Читать книгу The Year She Left - Kerry Kelly - Страница 5

There are at least half a dozen very good rock songs that offer convincing arguments that it is better to go down swinging than to be simply swept away, but at this hour of the morning, Kate was hard pressed to remember any of them. At this time of day, it seemed inconceivable that she could muster up the effort necessary to defend herself from this verbal onslaught.

It was much easier just to wait it out, glassy-eyed, and take it.

So she sat silently as she was fired. Again. Ending her stint at the fourth accountancy firm she’d been dismissed from this year.

The first time she’d been tearful, the second put out. By round three, a sense of déjà vu had left her feeling only mild amusement. Now, staring down the barrel of number four, her general attitude could be best described as resigned.

Until this one, Kate had told herself that it was the slow-growing cancer of her relationship with Scott that had made her so unhappy at work, that had made her barely competent. But now she realized she just didn’t like accounting.

In all cases, she’d have been happy to scream “I quit!” but had remained silent until her total lack of enthusiasm and work ethic said it for her. This time was no different.

With her newly old boss still leaning over his desk, one pudgy, accusatory finger still wagging, the saliva still glistening at the corners of his mouth, she stood, exited the room, grabbed her purse and ficus plant from the desk and saw herself out.

It was just after nine o’clock in the morning, and her time was once again her own. It didn’t feel too bad. It was sort of like sliding on shoes you haven’t worn in a while. Perhaps a little uncomfortable, but so familiar in a way, you don’t mind it.

After the events of last month, she hardly noticed. The break-up hadn’t been too traumatic, quite civilized really. But the adjustment to a life on her own had left her exhausted. His leaving in the abstract had seemed cut and dry. The problem had been that they were two separate people, whole entities that would simply head off in two different directions.

It was while clearing out the apartment that she began to realize this was untrue. It seemed there was a bit of both of them in every object in the place. There were many things he’d brought into her life that she’d never thought she’d have to part with, never thought she’d have to miss. Not the big things, the TV or the stereo. It was when he’d come back the week after he moved out to pick up his magazine rack that she’d felt her heart sink. She didn’t even like it, but it had been there. It had been theirs. She hadn’t known that she could cry over something like that.

His old high-school hockey jersey had been another example. She’d slept in it off and on in the weeks after he’d left. He saw it on the top of a hamper of clean laundry set out to be folded and grabbed for it without even asking. She bit her tongue in her effort not to ask his permission to keep it. That’s not just a figure of speech. People really do it. Sometimes they’ll even bite right through, trying so hard to stop themselves from being found out for who they are, when they are trying to do what’s right, or what’s expected. She had ended this, and she was in no position to be sentimental or selfish or angry or sad. All she could be was dry-eyed and apologetic. She didn’t protest one thing that he packed in the boxes. There weren’t so many; he wasn’t trying to ruin her. He was taking only the things he’d need to set up his own place, the things she’d always said she didn’t care for, and he was being wonderful about it.

The worst, though, was that he took all of the pictures they’d had in the place, photos of the two of them together. He didn’t ask, because he didn’t think he needed to. When she grabbed the last one sitting out in the living room, he was genuinely surprised, saying that he hadn’t thought she’d want them and didn’t want to think of them being thrown out in the trash. She tasted blood as she placed it on the top of the box he was holding. As she pushed the door for his final exit, she was impressed at his timing, waiting until this moment to break her heart as well.

Once it was over, Kate had then faced the utter nightmare of telling her parents and her older sister Tracy what she’d done. And now she’d have to add getting sacked to the list of disappointments.

Her family loved Scott, possibly more than they loved Kate. They would call to speak to him, even when she wasn’t there, to check up on him and fill him in on their lives. Keep him in the family loop. He always pretended he didn’t mind, and they loved him for it. He always returned their calls. He was a better daughter than she was, and bringing him into the fold had been her greatest familial achievement.

There had been some explaining to do and blame to accept and tears to count as they rolled down her mother’s face. Her mother wasn’t a pretty crier either.

In comparison to that, the fact that her services were no longer needed at Anderson-Smith and Co. didn’t bother her in the least. It was not only accounting that she didn’t care for, but accountants too. She had never taken delight in correcting people’s faulty sums in public meetings or whipping out a solar-powered key chain calculator at restaurants. In fact, she was pretty sure she was done with the field altogether. It hadn’t been her choice in the first place. Her father had steered her towards it after seeing she had a knack for numbers and little interest in anything at all.

That she was broke didn’t bother her either. In fact, in her mind, Kate wasn’t broke…yet. She had some outstanding salary to collect, some vacation pay coming to her and a tiny amount saved in a house fund. She was going to be broke, no doubt, and soon. But not today.

Today she could still take herself over to the fancy coffee shop, where they sprinkled cinnamon on absolutely everything, to buy a little treat to cheer herself up. She was rather fond of cinnamon.

She sat at a window table, with her plant at her feet and her hands wrapped around an enormous steaming cup, and felt satisfied. Changing her relationship status had not changed her life. She had thought it might. She was busting to be something, somebody new and/or improved. But she was still waking up in a beige-walled bedroom, albeit alone, and walking over to her beige-walled office and sitting in her beige-walled cubicle to count the seconds that make up an eight-hour day, all 28,800 of them. But this, this was a change. Whatever she might be and never be, she was no longer an accountant in the employ of Anderson-Smith. She was sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of the morning with all of the other people who don’t go to work from nine to five. People who live a different life. It was a step in the right direction, even if it was not one she’d made proactively. Staring at the people walking down the street in no apparent hurry, she was happy.

For about ten minutes. Then she saw a woman walking down the street who seemed in a very big hurry indeed. Someone familiar, and Kate realized that she had a big “I told you so” coming to her.

It was likely she had more than one. She had become quite the spectacular failure in the work department, but there was one to come from a most unpleasant source. A screeching, gloating, judgmental source who had just seen Kate and her plant sitting in the café window.

She took a long, slow sip of her coffee and tried to savour it on a level that would carry her through what was about to happen. Opening her eyes, she saw her sister still there, standing in the window, waiting to be acknowledged. Kate smiled and gave a little wave. Tracy gestured towards the plant with her thumb, and Kate just gave a little shrug, watching her sister turn back towards the café entrance.

Tracy knew. It wasn’t the ficus’s fault, the plant had simply been confirmation. No, she’d known it the minute she’d looked over and seen Kate sitting there. There were no secrets from Tracy, or Hawk-Eye, as their father had dubbed her. The girl had an uncanny knack for sizing you up in a heartbeat and an evil habit of broadcasting your innermost secrets in stereo. Kate remembered:

Walking out of the bathroom one day shortly after her twelfth birthday; “OH MY GOD! You’ve got your PERIOD!”

At sixteen, running up the stairs, brown bag in hand; “OH MY GOD! You’re on the PILL!”

At twenty-three, sitting down to dinner, dry-eyed and tight-lipped: “OH MY GOD! He DUMPED YOU!”

Thinking about it, she couldn’t recall any event in her life that hadn’t been conveyed to her family in this way. Older and wiser, Tracy had been the narrator of Kate’s life for over a quarter century.

Not that Kate wouldn’t have liked to get a word in edgewise every once in a while, to set some things straight. It is the privilege of family to know every single thing and understand absolutely nothing. But trying to stop Tracy was as productive as trying to slow down a freight train by blowing on it.

No, Kate had learned, it was so much easier to just sit there glassy-eyed and take it. Being Tracy’s little sister was the only job she’d never managed not to lose, and as much as it pained her to admit it, she wouldn’t quit this one either.

Draining the last of her cup even as her bladder protested, she ran her finger around the inside rim, collecting the last of the sweetness as her sister’s shoes clacked closer to her table.

Kate sucked the finger clean and sat up straight. She was ready now. “Hi, Trace.”

“OH MY GOD! They SACKED you!”

* * *

Mini sandwiches. Jesus. A culinary dropkick to the spirit of post-menopausal woman everywhere. The grey hairs, the nannies, the tea cozy and house slipper set.

A food reflective of the women they are made by and for. Fragile, bland antiquities trotted out for praise at celebrations and funerals.

Considered the height of elegance to those who wouldn’t know elegance if it came up and bit them in the ass, if you asked Glyniss.

She turned her eyes from the tiered silver tray laden with sandwiches never classified as tasty, but dainty. And who the hell would want to eat dainty food? Who wants to ensure their survival through the consumption of the sickening combination of eggs and mayonnaise served up on a plate in miniature Swiss rolls? Or via pimento and asparagus spears stuck at a jaunty angle from duck liver pâté sitting on a cracker?

“Who eats these things?” she asked her luncheon companions.

“Women of a certain age, dear,” replied the woman to her left, a tiny, straight-backed, proper sort of woman. All silver hair and pearls. The kind of lady who removes her coins from a change purse that closes with a crisp and satisfying snap. “And like it or not, that means you.”

Glyniss did not like it at all. She had hoped that having successfully (more or less) raised her sons and left her job behind, she would be afforded the blessing of quickly shedding her mortal coil, never to be burdened with the grey pubic hair, creaking joints or moderate incontinence a long life would ensure.

She was quite tiny herself. Glyniss had never bothered the world by taking up too much space with her presence. She doubted it would even notice if she up and disappeared. But if her last physical results were to be believed, her farewell was going to be a slow fade. Healthy as a horse, her doctor had informed her, only to top that unwelcome comparison by predicting that “It’s your mind that will go before that heart of yours gives out. Ha Ha.”

More’s the pity.

Of course, that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to Aunt Agathe, the family matriarch and sergeant major, who was for all intents and purposes the mother Glyniss never had.

To clarify, Glyniss did have a mother. A flighty, jealous and beautiful creature who could never decide which was worse, that her daughters should turn out not to be beautiful, or that they would.

Glyniss’s DNA, it seemed, had chosen the option less likely to end in the consumption of a poisoned apple, and assembled itself in a plain and pale formation. A clumsy, shy one at that.

So she was starved and taunted and threatened until she was abandoned altogether, leaving Aunt Agathe to instruct and encourage and make sure Glyniss’s life was not only sustained, but amounted to something.

It was also not the sort of thing she would ever say in front of her sister, Helen.

Helen had decided to emerge from the birth canal much like Athena through Zeus’s skull. A fully formed Amazon, Helen had hit the earth blonde and beautiful, somehow armored and immune to their mother’s jealousies and neglectfulness. Helen hadn’t cried when she’d woke one morning to find their mother had left, or when the letter had arrived saying she had died in a car accident halfway around the world a few years later. And she’d never spoken of her since.

Unlike Glyniss, Helen had fought for her senior years with a vengeance. Losing a breast in the battle, she had emerged victorious and more than willing to embrace all that golden age had to offer. Senior moments and senior discounts, afternoon teas, extra fibre cereals, as well as the God-given right to say whatever the hell she felt like saying and to keep a watchful and reproachful eye on her neighbours’ comings and goings.

The yellow teeth, falling uterus, grandchildren and saggy boobs, well boob, Helen thought it was all pretty hilarious. And Glyniss, with her A+ medical record, was too ashamed to disagree.

Which is why she was sitting on a hard plywood chair with her stocking catching on the mechanics of a folding card table draped in a lace cloth, as she meekly granted her aunt’s request that she pass the cream and sugar.

They were seated among a sea of other women in the slightly dank and heavily linoleumed parish hall of Agathe’s church.

The sisters, Helen and Glyniss, had been summoned early in the week. They were there, supposedly, to raise money for new hymnals which would provide the female congregation the necessary means to practice the other pastime deemed suitable for them, singing in the church choir.

But that was not why they were really there. They were there to talk to Glyniss about Stuart. They were concerned.

In the wee morning hours of the day after Labour Day, Stuart had arrived at his mother’s apartment building, drunk, broke and without the means to pay the cab driver who had brought him there.

He’d left Elizabeth alone to wait on yet another pitcher of beer and headed for the bathroom. Coming out, he had felt the overwhelming urge to flee. Standing at the urinal, holding on to the wall for support, it had come to him that there was still one place in the world that he could still technically call home. By the time he’d finished and zipped his fly, it was clear to him that he wanted his mother. With the idea planted, he couldn’t get himself there fast enough. He forgot to wash his hands, forgot Elizabeth’s kind offer to stay at her place…forgot Elizabeth entirely, along with the bar tab. His tab, since Elizabeth had her car and had been reduced to drinking tap water. He stumbled out the door and into a taxi. From there it was a twenty minute and thirty-five dollar trip to Glyniss’s door.

When Stuart stepped out of the cab, he realized he did not have thirty-five dollars, or ten dollars or two. So he began to ring the door buzzers of a random selection of his mother’s neighbours, calling “Sanctuary, sanctuary” into the intercom.

The driver, desirous of his fare and a quick escape from his obviously obliterated, possibly deranged passenger, managed to tease the right call number from Stuart’s muddled mind, waking Glyniss from what had been a fitful and unsatisfying sleep.

Picking up the phone to hear an accented description of a son downstairs in a bad way with no money to pay for his cab ride, she immediately brought to mind an image of her younger son Graham. But even as she could see his hazel eyes staring back at her, she could hear it was the voice of her older boy coming through the static.

“Sanctuary!”

She threw on slippers and donned a robe. Leaving the curlers in her hair, she stopped only to put on a splash of lipstick before grabbing her purse and heading for the lobby. She wasn’t about to buzz in a stranger; especially one who was audibly so unlike herself.

She said “stranger” even in her own head, but she knew what she really meant. Foreigner. And she knew it was wrong to mean it. But that didn’t change a thing.

Two unkind assumptions in about as many minutes, she noted. She knew it was wrong always to think the worst of Graham. She knew it was wrong not to buzz in foreigners. She was a bad mother and a bit of a racist. She knew it, and she could live with it.

The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open, offering Glyniss a view of her baby staring at her through the glass. He waved.

He looked half-cocked, and just like his father. She bristled but decided she wouldn’t mention that, even if it meant biting through her tongue. She was going to get this right.

She took a breath and opened the main door, wider than necessary to try to give the impression that she had no fear of this brown-skinned man who was holding her son ransom.

She pulled Stuart through the doors, handing the man two crisp twenties from her purse and thanking him profusely for bringing her son home. She sympathized that it must be terrible work having to bring home people like this, especially when in his old country he must have been “a doctor or scientist or something.” She told him she’d seen those commercials and thought the whole immigration process was such a crying shame.

Then she wished him a pleasant night and turned toward the elevator, resisting the urge to push the automatic door shut. Instead, she walked slowly, followed by Stuart, but stopping to open her purse and conduct a pretend key search until she heard the door click shut. It was all very well and good to be polite, but she wasn’t about to grant some stranger free access to the building.

Satisfied, she brought her boy up to her apartment, settling him on the couch before asking him what this was all about.

He hiccupped, then giggled, finally sighing as he said, “Emily broke up with me, but she still loves me, I think, but it’s over I think, so I don’t live there any more, and I had to come home. Can I get a glass of water or something? I am totally dry.”

Artfully ignoring the word “had”, Glyniss focused almost gleefully on the word “home”. Her boy wanted home. All motherly insecurities were momentarily swept away by the fact that in this time of crisis, her son had chosen her. She was a good mother. She was not her mother. Stuart had just proved it.

Stuart had never let her down.

Glyniss was saddened, of course, that he had been tossed aside. Well, not saddened really. Piqued. She’d never liked that Emily anyway. She was a bit on the vulgar side and was always chasing some cause or another. She had cost Glyniss a small fortune in donations to save baby seals and to stop bio-farming. But she had never once got her socially conscious behind out of her seat to help clean up the dinner dishes. Glyniss was sorry to see Stuart looking so terrible over the whole thing. Still, she couldn’t help feeling good about feeling needed.

Stuart wanted some water, and the responsibility was hers. She ran to the kitchen to fill up a glass, searching her cupboards for something he could put in his stomach to save him some agony in the morning.

Hugh, his father, had always fancied something salty when he’d rolled in from a night on the town. But it had been years since she’d kept the kinds of nuts and pretzels he preferred on hand. In the end, she grabbed a box of soda crackers and headed back to Stuart.

He thanked her for the water, and when she sat beside him and started to stroke his hair, he let her. Even though she felt him tense, he didn’t pull away. Victory. They sat there until his glass was empty. Until Stuart placed it on the ground, and, tipping to the left, landed his head on the arm of the sofa.

He’d been there ever since. That was six weeks ago. Glyniss had become, voluntarily, a slave to his every whim. It had been an honour, then a duty, and was now, frankly, a large, boring drain. She had mentioned this to her sister the last time they’d spoken on the phone. She had asked for sympathy but had also expected praise. “You’re a good mother, Glyniss. There’s a good girl.”

It had been a mistake. Helen thought her less a saint than a sucker and had hung up after telling her so, only to pick it up again to call Agathe.

Naturally, Glyniss’s presence had been requested. She was to be called on the carpet to explain, to defend why she would spend her days fetching a grown man’s bathrobe and favourite cereal and preferred magazines, because he refused to get his lazy ass off the couch.

There wasn’t even any small talk to prepare her before the questioning began.

“Did Stuart drop you off?” Agathe asked, innocent as a vulture.

“Well, no, Stuart doesn’t have a car.”

“I thought he had a flashy car.”

“That’s Graham, Aunt Aggie”

“Oh, yes. Graham does have the nice car. Did he walk you over then?”

“No, I was running late and hopped in a cab.”

“I see.”

They smiled at each other and stirred their tea. Helen shifted her chair a bit to fill the silence.

“What’s he going to be up to today?” the older woman continued, circling.

“Oh. I’m not sure,” Glyniss replied brightly. Too brightly. Her cheeks began to burn.

“Really. If I’ve heard correctly, I believe he’ll be sitting in your living room concocting shopping lists of ridiculous items for you to fetch for him upon your return.” The first grenade had been lobbed.

“I can’t imagine where you heard that,” Glynnis said, glaring at Helen, only to find that Helen wasn’t looking even the slightest bit sheepish.

“Oh, come off it, Glyn. You wouldn’t have been complaining about it if you hadn’t had enough of it,” Helen said calmly. “And we know you can’t ever stand up for yourself, so you want us to stand up for you. That’s why you called. Admit it.”

Glyniss felt her body slump. She was deflated. Not because Helen was right, but because she was always so wrong. She didn’t want Stuart to go, and she didn’t want them to tell her that she did. She wanted to tell them that it was hard, and he was sad, and he never said thank you for any of it. She wanted them to say thank you, and she wanted to know that what she was doing was deserving of thanks.

She said none of this, of course. No one ever did. “Stuart is going through a horrible time right now, and he needs a little sympathy and support.”

Helen waved the explanation away with her spoon, saying firmly, and quite coldly to Glyniss’s ears, “I know he broke up with Emily, and that they dated a long time, and it must be hard, but he did not lose a limb. He’s not disabled, he’s disinclined. There is a huge difference.”

“And either way, darling, it’s not you who should be punished for this woman’s betrayal,” added Agathe. “Don’t let the boy treat you poorly. You’ve done too much for him to ever allow that.” She had that air of authority that made it nearly impossible for Glyniss to ever argue with her.

But she would argue today. For Stuart and for herself, she would put up a fight.

“He’s not mistreating me,” she started, remembering as soon as she said it that she’d armed her sister with a litany of complaints, proving that, in fact, he was. She went on hurriedly. “Not on purpose. He’s a sensitive boy, and he needs my understanding.”

“He’s not sensitive, he’s spoiled, and he feels sorry for himself, and he feels entitled to take it out on you because you’ve always let him,” Helen said, condemning both mother and son in the same staid, matter-of-fact tone one uses to tell the time.

“How dare you,” Glynnis said hotly. She could taste the tears before she felt them, thick in her throat.

“Now, girls,” Agathe interjected. “We are not here, Helen, to burden your sister further. Glyniss, we know that Stuart has always been special to you. We are simply worried you are letting that cloud your reaction to his current predicament in a way that may be harmful to you both.”

The attempt at diplomacy was lost in what Glyniss heard as a veiled accusation, made worse because it was true.

“So I’m a doormat, and I pick favourites? What’s coming next? That I picked a drunk for a husband, and my divorce tainted the family? That I didn’t save enough money to retire like you wanted? Going to remind everyone that I used to steal the penny candy, Helen? I’m such a mess, it’s a wonder you can stomach to look at me.”

Glyniss had said this in an attempt to be cool and cutting. But she could not control the wobble in her voice and had managed to jostle a good quantity of the tea from her cup with a waving hand.

“Everyone is looking at you, dear,” said Agathe through a tight smile. She would not be the object of her Ladies Circle gossip.

Helen, infuriatingly, remained unfazed by the outbursts, looking neither sorry, nor angry, but smiling as she said, “Glyn, I’ve got no problem with you having a favourite. Everyone has a favourite. I personally think my son’s an idiot and can’t believe he’s mine by blood. I just think it’s odd that your favourite’s Stuart. I never did understand that.”

To some it would be hard to understand, since Graham, Glynnis’s younger boy, was the one with his life together. The wife, the job, the car, the confidence. It was Graham who had carried them through the first few months after Hugh’s leaving, when Stuart hardly left his room and Glyniss couldn’t quite get herself motivated to pay the bills or buy the groceries. He was the one who never asked for anything.

Graham was the baby. In a way, he was the reason she and Hugh had split up, much in the same way that Stuart’s surprise appearance was the reason they had gotten together.

Glyniss and Hugh had been dating only briefly when she became pregnant. They had not been in love, but they had been intimate. That was enough of a reason for Hugh to propose, once Agathe had shown up at his boarding house one day and left five thousand dollars poorer.

Glyniss had been thrilled by his interest, the subsequent stroking and thrusting, and finally, his offer to make a legitimate woman of her. The day he proposed, she felt like she had dodged a bullet. Not that of family scandal, but of spinsterhood, which would have been worse. Glyniss was thirty-two years old at the time.

She had wanted to be a bride and a wife, and she was, all because of Stuart. In the few short months that it took the new couple to invest Agathe’s “wedding present” in a decent bungalow and set up house, Glyniss had managed to turn a blind eye to Hugh’s late nights and red eyes and stumbles over the steps upstairs.

Just when it seemed that things would settle and she would have to face the nights alone with no boxes to unpack or curtains to hang, Stuart had arrived, all sweet smells and chub. His big blue eyes staring into hers, he looked to her for everything, wanting her always near.

She was more than happy to spend her evenings by his cribside. Knowing in her heart that she had somehow pulled a fast one on Hugh with this marriage and baby business, she never requested that he spend time with his son or herself unless there was company present. He had done enough for her, and she was grateful.

Grateful enough to make his meals, clean up his messes and ignore his drunken ramblings. And, on occasion, to allow his drunken hands upon her, though he tended to find that comfort outside of their marriage bed, which suited them both.

Even as a youngster, Stuart had sensed this arrangement, staying far from his father unless he was called before him to sing a song or be taught to make fart noises or be tossed in the air and laugh, even though it frightened him. He was his mother’s joy and his father’s responsibility, and he knew he ought to be sorry for it.

In this way, they were not a dysfunctional family. They functioned quite well. And if they weren’t a happy one, they were close enough for Glyniss and, it seemed, for Hugh.

Graham’s arrival a few years later changed things. He was a handsome baby, as was Stuart, but he was not a pleasant one. He was quiet and solemn. He was so stone-faced, in fact, that his father had wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with him. He slept through the night almost immediately and cried only for meals and when he was in need of a change. And, as a final insult, he only wanted those tasks performed by his father.

He didn’t like being held by Glyniss. He didn’t want to feed from her breast. He preferred to sit alone in a baby seat in the corner, unfussed until his father got home. Then he would cry, inconsolable, until he had his father’s attention, until he had been seen.

But as he grew, he didn’t want even that. He didn’t much care for reciting the alphabet for a drunken audience or standing at the ready to play the role of loving son. He didn’t like being fussed over by his mother. In fact, the only person who seemed to be able to do anything with him at all was Stuart.

Graham, it seemed, had the unfortunate talent, some might say the curse, of seeing things not as he’d like them to be, but as they really were. He knew that what was in his father’s mug was not coffee. He knew that his mother knew too. He knew that his father did not like his children, and when he got old enough, he told his mother so. She had slapped him once, hard, thinking it would make him cry, but he simply put his hand to his cheek and walked away with his suspicions confirmed. Soon after, he also grew to know that his father was staying away for greater stretches at a time and that he would not be their father much longer. He knew that his mother thought it was his fault. He knew that when she told him that she wished he’d been born “more like his brother,” she meant she wished he had not been born at all. When he was seven, he’d told her that, too. She’d slapped him again, for the last time.

She had been shocked to hear him say it and to know that it was true. Shocked to know that he was right. Her marriage was ending, and it was Graham’s fault.

He wasn’t a pleaser, this solemn boy. He knew that he was the cause of much unhappiness, but he did nothing to try to make them forget, to make up for it. He didn’t play along in this game that they’d so carefully orchestrated. He didn’t think he owed them for the trouble his presence had brought them.

It had taken the wind out of her, this moment of truth. But it had not knocked her down. It was something to file away in the deep, dark place we all pretend we don’t have, and she’d gone to find Graham sitting on his bed holding his cheek, and she’d sat beside him and hugged him tight and told him she could not believe he would think such a thing, and she’d held on, though he struggled to get away from her for a very, very long time.

That night she had made her family an elaborate dinner featuring some of what she believed were Graham’s favourite things, though he’d never stated a preference, so she couldn’t be sure. Then she had cleaned up the dishes and tucked him into bed reading him what she thought to be his favourite story, even though he told her he was tired and turned away from her when she sat on the bed. Once she finished the book, she made herself a cup of tea and sat with it at the table watching a salty drop hit the formica, then another. That was when Stuart had come up behind her, putting a hand upon her shoulder.

“Are you crying, Ma?”

“No. Honey, I’m just a little tired from making dinner,” she said, wiping her eyes and smiling at him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t help you with the dishes, Ma,” he said softly.

Glyniss looked at her sister and Aunt across the card table and thirty-odd years and said, “I don’t have favourites. But Stuart is special, and he needs me, and what I don’t need is a lecture.”

“What you need is a good slap up the side of the head, and so does your boy there,” said Helen, draining her cup.

“Helen, you are not helping Glyniss. And Glyniss, you are not helping Stuart. He needs to get his life going again, and if you are not the person to do it, then I know who is.”

“You?” said Glyniss hopefully.

“I think she means your other favourite sissy,” said Helen with a smirk.

“Helen! But yes, Glyniss, I think it’s time you had Graham stop by for a chat.”