I walked into the kitchen to find Anil washing up from dinner.
“Slay any dragons tonight?” he asked when he saw me, his arms covered in suds up to the elbows.
“Not tonight,” I said with a laugh. “But Amy caused some drama.”
“In the game or in real life?”
“In the game,” I clarified, “though I wouldn’t put the real-life drama past her.”
“That’s my girl,” he said with a laugh. They’d only crossed paths a handful of times, but they’d gotten on like a house on fire. Everyone seemed to get on with Amy like that; she had a way of adapting herself to whoever was around.
“Get in line,” I muttered.
I stepped in to help Anil, drying once he’d washed; we really did need a dishwasher, didn’t we? We ran through the evening together, and I was relieved to hear that it had been uneventful, and Ethel had been mostly with it.
“It was a good day,” Anil said.
“And you remembered to up the beta blocker dosage?”
“Sure did,” Anil replied, knocking his knuckle against the white binder on the worktop next to the landline. It was open to the medication schedule, which I’d updated just that morning. I’d started the binder when I’d first hired Anil, wanting to make sure I had everything documented; it was the only way I felt comfortable leaving Ethel with him. I doubted he referenced it much anymore, but it was still nice to have, especially when Amy had started staying with her, too.
“Just a thought, man,” Anil said, “we should think about adding a second bath per week for a while. I’ve noticed a few blemishes I think more baths could help. And she seems to enjoy them.”
I froze with a plate in my hand. The suggestion made perfect sense, of course, but it caught me off guard, too. Ethel had made it very clear in her earlier stages that she didn’t want me bathing her or helping her use the toilet; she wanted me to hire people to help with that. I only had Anil on Thursday and Friday nights though, and Saturdays when he wasn’t on his course. Although…
“Actually,” I said, “my friends wanna start doing a pub quiz on Tuesdays. Do you wanna add another night into the mix? At least for the summer?”
“Hell yeah,” Anil said, smiling at me. I got the sense that he really liked spending time with Ethel, which made it much easier to leave her with him.
“Perfect. I’ll send you the details over the weekend when I figure out what the plan is.”
As I sent Anil on his way and headed back into the lounge, I realised my pocket was heavier than usual, and I remembered the hunk of rhodonite Amy had given me. I pulled it out and examined it.
Here at home, I could let the smile crack across my face as I looked it over. Our windowsill was littered with shiny rocks of various hues, all of which had different purported healing properties. It was all a bunch of nonsense as far as I was concerned, but Ethel liked the way they looked, and I’d always been touched by how much Amy cared for her. How much she cared about everything, actually.
I stepped out into the back garden, dragging the plastic dining table off the raised stone patio and into the middle of our small patch of grass so it would get as much moonlight as possible, then placed the crystal dead centre. I stepped back and snapped a photo, then sent it to Amy.
I watched as the message quickly went from delivered to read, and I was only a little disappointed when she didn’t respond.
* * *
The next evening,I sat across from Poppy talking about Ethel. She was an occupational therapist, and she was giving me a list of questions to ask when we had Ethel’s next appointment. They were mostly the same as what I’d found online, but I was grateful she was talking me through it anyway.
Poppy and I had been out dozens of times over the last few years, mostly as respite from the hell that was our local dating scene. It was a small town, which meant that almost everyone I matched with was someone I knew or recognised, and there was really only one good place to go for drinks. It was exhausting to have to ask the same four questions over and over again: What do you do? Are you from around here? What do you do for fun? And, of course, the old classic: how is someone like you single?
No, Poppy and I already knew all that about each other. She was an OT, she’d lived here her whole life but had gone to the posh school Fatima now taught at, she loved old films, and like me she had no emotional bandwidth for a relationship. She was a single mum whose kid spent weekends with her dad, which meant Poppy had one night a week where she wasn’t working or parenting. It was perfectly symmetrical to my situation, so despite the fact that we had zero long-term interest in one another, we got dressed up every now and then and pretended like we did.
And if sometimes we ended up back at Poppy’s, well, that was fine too. She was a beautiful woman, tall, with long blonde hair and a dusting of freckles across her pale cheeks. In brief moments of uncharacteristic self-awareness, I could recognise the parallels to another leggy blonde I knew. But most of the time, I was happy to ignore that particular coincidence.
It had been a while since I’d gone back to hers, though, or to anyone’s for that matter. About ten months, in fact.
As Poppy told me about a particularly chaotic shift she’d had during the week, my attention felt suddenly pulled towards the front window, as if my gaze were magnetised. The sun was still out and wouldn’t set for a while still, and the lighting inside was low and moody, so I could see outside perfectly.
Standing just to the side of the door, her face frozen in surprise, was Amy.
It was a shock to see her, but I found myself smiling immediately. She looked beautiful in a white knit top that tied together twice at the front, her chest and stomach bare beneath, her long tanned legs visible through the holes in her jeans. The setting sun caused a sort of halo effect around her blonde hair, which was perfectly straight and hanging all the way to her hips instead of in its usual messy ponytail.
I stared at her for a long moment, wondering what she was doing there and waiting for her to look around and see me, but her gaze was fixed on something on the other side of the bar from where Poppy and I were sat. I tried to follow her line of sight, but the best guess I had was a table at the back where a couple sat on one side of a four-top. It was one of my biggest pet hates; save the PDA for home and actually look one another in the eye, for fuck’s sake. And there was plenty of PDA: the clean-cut guy had his mouth all over the neck of the petite blonde next to him, her chin-length hair giving everyone full view of what was going on. She had her hand on the side of her date’s face– or her fiancé’s, I supposed, given the giant rock on her left ring finger.
