Her responding smile is fake. It’s a little painful, to be honest. The Callie who laughed with me last night, the one I shared the easy conversation in the pub with, is gone, probably somewhere in Inverness. This Callie is grumpy and distant, and I want the other one back.
The door closes in my face.
Well, I should have at least made a joke to lighten the mood. Better have something prepared for next time.
My phone rings while I make my way down the stairs, and when I see my grandmother’s name flashing across the screen, I answer it. “Hiya, Granny.”
“Hamish gave me the news.” She sighs heavily. “There’s a storm coming, Gav. I feel it in my elbow.”
I go into my office on the first floor and close the door behind me. The drapes are pushed away from the window, and the clouds are off in the distance. Granny’s elbow was broken once and gives her grief, but it’s not usually wrong about the weather. “Let’s hope you’re misinterpreting.”
“Is your guest here?”
“Aye, she’s settling in now.” I feel a wee bit of temptation to tell Granny what a fool I’ve been. Her advice is usually grand, and I’ve been following it most of my life. But I don’t want her to be disappointed in me, either, and I know she will be. “How is Grandad?”
“Well enough, he is. Canna get him to agree to an American Christmas. He thinks they’ve come to ruin December.”
“They’ve taken enough from us, haven’t they?” he calls in the background.
He still blames America for stealing his best mate over fifty years ago. Never mind that Georgie is still happily married and living in upstate New York near all his grandkids.
“Quiet, you,” Granny says, her voice distant. “He doesn’t like change.”
“Mrs. Winter sent out an email saying she’d like to make a schedule for dinners, so we take turns cooking meals. Other than that, I don’t believe there’s much planned in the way of American Christmas.”
“Just you wait, lad,” Grandad says. “They’ll try to microwave the tea.”
I must be on the speakerphone.
Granny makes a clucking sound, and I can hear her moving away. “Listen, there’s something I’d like to ask you. When your parents arrive, how would you feel about letting them park up by the shed?”
Does she meanifthey arrive? I can’t say that to her or it’ll break her heart, but my parents aren’t known for keeping to their word. They live in a campervan and move at the whims oftheir finances and the weather, so we’ll see them when it’s convenient for them and not a minute sooner. “It’s your house, Granny. You decide where they park up.”
The line goes silent. My desk is littered with discarded story concepts and blips of ideas. Napkins torn in half with pencil sketches and lists of potential books I haven’t tried to write yet. Things that don’t evoke any feelings at all. I move everything aside and pull out my iPad, powering it on. When Granny still doesn’t speak, I glance up at the window. My eyes land on the large shed outside and the gravel drive leading up to it.
“You mean here,” I say. My mouth goes dry. She wants my parents to stayhere? After I bought the house from them two years ago, they haven’t been back here once. When I see them, it’s at my grandparents’ house across town, at the pub for dinner, or not at all. “Granny, they won’t want to come here.”
Even if they did, why did she think it was a good idea to make them sleepoutsideof the house they couldn’t afford to keep?
“I think they would like the invitation, Gavin.”
“We don’t see eye to eye on that opinion.”
“Mine is not exactly an opinion,” she says.
I set my Apple Pencil on the desk and lean back in my leather computer chair. I can’t illustrate anything right now. “You’ve already spoken to Mum about this, haven’t you?”
“She wants to be near you, Gavin.”
“What Jean says she wants, and what she actually does, are two entirely different things.” Granny, of all people, should know this well. My mother couldn’t commit to anything in the world outside of my father. Toward him, she is stalwart. But the biscuits for my bake sales and the permission forms for school trips, she is fluid about. Those don’tneedto happen. No one willdieif the biscuits don’t show up, Gavin. It’s not life or death if you miss the class trip to the zoo, Gavin.
When all my mates saw a lion leap in the air and catch anunsuspecting bird in its jaw on a school trip, it was the final straw. I started asking Granny to step in when things were important to me. That was the last thing I was going to miss because of a mere signature.
“You’ll not let her park up at the house, then?” Granny asks.
Way to make me sound like the bad guy. “They’re always welcome to park here.”
I’m simply not looking forward to the morning when we make plans to golf, and I look out my window to find the campervan missing because they had a whim to drive to Wales.
