AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘You need to be less of a hothead, Sophie Brennan. Next time try using your words instead of your fists. Or better still, just walk away.’
‘You can’t teach someone a lesson with words.’
My grandfather smiled.
‘You’d be surprised, muffin.’
Nanna had some experience in that department it seemed. I heard her and my mother talking one night when I was supposed to be asleep, disjointed words floating up through the floorboards.
‘I know what I saw. . . People are talking. . . Better if you. . .’
Not long after that we left the clapboard house with three suitcases, a Ziploc bag of cheese sandwiches and two plane tickets.
‘London, baby,’ my mother said.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I said, trying not to cry.
‘You win more arguments with smiles than tears,’ Nanna G used to say. ‘And smiles don’t make your eyes puffy.’
One of her ‘precious pearls of wisdom’.
‘It’s never too late to turn your life around,’ was the particular gem she gave my mother as we said goodbye that day, her and my grandfather standing side by side on the stoop, arms folded. Looking anywhere other than in our direction.
Was this why we were leaving, to find my mother a new husband? If so, what was wrong with the States? There were plenty of men here. Mr Benson, who ran the Candy Kingdom in Newton Center, was my not-so-secret ambition. A man for her, a lifetime supply of Red Vines and strawberry laces for me. Win-win, my grandfather might have said, though for some reason my mother didn’t see it that way.
‘Do you know what a confirmed bachelor is, Sophie?’
I considered the question.
‘An unmarried man who’s an adult in the eyes of the church?’
‘Not quite.’
I glanced at her, sitting up in the cab; chin raised, shoulders pushed back.
Let’s put on our happy faces.
Her happy face was a mask, a poor disguise for her vulnerability.
I wasn’t sure what made me think she was fragile. Her slightness perhaps? Her little bird wrists, that long slender neck.
People always said she looked like a curly-haired Hepburn. Not Breakfast at Tiffany’s Audrey with her choker of pearls and long cigarette holder, my mother was nothing like a film star. But Audrey, make-up-less in a turtleneck and ponytail, I could see the similarity there. They shared an innocent sort of beauty, fresh-faced and timeless.
Those long slender necks, heart-shaped faces and huge Bambi eyes. Though my mother’s are more amber than brown, the colour of whisky when the light shines through it.
I didn’t know the word ‘vulnerable’ then, just sensed it about her. That she wasn’t made of stone like Nanna G. That she was more cardboardy. That if she got wet, she’d crumple.
‘Why do we have to leave America?’ I asked, a squirmy feeling in my belly. The same feeling I got when I woke in the night convinced there were monsters under my bed.
‘We don’t have to leave, Sophie. We choose to.’
‘We choose to?’
Did that mean we could just as easily choose not to?
‘We’re choosing freedom. No one breathing down our necks. A fresh start.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
