Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble Page A

dishes—a perfectly open secret, and the way it had always been.
    No one really wanted it to be any different.
    Lisa peeled off her Marigolds and grabbed the Baileys and the ama-retto, plus a few of the small glasses Amanda had just dried.
    “Then Amanda can tell us what she’s so . . . smiley about.”
    “What do you mean?!” Amanda’s question was playful. “Aren’t I always?”
    “Not with so much twinkle . . .”
    “Is it a guy?” Hannah asked, eyes wide.
    “Of course it’s a guy,” said Lisa, winking at her little sister.
    “Fantastic.” Jennifer sipped her drink. “Dish, Mandy-Pandy—let’s have a little bit of vicarious romance.”
    Lisa caught the faint note of bitterness in her sister’s voice, but Jennifer avoided her gaze, and she turned back to Amanda, who was still wearing her paper hat, rakishly pushed back on her head. On her it looked good. “So . . .”
    “Blimey—it’s like the Spanish Inquisition.” Amanda laughed, looking from one expectant face to the others. “Okay, okay. There might be a guy.”
    Expectant silence.
    “There is a guy. I met him on the underground. Well, actually, I’d 74 e l i z a b e t h
    n o b l e
    seen him before, but . . . I . . . long story . . . I really talked to him properly first on the underground.”
    “That’s not fair. The only people who ever talk to me on public transport are drunks and beggars.”
    “He’s neither. He’s a student.”
    “They’re usually both, most of the time.”
    “He’s not. He’s studying to be an architect, like Mark, actually, so as you know, that takes longer than . . . I don’t know . . . being a doctor or a vet or something.”
    “Oooh. Clever boy.”
    “And handsome boy?”
    “Well . . . not in the conventional sense, I don’t think. He’s a redhead.”
    “Ginger pubes.” Lisa nodded sympathetically.
    “Gross!” Hannah groaned.
    Amanda gave Lisa a playful shove. “I wouldn’t know—we’re not all slappers.”
    “Ah—those were the days.” Lisa shook her head in mock wistfulness.
    “So are you two seeing each other?” Jennifer asked.
    Amanda smiled shyly. “I think so, yes, a bit. We only met a couple of weeks ago, so it’s early days. And, what with Christmas and stuff . . .”
    “Is he at home, doing the family thing?”
    “Yes. In Cornwall. He’s from this huge family, apparently—you know, a million cousins.”
    “Was he the call this morning?”
    She nodded. “He was. He gave me a present, the other day, before he left. He wanted to see if I’d opened it.”
    “We didn’t see it.”
    “I opened it on my own, early.”
    “And . . . what was it . . . ?”
    “Mind your own business!”
    “You’re leaving us with no choice but to assume it was, I don’t know—Agent Provocateur knickers or something. . . .”

    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 75
    “Assume what you want.”
    “Leave her be,” Jennifer chided Lisa. “A girl is allowed a secret.”
    It had been a square box, wrapped so beautifully— so Mumlike—that she wondered if he could possibly have done it himself.
    Inside, nestled on gold tissue paper, was a CD with no markings. The note had said, “I know this is obsolete technology, but I could hardly steal your iPod and load this, so it’s the best I could do. I hope you have a CD player at home. You seem like the kind of girl who wakes up early and sneaks a peek at her presents. I’m the kind of boy who will be woken early by half a dozen hyperactive nephews, so listen to this before breakfast, and I’ll be thinking about you. . . .”
    It was a mix tape. She hadn’t had anything like it since she was about fifteen and mix tapes were really tapes, and Paul Young was on all of them. It was a mix tape full of the cheesiest, most saccharine-laden, goofy love songs. Really. We were talking Cliff Richards’s “Miss You Nights.” Phil Collins’s “Groovy Kind of Love.” A Top 10 of naff.
    She’d snuck into Hannah’s room while