Читать книгу Twice as Good - Алисон Робертс - Страница 7

‘WHAT’S for tea, Mum?’

‘Bread and water,’ Janet told Adam sternly. She opened the back door of her small car and closed her eyes to the large clod that dropped from Adam’s shoe to be trodden into the carpet by Rory as he bounced into the back seat beside his brother.

Rory’s grin reassured Adam that he didn’t need to believe Janet’s threat of culinary punishment. Adam still looked worried.

‘Put your seat belts on,’ Janet ordered as she slid behind the steering-wheel. ‘Mrs Carpenter told me you were late again today.’

There was a short silence from the back seat. Mrs Carpenter lived only three doors away from their school. As the ideal position for an after-school care-giver, Enid Carpenter’s address had been a large deciding factor when Janet had chosen the older woman to care for the twins between 3 and 5 p.m. on weekdays. Along with the lower than average cost of five dollars an hour and Mrs Carpenter’s availability to care for the boys in the holidays and at home on the odd occasion when they’d been too sick to go to school.

It was an arrangement which had apparently worked well over the last eighteen months but recently Janet had detected less willingness on Enid Carpenter’s part. Janet sighed, slowing down for the roundabout near the shopping centre. The twins were becoming more of a handful for everybody, including herself, and she worried constantly about the level of supervision they actually received after school. Enid provided afternoon tea and was supposed to encourage homework. She was more likely to give the boys free run of her garden or unlimited television when the weather was wet. Janet wasn’t about to rush into criticising the caregiver, however. If Mrs Carpenter threw in the towel the boys would have to go to the same kind of day care facility she had used when they were toddlers and that would cost far more than she could afford. The early years had depleted her life savings to an alarmingly low level.

‘It shouldn’t take you more than five minutes to get to Mrs Carpenter’s house after school,’ Janet reminded the boys sharply. ‘She said it was nearly 4 o’clock when you arrived. She’d been about to go looking for you.’ And that was another worry. Janet would have been out looking for the twins within minutes of their non-arrival. Did Enid Carpenter really care about her sons?