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A year ago everything had tumbled down.
A year ago, almost to the day, she’d been living in a little semi close to the school where she worked, the school that Alice was about to start at, with a child and a cat and a husband and a laundry pile higher than Ben Nevis.
A year ago, Noah had come home from work with his face uncharacteristically pale and had sat her down at the kitchen table and said his piece and now here she was, not just becoming her mother but a single parent living with her mother.
Because that’s how she’d always planned things. Right.
“Can we have ice cream and can I have a Cornetto?” Alice said, tugging at her hand.
“Bit grown up that, don’t you think?” said Hope, raising an eyebrow at her daughter.
Caz laughed. “Go on, let her have one, I’m buying.”
Hope sighed but nodded and Caz and Alice went off to buy ice creams from the stand next to the polar bear enclosure and she watched the way Alice’s dark curls bounced as she walked and it made her heart hurt.
No matter what anyone said Hope couldn’t help but think that she’d fucked all this up.
It didn’t matter in the end that she was turning into her mother, after all, Caz was brilliant. No, what really mattered was that Alice was turning into a little Hope, and that just didn’t seem right. Not when Hope herself knew what it was like to grow up in a broken family, not when she’d always sworn that her kids would have the perfect parents.
“Strawberry or chocolate, mum?” Alice shouted.
Hope felt herself grin. “Strawberry.”
“Told you,” Alice said to her grandmother.
“Come on then,” Caz said. “Better eat them before they melt.”
THE CAR WAS standing in a shaded area of the car park and Hope was glad for the cool. It was hot, the kind of summer August heat she remembered from when she was a child.
“Do we really have to go?” Alice said.
Hope paused, wondering if a tantrum was in the offing, but Alice looked like she was honestly asking. To be fair, she rarely acted up, especially now that Noah was gone. Sometimes Hope worried about that, like maybe Alice was being too grown up. “We do,” she said. “Rosie needs feeding.”
“Can I feed her?” Alice asked. She was adorably attached to Rosie, who was a grumpy, fat cat that Hope had found in the garden one day and who had promptly moved herself in. When they’d moved back into Caz’s, Rosie had come with them, probably because she’d eaten everything even vaguely edible in their old neighborhood.
“You can,” Hope said, unlocking the car doors.
“Then I suppose the zoo animals need feeding too, don’t they?” Alice said as Caz helped buckle her into her booster seat. “Polar bears eat fishes and lions eat meat. But what about elephants, mum? What do elephants eat?”
Hope climbed into the driver’s seat and frowned. “Um, I don’t think I know.”
“Mu-um, come on, what do elephants eat?”
“Christmas trees,” Caz said.
“Mum, you’re not helping,” said Hope.
“No, I’m serious,” said Caz, getting into the passenger seat. “They do. I saw it on the news last Christmas, people donated their trees and the elephants ate them.”
“All of them?” Alice asked from the back seat. “Like every Christmas tree in the whole world?”
“Maybe every Christmas tree in Whitebridge,” Caz said. “Maybe not the whole world.”
“But what about when it’s not Christmas,” said Alice. “What do they eat then? Cos there’s only Christmas trees at Christmas.”
Hope carefully backed out of her parking space. “I know, why don’t you save that question up for when school starts again? Then you can ask your teacher.”
“You’re a teacher,” said Alice.
