AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘A bit of a turn, is that what she calls it?’ Dad snorts. ‘Didn’t get her own way over having a band at the party, is what she means.’
I scrutinise him carefully. He looks the same as always: tall and thin, as gangly as a teenager, with an unruly halo of white fluff around his ears and a pair of frameless half-moon glasses permanently perched on the end of his nose. He’s more than a decade older than Mum, but there’s a youthful air of mischief about him that even Nicky’s loss didn’t manage to dim. I’ve always thought of him as ageless, but I realise he’ll be eighty next April. He wears his years lightly, but eighty is old by anyone’s standards.
‘I heard that, Brian,’ Mum says, coming in through the back door. She’s been mowing the lawn, and her shoes are covered with grass clippings. I don’t know how she has the energy in this heat. My parents have an old-fashioned push mower, too, not one of those labour-saving petrol ones. ‘Hello, Louise. I like that dress on you. It suits you now you’re carrying that extra weight.’
‘Thank you, Mum,’ I say, not rising to the bait.
She reaches up to smooth Dad’s hair. ‘Honestly, Brian, look at the state of you. You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’
‘Fell asleep in my chair,’ Dad says, unruffled.
‘In the middle of the afternoon?’
‘Churchill used to swear by a nap,’ he says serenely, flapping out the pages of his paper and refolding it as he wanders back to his study.
‘Churchill had a country to run and a war to win,’ Mum calls after his retreating back. ‘Well, since you’re here, Louise, perhaps you can help me with the carrots,’ she adds, handing me the peeler. ‘I’ve got Luke and Min descending on me later with the boys. I could use a hand.’
I open the vegetable bin and get the carrots out. ‘Luke said you told him Dad had a turn,’ I say.
‘He’s not getting any younger. Cold water on the carrots, Louise.’
‘But he’s OK?’
‘He’s been a bit forgetful lately, that’s all. Let his eggs boil dry the other day, and he keeps feeding the dog. She had four breakfasts yesterday – she thinks it’s Christmas.’
I want to tell her that if she needs me to come over, she only has to ask; there’s no need to manufacture a crisis. But that’s not Mum’s way. She has never directly asked for help, even in the immediate aftermath of Nicky’s death. She finds our pressure points and uses them to get us to toe the line without seeming to lift a finger.
I pass her a peeled carrot and she dices it deftly, then scrapes it from the board into a saucepan. ‘Min told me you’d moved back home at the weekend,’ she says. ‘You handled that all wrong, you know.’
I pause, a half-peeled carrot in my hand. ‘Handled what all wrong?’
‘I can see what you were doing, moving into Caz’s space,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it unsettled her no end. But you need to be more careful. You gave her a genuine grievance to take to Andrew, and that wasn’t smart.’
‘It was his idea,’ I protest. ‘You think Iwantedto stay in their house?’
She puts down the knife and looks straight at me. ‘Well, of course you did.’
‘No, I—’
‘Louise, I spoke to Gary Donahue.’
That silences me.
‘He said the damage to the kitchen wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. He repaired the ceiling and patched the hole in the wall the first day. The house was perfectly habitable two weeks ago. He says he spoke to you and told you that.’ She turns back to the carrots and begins chopping again. ‘It’s not healthy, what you’re doing. You need to put some distance between you and Andrew.’
My mother has refined passive aggression into an art form. Usually, I ignore it, as I did with the backhanded compliment about my dress, but the flagrant injustice of this statement is too much, even for me.
‘Youinvited him to your anniversary party,’ I say tersely. ‘Even though I asked you not to. And what about dinner, the night of Bella’s play? I had no intention of crashing it until you interfered!’
‘I did it for my granddaughter,’ Mum says. ‘I thoughtit’d be nice for her to have both her parents together on her big night.’
‘Itwas.But—’
‘I like Andrew, but despite what you might think, I neither want nor need the two of you to get back together,’ Mum says. ‘If it’s what you want, I’ll do anything I can to help, but the only thing I truly care about is whether or not you’re happy.’ She pauses. ‘I need you to be happy, Louise.’
She loves me, I know that. Since we lost Nicky, she’s poured everything into making Luke and me happy. But she adores Andrew; she’d do anything to get us back together. She sees my divorce as a personal failure on her part. ‘Mum, I got over Andrew a long time ago,’ I say evenly. ‘We’re not getting back together, and I’m happy with that. He’s Bella and Tolly’s father, that’s all.’
‘I’m not judging you, Louise,’ she says, washing her hands. ‘I don’t mind if you lie to me, but don’t lie to yourself.’
