Five(25)

One night when she has heard him leave, Matilda finds her mother’s old valise and packs her few items of clothing, including the tiny pink dress once made for her with love. She runs her hand along the spines of her beloved books to say goodbye. She thinks about taking Gray’s Anatomy, which her father gave her last Christmas. She knows from the stamp inside that he did not buy it but that he stole it from the library. She has pored through its pages, but now she wonders with a shudder why he gave it to her. She does not dare to think what else he had in mind for her to learn. She comes down the stairs and takes a last look at the kitchen of her childhood home, covering her mouth and nose so that she does not have to breathe the stagnant, fetid air. “I’m sorry,” she says to no one, but hopes that somewhere Gerald can hear her. He returns home very late and does not notice until morning that she’s gone.



* * *





Two years after their first meeting, Mrs. Worth watches Horatio walk with Livvie down the aisle to meet Nicholas at the altar. She has declined to attend any of the prewedding events, like the rehearsal dinner and the Bridal Glam: Mimosas and Makeup! preening session on the morning of the ceremony, though Livvie was deliberately courteous about inviting her. Mrs. Worth did not want to be there almost as much as Livvie did not want her to be there, and at least there they agreed.

After the ceremony, Nicholas has a quiet moment with his mother.

“What do you think, Mum? I’m a married man now. Listen, it would mean a lot if you would finally let Livvie call you Matilda. It would go a long way to making things easier, between you, I mean, but for me too.”

Mrs. Worth has watched Nicholas and Livvie smile, and kiss, and hold each other throughout the day. She is, in her own way, happy for them, or rather, she can recognize their happiness and she is grateful that her son knows such a feeling. Mrs. Worth’s own understanding of love has been so muted and warped and stunted that she doesn’t realize that what disturbs her most about Livvie is not her frivolity and lack of depth. It is her ease with love, and the ease with which she gives that love to Nicholas, an ease Mrs. Worth has never had even with her own child and that she has even less now that he has grown up and found love for himself.

So Mrs. Worth instead answers her son with “No, I don’t think that will be possible.”

“Mum, please, we’re family now, you’ve got to give her a chance, for me.”

“The dog is wearing a tuxedo, Nicholas.”

“Mum, it’s just a bit of fun.”

She has never told Nicholas how she knows Livvie, that she met her before he did. If she had told him right after their first meeting that day maybe things would not have gotten this far, maybe she would not have lost her son to this ridiculous girl. But the moment for truth is long past, and he has chosen her, and Mrs. Worth will simply have to accept it.

Several years before Nicholas met Livvie, Mrs. Worth stopped in a Boots pharmacy on the high street. She’d been on her feet for twelve hours, her hands aching from clutching her surgical tools all day, her neck stiff from leaning over the body of the poor young woman they’d found in the Thames the week before. But it is her knees, getting arthritic, that are really troubling her. Mrs. Worth is sad for the dead girl and she is tired. She catches her reflection in a mirror at the cosmetic counter. She looks haggard and old, like the walking dead herself.

She is walking down the pain relief aisle when a thin blonde woman with a severe ponytail, wearing a tight black sheath, stilettos, and sunglasses, despite the late hour of the day, brushes past her, stops a short, sweaty male employee, says, too loudly, “Where’s the lube? You know, lubricant?” and follows him as he scurries down the aisle.

Good Lord, Mrs. Worth thinks, poor man, retrieving her reading glasses so she can find the Voltarol for her knees. She takes it along with some ibuprofen, a ChapStick, and a Kit Kat to the queue and watches all of her items fall to the floor when she is cut off by a young man in a hurry who is determined to get in line ahead of her.

“In quite a rush, aren’t we,” she says, irritated, struggling to pick up her items without bending her aching knees.

“What?” the young man says, rudely, over his shoulder, barely casting her a glance. “Sorry.” But he does not bend down to help her and stares straight ahead. No one in the queue helps her.

She finally picks up her things when a young shop assistant opens another register at the cosmetics counter behind her, just opposite the tills where they keep the perfumes in locked cabinets, so Mrs. Worth heads there and puts her items down, satisfied to be served before that rude young man after all.

“You can’t buy those here, this is cosmetics only,” the young girl says. Her long and perfect powder-pink nails tap once on the counter.

“But surely it doesn’t make a difference? It all goes to the same place?” Mrs. Worth says, indignant.

“You have to buy cosmetics if you want to check out here,” the shopgirl says, bored, annoyed, dismissive.

“I have ChapStick, arguably that is a cosmetic,” Mrs. Worth says, refusing to move.

The girl sighs loudly, pouts her lips and says curtly, “Look, you can’t check out here unless you’re buying perfume or cosmetics, all right? If you’re not, then you need to go to the other till, please.”

“I would like to speak to your manager,” Mrs. Worth says, digging in.