That wasn’t true. She’d seen the way her parents had looked at each other. She could still visualize the exact way her father had watched her mother when she was going about the simplest things. Like washing the dishes or talking on the phone or sipping her tea. He’d always seemed to be watching her. Not in a creepy, stalker kind of way, but because he’d just liked looking at her. His eyes would go all soft and mushy and full of what Jesse knew to be total contentment. He never had that look anymore. Jesse heaved a pot of boiling water off the Viking range and drained the organic wheat corkscrew pasta into a colander. Steam rose up, clouding around her face like vapor from a hot spring. She let it. It hid the tears that sprang up sometimes when she thought of her mom. She missed her. It was unfair. Mom had been a good person, and Jesse didn’t need to be some sort of expert on the human race to know that the world was severely lacking in the good people department. So why her mom?
