Read Online Lola's Secret by Monica McInerney - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Monica McInerney
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the simplest of relationships. She wouldn’t change a bone in his body, and she felt sure he wouldn’t change a bone in hers.
Geraldine was another matter. Geraldine would cheerfully have her deboned in the blink of an eye. She knew Geraldine saw her as the mother-in-law from hell, interfering, bossy, meddling, overbearing. A whole thesaurus entry, in fact. And very possibly, just perhaps, some of those words might be accurate descriptions of how things had been in the time they’d known each other. But Lola only ever behaved that way if she genuinely felt she had to, if she saw something drift, or a problem start to form that she could avert through action. Was that being overbearing or being proactive? Proactive, of course. Sensible. Practical. Otherwise what would happen around her? Chaos? Mayhem? Yes, Lola thought. Perhaps that had always been her main personality trait. She was a Fixer.
She had a dim memory of her teachers in Ireland scolding her, using words like incorrigible and unmanageable. And certainly, she and her husband had shared a fiery, if thankfully brief, relationship, before she had left him as quickly as possible, preferring the difficult life of a single mother to the even more difficult life of being shackled to a bully, a weakling, and a drunk. But if she hadn’t had that desire to change things, to make her life better, to make Jim’s life better, the best it could be, then where would she be today? Beaten down? Dead even, from exhaustion and sorrow? She’d had to act, and act now!
Hmm, perhaps this impatience trait wasn’t a sudden thing after all, she thought. More memories floated in, backing this new, slightly alarming theory. All right, perhaps it had been a tiny bit annoying for Geraldine sometimes to see her mother-in-law not so much “fixing” as “interfering in” some of their family situations. The ridiculous feud between Anna, Bett, and Carrie of a few years back, for example. But if it hadn’t been for Lola’s plotting and plan-hatching, the three girls might never have talked to each other again. How much more of a tragedy would that have been, if Anna had fallen ill while they were still estranged? Not that Geraldine had ever thanked her. Nor had Jim, but he was her son. He didn’t need to thank her.
The difference in this personality trait of hers now was the depth and scope of her feeling. Previously, she’d been happy to confine her fix-it-ing to her own family and perhaps one or two close friends. These days, she was feeling an urge to fix the whole town and everyone in it. The state. The country. The world. Was it normal? Was it a rush to get things done before the Grim Reaper came a-reaping?
She’d raised the subject with her friends and fellow charity shop ladies recently. They already had so much in common, and not just the fact they were all widows. She’d come at it in a circuitous way, asking whether they felt they had changed at all mentally as they got older. And not in a forgetful way that might hint at Alzheimer’s or anything similar. Purely from a personality point of view. A sudden urge to Get Things Done.
Margaret—a gray-haired sixty-seven-year-old—had given it some thought. No, she’d decided. If anything, she’d become more relaxed. “All the hard work’s done. I’m coasting down the hill now,” she’d said. Patricia, a beautifully groomed fifty-seven, had dismissed the idea immediately, too. In her opinion, her personality was now set in stone and she liked it that way. “I don’t like physically aging, but there’s no way I’d go back to all the angst-ridden thoughts of my thirties or forties. It’s a miracle I’ve got this far, when I think of all the things that could have happened to me. I might have been hit by a bus. Or fallen out of a plane. Even got run over by a train.”
“I hadn’t realized you’d been starring in silent movies,” Lola said.
“You know what I mean. People die in odd accidents every day.
Geraldine was another matter. Geraldine would cheerfully have her deboned in the blink of an eye. She knew Geraldine saw her as the mother-in-law from hell, interfering, bossy, meddling, overbearing. A whole thesaurus entry, in fact. And very possibly, just perhaps, some of those words might be accurate descriptions of how things had been in the time they’d known each other. But Lola only ever behaved that way if she genuinely felt she had to, if she saw something drift, or a problem start to form that she could avert through action. Was that being overbearing or being proactive? Proactive, of course. Sensible. Practical. Otherwise what would happen around her? Chaos? Mayhem? Yes, Lola thought. Perhaps that had always been her main personality trait. She was a Fixer.
She had a dim memory of her teachers in Ireland scolding her, using words like incorrigible and unmanageable. And certainly, she and her husband had shared a fiery, if thankfully brief, relationship, before she had left him as quickly as possible, preferring the difficult life of a single mother to the even more difficult life of being shackled to a bully, a weakling, and a drunk. But if she hadn’t had that desire to change things, to make her life better, to make Jim’s life better, the best it could be, then where would she be today? Beaten down? Dead even, from exhaustion and sorrow? She’d had to act, and act now!
Hmm, perhaps this impatience trait wasn’t a sudden thing after all, she thought. More memories floated in, backing this new, slightly alarming theory. All right, perhaps it had been a tiny bit annoying for Geraldine sometimes to see her mother-in-law not so much “fixing” as “interfering in” some of their family situations. The ridiculous feud between Anna, Bett, and Carrie of a few years back, for example. But if it hadn’t been for Lola’s plotting and plan-hatching, the three girls might never have talked to each other again. How much more of a tragedy would that have been, if Anna had fallen ill while they were still estranged? Not that Geraldine had ever thanked her. Nor had Jim, but he was her son. He didn’t need to thank her.
The difference in this personality trait of hers now was the depth and scope of her feeling. Previously, she’d been happy to confine her fix-it-ing to her own family and perhaps one or two close friends. These days, she was feeling an urge to fix the whole town and everyone in it. The state. The country. The world. Was it normal? Was it a rush to get things done before the Grim Reaper came a-reaping?
She’d raised the subject with her friends and fellow charity shop ladies recently. They already had so much in common, and not just the fact they were all widows. She’d come at it in a circuitous way, asking whether they felt they had changed at all mentally as they got older. And not in a forgetful way that might hint at Alzheimer’s or anything similar. Purely from a personality point of view. A sudden urge to Get Things Done.
Margaret—a gray-haired sixty-seven-year-old—had given it some thought. No, she’d decided. If anything, she’d become more relaxed. “All the hard work’s done. I’m coasting down the hill now,” she’d said. Patricia, a beautifully groomed fifty-seven, had dismissed the idea immediately, too. In her opinion, her personality was now set in stone and she liked it that way. “I don’t like physically aging, but there’s no way I’d go back to all the angst-ridden thoughts of my thirties or forties. It’s a miracle I’ve got this far, when I think of all the things that could have happened to me. I might have been hit by a bus. Or fallen out of a plane. Even got run over by a train.”
“I hadn’t realized you’d been starring in silent movies,” Lola said.
“You know what I mean. People die in odd accidents every day.
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