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I made a big thing of looking back at him too, which made him blush. I spotted a missing button on the sleeve of his jacket, which he was still wearing in the car like an amateur. “I take it you didn’t buy something new to wear for this event either.”
Phil shrugged. “We’ve all been to a funeral or something before, right?”
Matt had his jacket folded neatly on the front passenger seat alongside him. “Now I have it from the arsehole’s mouth himself that Axel will be along tonight. Are you going to want to see him?”
“Well I’m going to see him whether I want to or not if he’s there, right?”
I started at Dad standing outside the car. He tapped on the side of the car even though all the windows were still down.
“Hey Matt, will you say hi to your mum for me?”
He went off laughing. I traded glances with Phil.
Matt put his head down on his steering wheel and started upright again when the horn went off.
“Okay, Matt,” I said, “you’d better tell me what you know about this.”
“Your dad has been meeting with my mum,” Matt muttered.
“Meeting…”
“Well I can’t give you anything more specific, it’s not like I spy on them. But now and then when you’ve been out doing something else, he comes over and they go off, sometimes out of the house and… well, she’s a lot happier these days, I don’t ask too many questions. But yeah, that is a thing that is happening.” He put his windows up and started to drive off like he might be able to outrun this discussion. No such luck: Phil was laughing so loudly it was hard to even think about getting a word in.
“You realise he’s a total flake and he might break her heart harder than that guy who broke her already, and he’s the type who expects the woman to financially compensate him.”
Matt laughed. “You, Aileen? Trying to warn me about a man who might be bad news?”
“I do see the funny side of the situation,” I admitted.
I didn’t think I really did. I was mostly in shock. Had he been cheating on Sandy with Matt’s mother, or were they all at a point in their lives where you just accepted that nobody was really doing the most honourable thing? Sandy had definitely been acting like something was up lately, with all her clinger antics. I’d mostly ignored it because I knew I was never going to have to accept Sandy as a permanent part of my life, but I was going to feel a bit guilty if it turned out Dad had been two-timing her.
Matt coughed pointedly until Phil finally chilled out with his cackling. “It worries me, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. I don’t think there’s anything I should do about it. I… you’ve got to let people be happy however works best for them. And sometimes that means they have to enjoy things that might be ultimately bad for them.”
“You’re making my dad sound like a diet consisting only of Tim Tams or something. Because if that was the case, I’d want to date him.”
“I’m just saying not everyone arrives at the same destination through the same steps. And that’s okay. After everything Mum has been through, I’m willing to let her try anything that lifts her mood, if only for a little bit.”
We’d already made it to the venue our school always hired for this event. It looked exactly the same as it always looked when I passed it on the way to somewhere else. I didn’t think anyone from our class had been invited to participate in the decisions about catering and decorating. It was supposed to be a meaningful experience for us based on the fact of its existence only.
When we stepped out of the car I could already see Callie and Tamara waiting at the door with Lucas and Steven on opposing sides of them, forming a barrier that kept them from the rest of the class. Lucas was scanning everyone as they came in, greeting a few lucky individuals who were mostly too awkward to either be sharp with him or overly friendly, either. Callie looked bored in a dress that was supposed to incite questions of who are you wearing? but was bearing it well, bestowing smiles on Lucas’s chosen few who just reared back in bewilderment, like they still couldn’t quite remember who she was.
It made me shudder a little, but I had a while to keep observing them as I walked up from our parking spot, and for just a moment when we were too far away and nobody else was near, they broke character. Lucas grinned, and slung his arm across Callie’s shoulders, tucking her against him. She wouldn’t look at him for some reason, but her lips eventually quivered into a smile as well. When they were alone, without a doubt they had a world that only the two of them were ever invited into. And that actually seemed like the sort of thing that would suit Callie.
Tamara and Steven had already let half the attendees in on their personal world. They were both a bit rumpled, their eye contact searing, and I could hear what they were snapping at one another from ten paces.
“If you’d told me you were going to be late, I could have done something better with my time than sitting around twiddling my thumbs. But I guess you were too busy twiddling your thumbs to care about anyone else!”
Steven was somehow both wired and relaxed in the face of her tirade. “Jess knew where I was.”
“And why should I have to think that I need to ask my little sister where my boyfriend is? What kind of arrangement is that?”
I split off from Matt and Phil to get the greetings over with before I could find out if being Callie’s sometime friend and the target of Axel’s harassment entitled me to a Lucas greeting. “Lovely evening for it, isn’t it? Callie, you look like all the rest of the bucks Tamara and I couldn’t be bothered spending to fit ourselves out. Tamara, you’ve got Paradise in trouble, I see.”
Callie and Tamara had to take a moment out from their men to roll their eyes at one another. “It’s nice to see you decided to show up, Aileen,” said Callie, managing to mostly sound sincere.
Lucas slipped his phone back into an inner pocket of his suit jacket. He was so quick I had almost missed him. “We’ll see you again inside,” he said.
I knew exactly who he had gotten in contact with and why, but if he wanted to think he could just dismiss me now I was happy to move on with my evening as planned.
