Read Online Attachment by Isabel Fonseca - Free Book Online

find buried treasure with a broom.
    When Mark passed by in his blue robe, he looked friendly enough, but she saw he was keeping his distance. Didn’t he know that she knew—wasn’t her sweeping expressive enough of her outrage, her desire to be rid of the filth in their life? Perhaps he was praying for a silent deal: he’d give up Giovana and Jean would never mention it. She guessed he did want it to stop (where could this kind of thing go?) and that every time he actually saw Giovana he resolved—immediately after he fucked her—to end it.
    While Jean swept, Mark went down to latch the open gate—as if that, any more than her e-mailing, could keep out a determined intruder. When he was done he reached stiffly down—his tall person’s knees and back—and recovered his beer from where he’d placed it on the ground. She could see the relief spread through him as he drank, and pushed away an image of Mark with his lover in postcoital repose. Did Giovana love the way his feet hung over the end of the bed? Jean had always found this, especially the toes-down position, totally moving: Mark’s not quite fitting anywhere; and the homeless toes in particular, so literally downcast. Did he even think about Jean in that kind of detail anymore—her feet, her breasts, or the points of her collarbone, as hard and smooth under the skin as pearls wrapped in silk, as he used to say when he fingered the delicate nodules? Or had Giovana’s big costume jewelry crowded her out completely?
    She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. He saw her as more and more agitated, busy but producing nothing, a bird trapped in a house. Would he say that to Phyllis, “like a bird trapped in a house,” when Jean was making dinner and not there to protest, while her mother tittered, more flattered by the confidence than worried by the image? Not talking about Giovana was an agony for Jean. But nothing could induce her to open her mouth.
    He turned his back to the view. Feeling his eyes fix on her, she sensed, just possibly, his wish to convey that, despite everything, he did still love her. But Mark wouldn’t go to her, and risk the whole thing busting open with Phyllis about to descend. Still, he seemed to want to shoulder a little of the weight that pressed down on her so heavily and his contribution was to move the truck.
    The dented tricolor jalopy had been their first purchase on the island, a car that had the back scooped out of it to make a truck. It was only semireliable, but Mark adored its hybrid charm—long in the back, short in the front—a mullet hairstyle of a car, he said, complete with “pleather”-upholstered seats, and he insisted on calling it a carck. Jean tolerated the carck, approving its aura of the tacky bohemian, but for the duration of her mother’s visit, she’d drive a tidy rental.

T he interior road to the airport was shorter and therefore favored by Mark, but it was unpaved and deserted. Jean imagined herself tracked by vultures and dumbfounded goats, kneeling beside the new hatchback and wrestling with the rust-jammed jack, her airport skirt coated with red dirt. So instead she took the coast road, lined all along with reassuring life. Hands firm at ten and two, she was relieved to discover that the thought of Phyllis no longer irritated her. This was auspicious; surely most irritation started in the expectation of it, and the trick was to avoid the dread, not the encounter. Her mood was lightened by the breeze coming through the window, by the open road, and for the rest of the drive she sang.
    Phyllis was the last off the twelve-seater plane, picking her way down the aluminum steps with precision and delicacy, sidesaddle: the picture, to her health-expert daughter, of a woman intimate with her bone-density reading. Windswept on the tarmac, with a geometric scarf tied under her chin, enormous sunglasses, and fuchsia lipstick, she looked even smaller than Jean remembered. Or did her head seem