Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble

from asking questions, she couldn’t stop thinking about the pretty girl in the photographs.
    Now, though, she was free to ask him whatever she wanted to know.
    And she wanted to know everything. She thought that if she probed every detail, understood everything, then she wouldn’t be able to imagine anything else. That knowing would enable her to put it away, that chapter of Andy’s life, and not worry about it.

    T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 71
    It hadn’t exactly worked that way.
    Karen had changed, Andy said, as soon as they left Turkey. Slowly, at first. He didn’t notice until after they were married. He hadn’t seen the ambition and the drive and the slight streak of ruthless selfishness. Maybe it hadn’t been there on the beach. Maybe she grew into it. Andy said he had almost admitted to himself that he wasn’t in love with her anymore when she’d gotten pregnant with Cee Cee. It had been an accident. (Lisa didn’t understand how that happened. She’d had a lot of sex, with a lot of guys, and she’d never come close to having “an accident.” She never entirely believed intelligent people who said they did.) For a few weeks a sullen and sick Karen had talked about “the pregnancy” and not “the baby,” and Andy suspected that if it were up to her she might not stay pregnant. He tried, he said, for Cee Cee. He said she did, too, although Lisa found that harder to imagine.
    Lisa never worried that Andy still had feelings for Karen. That wasn’t it. She was just jealous of the feelings he had once had for her. Mum had told her off about it once. She’d said it was immature. That people were who they were and that included a part of all the people they’d loved before. And that you should be glad of someone’s capacity to love and then love again, not jealous. That virgins—emotional and physical—had far less to offer in an adult relationship. Lisa remembered telling her mum she’d been watching too much Oprah on cable TV.

    �
    Christmas Day

    “Delicious. We did good!”
    “No amount of chestnuts and bacon could ever make Brussels sprouts delicious.”
    “And that’s why we made you carrots.”
    “With maple glaze, if you please. Taking the vegetable as near to being a sweetie as the vegetable can get. Just for your sweet tooth.”
    “Now they were delicious!”
    “Forgot the cranberry sauce, but other than that, pretty good.”
    “I just wish it took as long to eat it as it took to wash up from.”
    Lisa was washing, Amanda was drying.
    Jennifer was clearing, and Hannah was sitting on one of the bar stools, eating brandy butter straight from the bowl with her finger.
    Jennifer pulled a face. “That’s disgusting. You’ll be sick.”
    Hannah smirked. “It isn’t Christmas Day until someone’s been sick.”
    “I wouldn’t mind if you at least ate Christmas pudding with it.”
    “But Christmas pudding is disgusting.”
    “Philistine. Spoiled Philistine. When we were little, we weren’t allowed brandy butter without it.”
    “Fortunately for me, they’d chilled out by the time I came along.”
    “They weren’t chilled out—they were just knackered.”
    “There have to be some perks to being the baby.”

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    “Some perks! The whole gig is one long perk. Try being the oldest,”
    Lisa shrieked.
    “Forget that. Middlie—that’s the tough position. Ask any shrink.”
    Jennifer was half serious.
    Amanda snorted. “But there are two of us in the middle—what does that mean?”
    “It means in this family you don’t even get the worst position in the family to yourself, that’s what it means. . . .”
    “Shut up moaning—who wants another liqueur? If we’re stuck in here while the hunter gatherers roam free, we may as well have a drink.”
    Mark was outside with Andy and Stephen. Apparently they were chopping more logs for the fire. Actually they were smoking cigars and avoiding the