Read Online Random Acts of Kindness by Lisa Verge Higgins - Free Book Online Page A

of her car. The house was in upheaval. Zoe was going off to camp the next day. No one really noticed that Jenna had come home early. It was easy to sneak that box into the attic. Nate was wrapped up in the packing and Zoe…Zoe was angrier than usual. Every time Jenna approached Zoe’s room to ask if she was excited about becoming a Master Ranger, Zoe just yelled at her.
    I’m busy! Get out of my room!
    “And on Saturday,” Jenna continued, “after we dropped Zoe off at the airport, Nate handed me a nine-page Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.”
    Nicole leaned forward so far she practically pitched herself onto the coffee table. “Did you sense something was wrong before that?”
    “Not a clue.” Jenna looked longingly at a whiskey nip on the table. “Maybe I should have paid more attention. Maybe I should have noticed the looks the neighbors were giving me. Her name is Sissy Leclaire,” she said, the name sour in her mouth. “That’s who my husband was— is —fucking. She lives three doors down.”
    Claire’s little indrawn breath was a sharp sound in the room.
    “I guess he got thirsty while I was bringing home the bacon,” Jenna said. “So he reached for the nearest beer.”
    When he’d slipped the divorce papers across the table and quietly explained how they’d been drifting apart and how he’d made such an effort but he couldn’t continue like this, it wasn’t fair to him and it wasn’t fair to her and it wasn’t fair to Sissy . All the while, Jenna had stared at his sculptor’s hands, striped with old scars, one a long, thin scab over a newer one, rough from his latest project. Sitting across the kitchen from her while his coffee went cold, he’d tried to act calm and rational, but she knew him. His skin was ruddy high on his cheekbones. He’d scraped his fingers through his hair so much it stuck straight up. He looked like he’d been caught watching porn on his laptop.
    He couldn’t meet her eyes.
    When they’d first met, fifteen years ago, it had taken her nearly two weeks before she could muster the courage to look directly at his face. It had been beyond her comprehension why any man so attractively disheveled and so very normal would take an interest in shy, crippled little Jenna Hogan. But those days he was hanging artwork in her building lobby, he specifically looked for her. He greeted her by name, once he had teased it out of her. He complimented her on her hair. He grinned when she blushed. He’d asked her for coffee, and when she’d stuttered excuses, he just asked again the next day, promising he’d keep asking so she may as well just say yes and get it over with.
    Later, after she’d tumbled in love with the man, they scraped together enough money to take a trip to Massachusetts to visit the artist colony in Cape Ann. They wandered among the galleries. They spent hours sitting on the rocks listening to the cold surf sucking and swirling in the caverns beneath, all while picnicking on whole-grain bread and artisanal cheese and cheap wine. He was a quiet man, fathoms deep, who liked to run his hands over the surface of things: rocks, weathered driftwood, her naked back.
    You’re an oasis, Jenna. When I’m with you, I can think.
    Her purse suddenly rattled.
    Nicole stared at Jenna’s handbag vibrating on the table. “That’s him again, isn’t it?”
    “At four thirty p.m. Pacific Time today, I was supposed to meet Nate in his lawyer’s office to discuss custody issues.”
    Nicole raised one eyebrow. “One week after he served the petition?”
    “I have thirty days to respond. Nate’s hoping to move things along.”
    Let’s not drag this out.
    After he’d left the house that terrible Saturday morning, she’d sat at the kitchen table with the papers in front of her. She might have sat for an hour, maybe more. She didn’t count the ticks of the clock over the kitchen sink—the clock he’d installed in a crosscut of white pine not long after they’d bought