Julia's Daughters by Colleen Faulkner

hair, black eye-pencil eyes and eyebrows. But there’s a cloud around her, too. A cloud that scares me and makes me feel bad for her at the same time.
    Since the accident, I’ve pretended not to see her, but she’s caught me. She knows I see her and I suddenly feel shaky and my eyes get watery. The crazy thing is, her eyes look wet, too. The eyeliner probably. She just keeps looking at me. It’s like she wants something from me. But I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know if I could give it to her, even if I wanted to.
    I turn around and walk into the hall. I hear the TV. Nickelodeon. I wipe at my eyes so I don’t look stupid and I call Alice’s name.

Chapter 11
    Julia
    49 days
    Â 
    I stare at the powder room door. I’ve been in here at least ten minutes. I’m surprised no one has come looking for me.
    Not really.
    Who would come looking for me? Izzy? Possibly. Certainly not Haley. She hates me. Not my husband. Ben’s thoughts are a thousand miles away from me right now; he’s in the bosom of his family.
    I groan to myself. How is it that after all these years, I still haven’t outgrown, outsmarted, out- somethinged these petty jealousies?
    I have no right to be covetous. I know that.
    I knew what I was getting myself into when I married Ben almost twenty years ago. I was an adult woman, making adult choices. I knew what his family was like. How they could be overwhelming and all encompassing. And it’s not like we didn’t talk about it. Ben warned me when we started discussing the possibility of marriage, our senior year at Cal. He flat out told me that he was a mama’s boy. He told me his brothers were his best friends.
    But I wasn’t really listening. Looking back, I see that now. Ben was so much fun and I was so in love. I was too busy thinking about a house with a finely manicured lawn, thanks to Maxton and Sons, and a baby in my arms. I didn’t read between the lines. The truth is, I was young and dumb. And I didn’t want to listen to my mother. I didn’t want her to be right. About me or Ben. About anything.
    But she was right. She’d been wrong about a lot of things, but this one thing, she’d been right about. What Ben had been trying to tell me was that I would never be the most important woman in his life. That I would never be his best friend.
    That was exactly what my mother told me. Damn her.
    So I have no right to ask to change the rules now. Not after all of these years. Not after having three children. Certainly not after burying one.
    And then here I am again, back to Caitlin. It’s like that silly movie Caitlin loved, Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. He keeps living the same day, over and over again.
    I lean back on the toilet. The lid’s down; it’s actually not an uncomfortable seat. And it smells good in here. Linda always has Yankee candles burning all over her house. The one burning on the sink smells like vanilla. It’s nice. I used to burn candles in our house too. Before we draped the mirrors with black crepe and piled ashes on the furniture.
    I came into the bathroom to pee . . . going on fourteen minutes ago, I see from my cell sitting on the edge of the sink. But then I realized I needed a minute. A minute to what, I’m not sure. Not necessarily to cry. Although this is probably the longest I’ve gone without crying in forty-nine days.
    I think I just needed to catch my breath.
    Tonight’s been hard. Harder even than I thought it would be. So hard that more than once I seriously considered getting up and walking out.
    But I didn’t leave. I just hid in the bathroom. That’s progress, isn’t it?
    I close my eyes.
    I should cut myself a break. This is my first real foray into some sort of normal outing. A birthday dinner at my mother-in-law’s. A protected environment where someone who doesn’t know won’t ask how Caitlin is doing in her cheering