The Better Mother

PART TWO





THE HOUSE

1938 to 1946


It was a small house, a clapboard shack really. It sat on River Road, on a wooded lot choked with wild blackberry and dogwood. Even though there were other houses nearby, it was easy to believe, when standing on the porch or on a boulder in the backyard, that this was the only inhabited house for miles and miles and that they were the only family. From the kitchen, Val could just see the Fraser River through the trees. When she was a little girl, she spent hours staring at its winking, grey-blue surface. Once, right after her eighth birthday, she took her father’s axe, the one with his first name, Warren, carved crudely into the handle, and tried to slash her way through the bush and down the hill to get to the shore. After a half hour, her mother discovered her, covered in scratches from the thorns, dead leaves stuck in her dull brown hair, her hands covered in rust from the blade. Her mother said little, and finished cleaning Val’s scratches before sitting with her by the kitchen window in the late afternoon light, listening and watching for the fishing boats and logging barges.

“I love the river, Mum,” said Val, resting her hand in her mother’s lap.

“Yes. Me too. If you cross it and pass the island, you’ll find the city,” Meg said softly, as she waved her hand at Annacis Island, blue and blurry in the sunshine.

“Have you been to the city?”

“Once. Before you girls were born. It was lovely, you know. We saw a vaudeville show and looked at diamonds in a shop window.”

Val imagined her mother as a young woman with sparkly, lively eyes, sauntering down a glittering street lit with tall, wrought-iron lamps. She wore a white fur coat and high, shiny black shoes. She stopped at a bright window, pointed at a necklace winking on a blue velvet cushion. Val’s father, dashing in a black hat and coat, strutted into the store and came back out, necklace in hand. Val leaned her head on her mother’s arm as the story came to an end, the rough cotton tickling her cheek. She fell asleep to her favourite lullaby.

Her father promised that he would cut a path to the river the following weekend, but instead spent those two days sitting on a stump in the backyard, drinking beer with his old logging buddies, talking about the wild days they used to spend in the bush and the wilder nights they spent in the city. Before there was no more work to be found, before all a family man could do was line up for relief and take whatever was given to him.

Val and Joan were fifteen months apart and inseparable. In school, they were known as “Those Wild Nealy Girls.” Teachers sent home notes complaining that the sisters picked on the other girls, cutting off their braids with pocket knives, chasing them with dead rats they found in the schoolyard. Once, Joan took exception to another girl’s pristine white gloves and quickly but silently drove a sharpened pencil through the creamy leather and into the back of her hand, where it stuck into her flesh as the little girl howled.

Joan—small and small-boned with white-blond hair and blue irises ringed in black—only stared blankly at the teachers and the other children when they were angry with her, sometimes allowing a perfectly formed tear to course slowly down her pale cheek. Val—taller and bigger with arms capable of killing field mice by throwing them against the schoolhouse wall—yelled back, her head vibrating with so much raging energy that her brown curls shook and stiffened from the sound of her voice.

Meg, in her faded cotton dresses, took the notes they brought home and left them on the kitchen counter, where they remained unread and eventually multiplied into a pile of meticulously folded foolscap, which Warren used to start fires in their ancient woodstove. Neither parent ever asked why the other children never came to the house to play or why, on sunny Saturday afternoons, Val and Joan stuck close to the house, holding hands as they lay on their backs in the yard and watched the clouds shift and blow through the sky. Perhaps Meg and Warren heard the whispers when they went to the general store for flour and salt and seed, those whispers spoken behind hands, with eyes averted.

“Those girls never speak to anyone besides each other.”

“I invited the mother over for tea two years ago, but she didn’t drink or eat. All she did was stare at me with those empty eyes. It gave me the creeps.”

“The blond one pushed my Jimmy into the duck pond and tried to hold his head down. Would have drowned him if Mr. Lumby hadn’t heard the ruckus.”

“Men who don’t help themselves only punish their families.”

Val knew that money was tight for everyone these days and that, years ago, when she was a baby or maybe even before she was born, times had been better. The stories her father told his friends were always the same: he was once the bravest logger in the whole province, and could climb the tallest spruce in his spiked shoes without even a shiver of dizziness or fear. Some men never got the hang of it and were relegated to sawing the logs into pieces after they came crashing down to the damp, mushroomy forest floor. But not her father. Sometimes he’d climb higher than he ever needed to, just so he could sway with the skinny branches and feel his whole body bobbing in the wind. The other men hollered up at him that he was as crazy as the crow they once saw eat her own chick, but he didn’t listen, only grinned wildly at the sunshine he never felt while on the ground.

They had been on relief for as long as Val’s memory stretched, but she knew that other children’s fathers had started to work again now that the sawmills were expanding and the trains were stopping to pick up wood and fish to ship east, and that the other girls in school were wearing new hair ribbons and sturdy boots. But Val didn’t care as much about those things as Joan, whose eyes flashed meanly when Beryl showed off her cashmere stockings at recess by dancing the Charleston in the schoolyard.

“My dad is the new foreman at the lumber mill,” she said as she smoothed down her sleek, dark hair. “He bought my mum a jar of special cold cream that cost a whole three dollars.”

That afternoon, Beryl went home crying, her legs bare and her arms tied behind her back with one ripped stocking. The other was tied around her head, with the foot stuffed unceremoniously into her mouth.

Once in a while, Val watched her father leave in the morning for a pickup shift at the rail yard, his lunch pail half full of bread and butter, an apple and beef jerky. He came back before bedtime, his face covered in a fine layer of dirt and his work pants covered in paint or smelling like whatever he had been loading and reloading into the cars. Other days, he would simply sit in the backyard or on the front stoop in an old kitchen chair, watching as people walked by, as the occasional car or truck rumbled down the road. Eventually, by dinnertime, two or three or four of his friends, those who had no children or wives and couldn’t get relief, would show up and Meg—her shoulders drooping with exhaustion, or perhaps disappointment—would have to search the house for more scraps of food to make a big enough meal for everyone. Val particularly hated the soup, which was dense with potatoes and not much else, and she felt sick every time she walked through the kitchen and saw it bubbling thickly on the stove, its smell seeping through the house like dirty clothes wet with rain. She swore she would never be like her mother. If she married, he would be rich. If she didn’t, she would take care of herself.

On nights like these, Val and Joan huddled together in their makeshift play tent made from fallen branches and an old tarp of their father’s, and pretended to cook a meal—Val doing the cooking while Joan organized their imaginary dishes.

“I’m going to make a lemon chiffon cake.”

“What’s a chiffon cake?”

“I think it’s a cake that has lots of bubbles in it; one that floats in your stomach when you eat it.”

“Oh. What else?”

“Bacon and toad-in-the-hole and roast chicken and jellied salad and champagne.”

“I think I would like some beef pie too, please.”

“All right, Joanie. Beef and mushroom pie it is.”


The other children at school were buzzing, their small heads bent together in class or at lunchtime. But this time, they weren’t whispering thoughts and observations (both true and untrue) about the Nealy girls. They were talking about war.

Words that Val and Joan had never even considered before became part of conversations they overheard wherever they went. Germany. Enlist. Fighter plane. Commonwealth. The older brothers of the other children at school were enlisting and, every morning, another girl or boy would brag about how Jimmy or Willy or Fred had made the decision to leave home and shoot Nazis. Once in a while it was even somebody’s father, usually a man who hadn’t been able to find work and whose children were as poor as Val and Joan. At home, however, the discussions were still the same, which meant that Warren still talked about the old days with his buddies, and Meg softly told the girls about her one visit to the city, a story they knew so well that they repeated it silently whenever they had a quiet moment.

But news has a way of infiltrating even the most isolated house, even the one drowning in bush and the scent of decaying raccoons and squirrels, long dead and hidden in layers of salal and creeping Charlie.

One evening, their father sat down to dinner (trout from the river, small knobbly carrots from the garden and the last jar of applesauce from the autumn before) and smiled broadly at his family. His lips stretched far past his teeth and showed what Val thought was an unseemly expanse of gum. Banging his fork on the table, he announced, “I’ve found a job.”

Meg gasped and Joan gaped.

“You see, I told you it would happen,” he said, spearing a carrot. “There was never any need to worry.”

Val couldn’t remember if her mother had ever said she was worried. Then again, her mother didn’t say much.

“Where?” Meg asked, her hands resting on the tablecloth, her plate of food steaming in front of her. “How?”

“They’re reopening the fish cannery downriver. It’s going full steam, Meg, with shifts around the clock. The pay isn’t as good as I was hoping for, but I’m glad to be off relief. It hurts a man’s pride to take handouts like that.” Her father thumped on his chest with his fist.

Her mother said nothing, but Val sat up straight and looked around the table. “It’s because of the war,” she announced. “They need to feed the soldiers and they’re going to send them canned fish.”

Joan nodded and said, “That’s right. The war.”

Their father ignored them and nodded at Meg, who was lifting her first forkful of food to her mouth. “Bake us something sweet. The boys are coming by tonight to celebrate. It’ll be a party.”

Later, Val and Joan sat on the back porch, hidden by the holly bush that grew by the stairs. Warren and his friends smoked and drank, passed around bottles and stories, and threw rocks at the furry shapes that scurried around the perimeter of the yard. Crouched around a small fire, each man was indistinct and Val couldn’t tell whether the one closest to the outhouse was Johnny or Oliver or Buck. Their clothes were faded or stained the same shade of brown, and each of them had the same scratchy voice, a voice scarred by yelling, drunken singing and the sharp-edged whisky that clawed at their throats on the way down. The one she recognized was her father, with his narrow shoulders and scrawny neck, his outline sharp against the wavering firelight.

“What about the logging then, Warren? Canning fish sure isn’t the same thing now, is it?” Their laughter lifted the hairs on Val’s arm. So loud. Tinged with that meanness that swells in groups.

Val saw her father lean back and tip his face toward the night sky. She wondered what he was looking at because there were no stars tonight, no moon. Nothing but the dun undersides of clouds, one shade brighter than the sky itself.

“Meg won’t have it. She told me so this afternoon. Said she wasn’t going to stand for me disappearing into the bush for weeks at a time, no matter how good the money was. I tried to reason with her. The war will be eating up all sorts of things, not just canned fish, but lumber and steel too. I told her, these next few months could be the richest of our lives, if she’d let me go. But she doesn’t like the danger. And, of course, she doesn’t want to be alone. Once a lady has had a taste of this,” he said, gesturing toward his crotch, “there’s no turning back.”

The laughter rose up again and Val rubbed her ears to empty out the sound. When had she ever heard her mother say those things?

Joan leaned in toward her and whispered, “I don’t think Mum would notice if Daddy went away.”

One man, whose voice sounded smoother than the rest, as if he had been chewing on duck fat, boomed into the air. “Come on now, Warren. Maybe you’re getting old and scared of what those trees could do to you, hmm?”

Warren stood and threw his bottle at the man’s head. He missed, but his target rose as well and began pushing up the sleeves of his shirt.

“Lost your temper with your balls?” the man hissed.

Val craned her neck to see better, but the light from the fire skipped over the men’s faces and all she could see was their two standing bodies, dark and tense. She held her breath, waiting for another word, for the sound of fist hitting flesh, but everything was silent. No small animals rustling in the bush, not even the breaking of water on rocks. Joan put her thin hand on Val’s knee.

Their mother stepped out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, not noticing her two daughters crouched behind the railing. She held a plate with a flat, plain cake. Blinking against the darkness, she said softly, in a voice that wavered on the air, “Cake?”

The other man sat down with a thump. Warren strode over, pulled the plate out of Meg’s hands and dropped it on the tree stump in the middle of the yard. “Eat,” he said, before disappearing into a narrow gap in the bush and stomping toward the river.

—

By the time Val was fourteen, she and Joan had stopped going to school altogether. Their mother said nothing about it as she let down the hems of their dresses and sent them on errands to buy milk and flour. It didn’t even matter when the truant officers came to the house and knocked and knocked. Meg simply turned her head creakily at the sound while continuing to knead the bread or wash the windows. Eventually it became Val’s job to feed the chickens and make sure they had enough air and light. It was Joan’s job to weed the garden and harvest what could be eaten. But these things took little time, and by mid-morning the girls had nothing to do, so they started to dance.

In the attic, they found an old record, Hinky Dinky Parlez Vous. In their bedroom (where their father couldn’t see or hear them and complain about the noise), they set up the ancient phonograph and danced, each taking turns high-kicking, twirling, doing the splits. In the beginning, Meg told them about the show she saw in Vancouver, describing the routines at her daughters’ prodding. When Warren went to work, they pulled their mother into the bedroom and danced for her. She laughed until she cried, her hands clasped over her belly.

“You two will never be famous hoofers, but at least you try,” she said, wiping away the tears on her cheeks.

After two years of selling eggs for pennies and accompanying their mother on intermittent cleaning jobs, Val came up with a plan. One night, as she and Joan were lying in bed, awake because their father was outside drinking again with his friends, she whispered the details to her sister.

“We’ll run away, see? We’ll hitch a ride to Vancouver and we’ll audition for the Orpheum. They’ll take us for sure. And then, maybe we can get all the way to New York! Mum said the vaudeville shows were full of dancing girls like us. Come on, Joanie. What do you think?”

Joan pulled the quilt up closer to her chin. “I don’t know, Val. We don’t really know anything about Vancouver, do we? Mum hasn’t been there in almost twenty years.”

Val grew angry. “What’s the matter with you? When did you become such a wet blanket?”

“I’m not! I want to leave this place as much as you do. I just don’t know that running away is the best thing to do.”

“Do you have any better ideas?” Val asked scornfully.

“No,” said Joan. She turned to face the wall. “But I’ll think of something.”


A few weeks later, Val woke up in the middle of the night, feeling strangely cold. She turned over. Joan had disappeared.

Val pulled on her housecoat and padded through the house in her bare feet, listening for her sister’s voice or the creak of a floorboard. She peered into her parents’ room, where her father lay on his stomach, his face squished into his pillow. Her mother was curled on her side, taking up less room than a small child. Outside, Val could see the deep blackness of the river.

She heard a murmur and a slight thump coming from above. In the hall, she saw that the ladder to the attic had not been pulled up. “What on earth is she doing up there?” Val whispered. She had thought that speaking would dissipate the heavy silence, but her words fell and disappeared, making no impact whatsoever on the quiet around her. As she climbed the ladder, she heard the squeak of the unfinished wood floor. Is she dancing?

Moonlight flooded in through the uncovered window. Against the walls, boxes of old clothes and toys and tools sat in uneven piles. In the corner, an armchair was covered with a white sheet. And there, right on the floor, on top of their dead grandmother’s quilt, was Joan, naked, her back arched, her white breasts pointed toward the ceiling. Underneath her was a man Val only knew as one of her father’s friends. His brown hands were travelling up and down her sister’s body as she rode him, moaning with her eyes closed. A pool of moonlight illuminated the curve of her hips, the paleness of her skin. The man was barely visible; he was, to Val, shades of brown and clumps of black, curly hair.

He lifted his head. Val stepped backward, looked behind her for the trap door. Before she could step down onto the top rung of the ladder, she heard his voice.

“You can be next, big sister, if you like.”

As Val climbed back down, Joan’s giggle floated after her.

In the early morning, Joan crawled back into bed beside Val, smelling of flesh rubbed together, like the odour of burning hair and sour milk. Val kept her eyes shut and pulled the blankets up to her nose until dawn, when she quietly left the bedroom and went outside to the henhouse. She checked their nests, her ears filled with the sound of clucking chickens.

At breakfast, her mother set down plates of toast and poached eggs. Val’s stomach was unsettled, tightening and loosening every time she tried to swallow. As she choked her food back, Joan wandered into the kitchen, still in her nightgown.

“I’m starving,” she announced.

Meg nodded and pointed to her congealing egg.

With a mouth full of yolk and toast, Joan eyed Val from across the table. She swallowed loudly. “Have a good sleep?” she asked, a grin starting in the corners of her mouth.

Val sat up straight. “No, actually. A couple of rats in the attic woke me up.”

Joan stared sullenly out the window.

Val felt strangely rooted to her chair, listening to the sounds of her sister and mother chewing their breakfast. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on the scarred wooden table-top, at the crumbs that had, over the years, collected in the scratches and dents.

Joan stood up to bring her plate to the basin. On her way, she whispered to Val, “You have your own stupid plan to get out of here, I have mine. He’ll marry me, you’ll see.” And she flounced out, her almost-white, uncombed hair like a cloud in the morning sunlight.


That winter, the baby was born, squalling and slimy and wrinkled. Val stared at the child as he lay on Joan’s chest, clenching his fists and wailing. Joan’s eyes were closed and she was breathing through her mouth as Meg, with an old sheet, tried to clean up the blood and fluid slowly soaking into the girls’ mattress. Everything seemed wrong to Val: Joan’s skinny frame that had hardly appeared pregnant at all, the baby’s bluish skin that barely contained his small, birdlike bones, her mother’s tentativeness in telling Joan when to push and for how long.

As Meg wrung out a cloth in a basin by the window, Val whispered to her, “I told you we should have gone to the hospital.”

Wet strands of hair clung to the sides of her mother’s face, and Val could see her body wilting as the exhaustion crept from feet to spine to neck.

“Better to keep it quiet,” her mother said. “That Lumby girl is a nurse, and then everyone around here would know.” She turned and looked Val directly in the face. “Do you think I don’t know how they talk about us? If word gets out that Joanie has a baby, those self-righteous women will start saying Warren is the father or that we’re making you girls part your legs for money. Maybe they’re even saying it already.”

And Val knew this was true, that eyes watched their every move and not just because of curiosity. She looked back toward her sister and realized no one had yet cut the umbilical cord. She picked up a pair of sewing scissors from the windowsill, took a deep breath, and stepped toward the bed.

When Val walked into the kitchen to fill a pail with hot water from the kettle, her father nodded at her and said, “You remember to tell your sister she’s to name that child Warren. I don’t usually ask for much, so it seems to me Joanie can humour me this one time.” And he stood up and walked out the back door, his work boots leaving behind a trail of dried mud, flecked with the mirrored remnants of fish scales.

Val cleaned the baby with warm water, poked her finger into his armpits and the creases around his thighs. Quiet for now, he stared at her with round, teddy-bear eyes, searching her face for, perhaps, something familiar. She thought she saw him reach for her as his tiny hand brushed the fabric of her grass-green dress. She knew he couldn’t possibly control his arms, but she smiled anyway and wrapped him in an old flannel blanket. Drowsily, he fluttered his hands and fell asleep.

Joan lay on her side, her hands between her legs. She stared at the faded wallpaper beside the bed. The blood was mostly gone (only faint pink streaks remained on the wall and on the floor) and Meg had replaced the soiled sheets. Val tucked the baby into his basket by the window.

“Does he have to sleep in here?” Joan asked, the words coming out like groans.

“Where else is he going to sleep? In the henhouse?”

“Shut up, Val. You don’t know what it’s like.”

Val laughed. “No, you’re right; I don’t. Why don’t you tell me then?”

Joan traced a crack in the wall with her finger. “You’re talking so loudly, it hurts my head.”

Dropping her voice to a whisper, Val leaned closer to the bed. “Tell me: which one is the father? Or do you not remember?”

Joan rolled over to face her sister. “I know exactly who the father is, you stupid cow.”

“Really? Where is he, then?”

“Stop talking! I need to sleep. Leave me alone.”

“Why isn’t he here, Joanie? Did you say something to make him mad? Did you drive him away?” Val wanted to slap Joan, take her by the shoulders and bang her blond head against the wall until she admitted she was wrong, that she had miscalculated her escape.

“He’s with his wife! He wouldn’t leave his good-for-nothing, lazy wife. Satisfied?” She sat up abruptly, thumped her fist on the mattress and jumped to her feet, her arms out like she was ready to grab Val by the hair. Val was about to yell something back at her, sleeping baby or no, but Joan turned pale and her mouth twisted in a strange half-smile, half-grimace.

She wavered in place until Val caught her and helped her lie down. As she pulled the blankets up to cover Joan’s chest, her arm brushed her sister’s cheek. Red hot, like the rocks their father used to ring the firepit in the yard.

All that night, Meg sat by the side of the bed on one of the hard, wobbly kitchen chairs, wiping Joan’s face with a cool, damp cloth and murmuring that same story over and over again.

“The lights. You should have seen them,” she said softly. “Like a night sky, but so much brighter.”

For three days, Joan tossed in a fever, gripping the sides of her stomach with her long white hands. On the fourth day, Warren went to the neighbours’ to telephone the doctor, who examined Joan for ten minutes before taking her in his own car to the nearest hospital, a one-hour drive away. Meg, with Joan’s head in her lap, went with them and left Warren, Val and the baby home alone.

Val had been worrying over the baby all this time. When Joan, groggy from oversleep, tried to feed him, she cried that her breasts hurt too much, and no milk came out of her swollen, bright-red nipples. It wasn’t long before she stopped trying altogether, and she seemed to forget his existence entirely. It was up to Val to clean him and soothe him, to prepare the diluted cow’s milk every two hours and feed him.

He seemed all right for the first little while, and he often stared at Val with a contented look. Whenever Warren held him, the baby screwed up his brow and scowled at his grandfather, fussing until Val cuddled him close to her chest and hummed a made-up song. Soon, she thought she could see his eyes searching the room for her, and she said to herself, “I’m the one he can trust. I understand him like nobody else.” When he was awake and quiet, she sometimes wet his scalp and spent a half hour gently arranging and rearranging the fine, dark hair, pretending that she was a barber with a tub of Brylcreem. And as he fell asleep in her lap, he pulled at her skirt and clutched it in his fist so tightly that she closed her eyes and slept with him in the chair by the kitchen window for as long as he needed.

But three days after Joan left for the hospital, he changed. He napped in irregular spurts and hardly seemed to notice Val at all. He began to spit up every drop of milk she fed him, coughing and choking until the front of his chest was sour and damp.

Still, she kept trying, and still, he couldn’t keep it down.

After five days, Joan and Meg hadn’t come back. The baby was yellow and listless, barely waking when Val tried to rouse him to eat. She and Warren stood at the side of his basket, staring at his small, peaked face.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.

Her father wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. “I can’t afford the doctor again. If I ask for another advance, the cannery will fire me. Every day that Joanie is in the hospital means more money.” He didn’t say, It’s Joan or the baby, but Val knew that, stripped down, this was the choice they were both making, even though it felt like no choice at all.

The next day, as Val was holding the baby, trying to tease his mouth open with the nipple on the bottle, he reached up with his shrivelled hands and looked past Val’s shoulder at something in the distance. She looked behind her and saw nothing except shadows on the bare wall, dust motes floating in a ray of sunshine. She held his little hands in hers and murmured, “You don’t have to be scared. Shhh.” After a few minutes, she even brushed the sleeve of her green dress against his cheek in the hope that he would grasp it like he always had before. But he didn’t seem to notice her at all and continued to hold his arms out stiffly. When Val began to worry they would never relax again, he sighed, dropped his hands and died, his life escaping like a whisper, the straight black hair on his head wavering slightly in the draft. Eventually Warren discovered them in the kitchen chair. He took the baby from a motionless Val, wrapped him gently in an old white sheet and carried him into the bush, where Val knew he would bury him.

For the rest of the afternoon and evening, she sat on the front stoop, but Joan and Meg didn’t come home. She thought, There’s no hurry now.

She cleaned the house for days afterward, starting at the attic and working her way down. She threw out everything that hadn’t been used in a year and scrubbed her way from room to room. Her father, for the first time, went to work clearing the bush around their house, cutting and slashing and digging in concentric circles for hours after his shift at the cannery. In the evenings, Val made dinner, usually potatoes and salt pork, with blackberry preserves from last summer for dessert. She and Warren said little; as he washed the dishes, she swept the floor. Afterward, they went to their separate bedrooms and slept dreamlessly, their arms and legs and backs aching with work. In the morning, she found the trails of dried tears on her cheeks, but never remembered crying in the night.

When Joan and Meg returned, her sister appeared older and sharper, the lines on her face clearly defined—eye, jaw, cheek. She no longer looked like a doll, but like a tired, beaten woman whose body seemed on the verge of collapsing under its own meagre weight. Her eyes darted from left to right as she came up the front walk, until they rested on Val’s face.

“How are you? What happened?” Val held on to Joan’s elbow and guided her to a chair.

Meg stepped in behind them. “It was an infection, they said. Something she caught before she was pregnant.” She paused. “She won’t be able to have any more children.”

“I’m sorry,” Val said, her hand resting on Joan’s shoulder.

“Where’s the baby?” Joan asked. “Is he sleeping?”

Val tried to be gentle, tried to impart that he had died quickly and didn’t suffer, but Joan didn’t appear to be listening as she raked her fingers through her stick-straight hair. When Val finished, Meg was sitting on the floor in a corner of the living room, sobbing into her hands.

Joan stood up. “The doctors said he might not live without me. I half expected it.” She walked down the hall and into their bedroom, not bothering to close the door. Val could hear the springs in the mattress groan as she lay down.