Song Book” without showing the merest glimmer of talent. Jill’s mother always said they’d inherited her lack of a mere glimmer, that she was at best a mediocre player and that was why she’d majored in music history rather than performance. But she sounded good to Jill. She played not for glory but for her own sweet pleasure.
    If she moved the piano to her new apartment, that would seem final, some sort of statement.
    “I don’t have room for it in the apartment,” her mother said. “It’s going to stay in the living room for the time being.”
    For the time being. What did that mean?
    Jill’s head hurt from thinking too hard and analyzing too much. She could just picture her mother’s new residence: one of those three-story complexes scattered throughout the suburbs where divorced people lived. Usually fathers, wanting to be within reach of their children, who remained with their mothers in their houses.
    There was no need for Jill’s mother to move into a divorce village. The house was big enough that her mother and father could share it and manage to avoid each other. They could even sleep in separate bedrooms. One of them could eat in the kitchen and one in the dining room. They could divide the refrigerator right down the middle.
    Except that in her own apartment, her mother wouldn’t have to rinse beard hairs down the drain of her bathroom sink.
    It was stupid, really. Yet in some small, dark corner of Jill’s brain, she understood.

Chapter Six
     
    Doug wasn’t in the mood to play golf, but he’d rescheduled his and his father’s tee time and arranged to have his mother drive Brooke and the girls home so he could take his father with him to the club after the family powwow. He would have preferred to return home with Brooke, where he could share with her all the thoughts buzzing inside his head like angry mosquitoes. Better to let them escape than have the little demons suck all the blood out of his mind and leave it itching and inflamed.
    But he and Brooke wouldn’t have been able to chat quietly over a drink—a double scotch neat would suit him perfectly right now. Private discussions were impossible when the twins were in the vicinity, bouncing around and babbling. When he and Brooke wanted to have an extended conversation, they waited until after the girls were in bed for the night.
    Should he raise the subject of his parents’ marital situation with his dad during