‘Ah,’ Dan acknowledged, his head furrowing beneath his flop of hair. ‘Well no wonder I couldn’t tempt him with the soup. He wasn’t gonna slip that into his backpack for later. Spud was it?’
‘I probably should’ve made the situation clearer,’ Alex replied. But she hated it. Walking bemused newcomers through the procedure, hitting them with the spiel on support workers and benefits entitlement before they could sit down and enjoy a meal in peace. The twins’ father had wandered in to the Trust’s lunchtime session more wide-eyed and bewildered than the kids; that familiar mixed heavy look of desperation and gratitude nearly always held together by a debilitating undercurrent of this is not my life! Alex got it. This wasn’t really her life either, at least not the one she’d once envisaged.
Dan sighed, retrieving a replacement jacket potato from one of the ovens ‘Well, he’s going to need all his strength while the kids are still off for the summer hols. Is Mum here too?’
Alex regarded the two young boys, wondering when their last opportunity to get into mischief had been. ‘I think Mum’s left. After Dad was made redundant.’
Dan finished bothering with the potato and shook his head. ‘Blimey. Tough break for the kids. But who are we to judge, right?’
It had been part of the training when Alex had first started here after ditching uni. Listen, yes. Encourage, yes. Second-guess the mechanics of a family’s downfall? Who was ever really qualified to do that?
‘Put the butter straight on it this time, Dan, don’t give him the little tubs.’ It was a small deterrent to squirrellers, but a deterrent nonetheless.
‘You know, it always stuns me when the mum jumps ship,’ Dan’s said quietly. ‘We bang on about equality and all that, but it’s still a shocker when it’s the dad left picking up the pieces. Know what I mean?’
Alex shrugged, but she knew exactly. Mothers pressed on, held everyone else together while their own hearts broke quietly. Hers had. Blythe would be pressing on right now, right this minute, two hundred miles away.
‘You sure you’re OK today?’ Dan was watching Alex readying the soup bowls with the same look he reserved for the elderly visitors to the food bank he worried needed more help than the trust could offer. ‘I thought it might be love but on second thoughts, you seem a bit …’
Alex’s smile was automatic. ‘Manic Mondays, Dan!’ she lied. Dan was a good guy. He’d be quick to offer his sympathies but it always felt like borrowing clothes she liked the look of, knowing they’d never fit right. ‘Now hurry up and get those soups out, they’re going cold!’
‘OK, OK … I’m going, I’m going.’ Dan loaded the last teas onto his tray and jostled back out through the kitchen doors. Alex’s thoughts meandered straight back to Eilidh Falls. She would call them all later, before they sat down to dinner together. Six o’clock, same time every year, no variations, no surprises. Alex dreaded it. She dreaded the thanks her mother would lavish on her for sending flowers and she dreaded hearing the consolatory lilt in Jem’s voice planted there by Alex’s perpetual absence. But most of all, Alex dreaded the complete normality of the conversation she would have with her dad. The shooting of the breeze. She had to wonder what they would have done for conversation all these years had it not been for oil changes and tyre pressure.
‘Oi.’ Dan’s face popped through from the other side of the hatch and startled her. ‘You don’t fool me, Alex. I might be a speccy kitchen hand with a flair for jazzy garnishes,’ Dan waved the tray of food and drinks flamboyantly past the servery hatch for Alex’s appraisal, ‘but I’m tuned in to the ways of women, you know. I know what’s eating you.’ He looked over his shoulder towards the twins playing air hockey with the condiments on the table. ‘You’re really worrying about them, aren’t you?’ Alex’s thoughts shifted from one broken family to another. She sent a small request into the universe that a little time and distance might help them too.
‘They’ll be OK, Alex,’ Dan reassured. ‘Look at them.’ One of the twins began giggling at something his father had just done with the pepper pot. ‘They might be going through the wringer but they’re still a family. A family can get through anything if they just stick together. Am I right?’
Alex could already feel the return of that automatic smile.
‘Crappy neon, Alex. Neon! It’s a florist’s not a bloody tattoo parlour! You should see it all lit up at night. One big, craptastic eyesore.’
‘Jem, please stop saying craptastic, darling. You sound like a teenage boy.’ Alex heard their mother sigh in the background and allowed herself a little one of her own so the other two Foster women couldn’t hear it. The call was on loudspeaker. It was Blythe’s way of pulling Alex as best she could back into the heart of the family home while she prepared the meal Alex never came back to eat.
Jem exhaled irritably again. ‘Carrie always did have a flair for cheapening her environment.’
‘Jaime Foster, you catty girl.’ Alex heard their mother tease.
‘Better a cat than a total bitch, Mum.’
‘Oh, Jem.’ Their mum didn’t like bad language of any sort. Never had, although Blythe would turn a deaf ear if Ted or the girls used an obscenity so long as there was a legitimate reason. Like stubbing a toe, or winning the lottery. Not that anyone had ever won the lottery.
‘Alex knows what I mean, mum,’ Jem called back to Blythe. ‘You know what I mean, right Al?’
Alex was decompressing, gradually leaving the carnage of Dill’s birthday the way those crazy scuba divers she sometimes watched on Discovery would gradually leave a doomed shipwreck in the murky depths, steadily and cautiously in case they got ‘the bends’. Returning to the surface of Foster family life felt a lot like that sometimes. Something to take steady before the change in pressure did something catastrophic to Alex’s system. Thankfully, although Jem’s evergreen hang-ups with Carrie Logan – arch-frenemy since their days at Eilidh High – had never made much sense to Alex, they were good enough to change the subject from Blythe and Jem’s visit down to the churchyard earlier. (It had been one of those trivial fallings out between teenage girls, Jem had claimed, the kind that burn on ferociously like the light from a dead star, years after the main event.)
Alex could feel the tension leaving her shoulders as Jem vented about Carrie. It felt good. Normal. This must be what it felt like for those mental free-divers, Alex always thought, when they found oxygen again after plumbing the depths on just one devoted lungful of air.
Alex had taken a reassuring breath of her own just before dialling her parents’ number. It hadn’t been half as uncomfortable as she always prepared herself for. It never was. She shouldn’t be so hypersensitive; she had no right. They all deserved so much more from her and what did she do? Drag her heels all day as if phoning her family was the worst thing in the world. You will remember this next year, Alex. You will remember that you make it worse, not them. But guilt was a lot like love, doing funny things to the mind.
Jem had railroaded the conversation beautifully as ever. Jem was an excellent railroader, a seasoned expert at smoothing the awkward away with a nice thick layer of normality, as if they were all just enjoying a regular everyday catch-up with each other. Blythe too, as unwaveringly warm as she was thoughtful, had gushed about the flowers Alex had sent home, lest Alex’s woefully inadequate annual gesture ever go un-championed. ‘Oh, Alex … sunflowers and thistles!’ Blithe had delighted, ‘Such a simple posy but, just so beautiful, darling. Really, the perfect choice. Ted? Come tell Alex how beautiful those sunflowers are,’ her mum had encouraged. ‘Your dad commented on them, darling, and you know how oblivious Foster men are. Did you know, your father wanted sunflowers at our wedding? Your grandma Rosalind said they weren’t a traditional choice though, so that was that.’
Alex