The Playdate Read Free

tired.”
    “Hmm.” He nodded. She put him down, sighing with the satisfaction of getting it right, and watched him toddle into the kitchen behind Peter, his raven curls bouncing.
    The midafternoon sun beamed in through the glass wall that ran across the back of the house, making her Italian kitchen gleam. The boys climbed on the giant sofa. She loved this space. It was impossible now to remember what it looked like as a collection of cramped Victorian rooms. She thought Jez was joking when he told her the price of the house. You could buy a small ranch for that in Colorado. Then he explained how the vendor had just received planning permission to knock the rooms together and extend at the back—just as he and his girlfriend decided to split up. Suddenly Suzy had seen how it could work. A huge family room filled with toys and the newfriends they’d make in London, and her serving everyone great steaming bowls of pasta; children running around, playing; she and Jez opening wine together. Jez was right. The room had worked out well.
    He just hadn’t been in it much lately.
    Suzy took paper and felt-tip pens out of the drawer of the kitchen table, and placed them with a cookie and a drink each on top, kissing each boy as she helped him up. She turned on the oven, pulled a tray of meatballs that she’d made earlier from the fridge, and turned to wash her hands.
    It was then that she saw it.
    He had done it again.
    A newspaper was spread out on the quartz countertop beside a white mug whose sparkling interior was violated by a muddy tide line of coffee. Crumbs lay beside it. The remnants of a sandwich eaten without a plate or thought for who would clean it up.
    Discarded shoes, jackets, cups, and crumbs. Shaving foam left out. Undrained baths. Uncapped olive oil. A house full of Jez’s semaphores for things he wouldn’t say.
    Clamping her jaw, Suzy folded the newspaper and put it in the recycling box. She and the boys looked up as heavy footsteps came down the stairs and toward the kitchen. Jez filled the doorway like a dark cloud about to rain.
    “Hi . . . good day, boys?” he muttered gruffly. Peter smiled shyly, Otto began to grizzle again. Jez glanced at his wife briefly, then looked around the kitchen.
    “Can’t find the phone charger.”
    “I put it back on your desk,” she said flatly, picking up Otto for another hug. “I needed to use the kettle.”
    He raised his eyebrows and began to walk back out of the room. She couldn’t help herself.
    “Would you like me to put this away, too?” she said, nodding at his dirty mug.
    He paused, then shrugged. “Or leave it there.”
    She held Otto closer, like a shield.
    “All right, little man?” Jez said, ruffling his hair as he walked back out the door.
    She put Otto down again and began to cut up an organic cucumber, focusing on its uneven ridged bumps to distract herself from the urge to follow Jez. With a start, she realized Peter was watching her silently, his gentle face fixed in a frown. Of the three, Peter was her sensitive one. The one who stood back and let Otto and Henry grab their favorite toys first, who gently stroked Suzy’s arm when his brothers bit and kicked each other. She blew him a kiss to show him everything was all right, and began laying the table with plates, trying to concentrate on the polka-dot blue plastic.
    Three plates for her three boys, then one for Rae just in case. Now, did Rae like meatballs? Yes, she did, it was sausages she’d gone off . . .
    How could Jez say that?
    Putting down the jug, she pointed the remote control at the widescreen TV on the wall. Cursing under her breath that she was breaking her own rules of no kids’ telly during the week, she flicked through till she found Postman Pat . The boys’ faces turned to the wall, amazed.
    “Mommy go pee-pee,” she said, beaming. “Back in a minute.”
    Checking that they weren’t following behind her, she tiptoed up the stairs past the first floor to the office Jez