The Time of Her Life Read Online Free

to, don’t you? Maybe it never occurred to you that your mother and
     I have something to talk about. By ourselves! Just go back to bed!” He started to move in her direction for two or three steps,
     but he had never touched Jane when he was angry, and she stood her ground right where she was, shaking her clenched fists
     by her sides with each word.
    “No, I said stop it! Stop! Just stop it!” And she wasn’t quiet until Avery left the house in a fury, slamming the door and
     roaring out of the driveway at two-thirty in the morning.
    Now, the next morning, in the kitchen and the sunlight,sitting across from Jane, Claudia undid the buttons at her wrists and pushed back her full sleeves. She held out her arms
     to see that, in fact, they were smudged with bruises where Avery had held onto her. She turned her hands palm up and studied
     the marks on the pale white underside of her arms with curiosity.
    “Oh, well,” she said to Jane with vague irritation, “I just don’t think that should have happened! Look at my arms! Damn!
     That just shouldn’t have happened.” Jane was looking out the window again, and Claudia was mostly musing to herself in any
     case. She rested her elbow on the table, settling her chin into her hand, and gazed and gazed at nothing. One corner of her
     mouth twitched downward in an expression of distaste. With this first dissipation of her slippery morning expectancy, disappointment
     grew apparent in all her movements, especially in the subtle hooding of her large, wide eyes. Her appearance was as susceptible
     to disillusionment as a morning glory that wilts with fragile translucency when the light fades.
    Jane had moved to the counter to make herself more toast when her father came in, and Claudia was still leaning into her hand,
     absorbed in her own thoughts; she didn’t look up right away. Jane put two more pieces of bread in the four-slice toaster and
     poured another glass of juice to give to her father.
    Avery was disheveled. Even in his handsome green robe and still crisply creased pajamas he had an air of being askew, and
     he was not quite sober from the night before. But he was not uncivil. He was hesitant and quiet; he came into the room as
     though he might immediately back out of it. Avery was a man, this morning, to be pitied, and he wouldn’t shun pity. That washow he looked. He carried his injury with him. It defined him for this day, although it didn’t make him less pitiful; it only
     made his abjection less savory. He didn’t have much to say when he sat down at the table; he gave only a halfhearted nod of
     greeting. When Jane put some toast and juice down in front of him, he was careful to thank her with elaborate courtesy.
    Claudia did not acknowledge him at all except to raise one eyebrow in an expression that Jane had often practiced in the mirror.
     Her mother didn’t aim this expression at her father; it was a comment she was making strictly to herself. Disdain. It was
     superb disdain, and only a light sigh accompanied that look as she very deliberately cleared her place and rinsed her cup
     and saucer. She swirled her robe out of the way—flicking it to one side or the other with a twitch of her hand—to avoid catching
     it on Avery’s chair, which was in the way now that he had drawn it out from the table to sit down. She even wiped the residue
     of jam and sugar from the counters and shook out her place mat, making a swipe beneath it with a cloth to clean the table.
    “I’m going to get dressed,” she said out into the room with no inflection. Perhaps it was a bit of information just meant
     to float upon the air, and she left the room with a final sweep of her robe and impressive urgency. Finally Jane went to get
     dressed, too, while Avery remained at the table, solemnly eating a piece of toast.
    Avery was writing a book, and he took a second cup of coffee into his study and sat down at his long bleached oak table, so
     spare and functional, which