Page 64 of The Good Boy

“We don’t even think about it,” Rory muttered as he climbed into the back seat and put his seat belt on. Miles had kept Matilda in her carrier on his lap in the passenger seat, from where I could feel her glare boring into my skull. She might very well have a cuddly side, but I didn’t think it was the side that was facing me right then.

Miles had been right, though. There were plenty of cat people among the residents of the care home, and once the manager hadmade sure that no one with allergies was in the designated sitting room, Miles had disappeared with Matilda to talk to the cat people, in their satanic cult, or the sunroom, whatever you want to call it.

I peer in through the window for a moment while Rory is doing his rounds. That cat is curled up on the lap of one older gentleman as though butter wouldn’t melt. He smiles as he strokes her and tells Miles stories of the long-gone Scarborough of his youth. Maybe he feels me watching—I don’t know—but Miles glances up at me and winks when he catches my eye. And I, for reasons that will forever be lost to the annals of stupidity, slowly slide down out of view like a mime artist pretending they are in a lift. No, that’s a lie. I do it because Miles’s winking is impossibly attractive, and when Miles is attractive I behave like an idiot. It’s sort of like the laws of motion: for every cute action there is an equal and opposite stupid reaction.

How am I, the sitting-on-the-floor Genie, ever going to get to a place where I can look him in the face and tell him I am in love with him? Maybe I could write him a letter; no, strike that. I’ve seenRomeo and Juliet.

“Genie?” Miles opens the door, and I almost roll onto his feet. “Want to come in?”

Looking over at Rory, I can see he’s doing really well all by himself. Miles offers me his hand, pulls me to my feet. We are standing close together.

“I dropped a... button,” I tell him.

“Did you get it?” he asks, still holding my hand.

“Yeah, I got it,” I say, still holding his hand.

“Where’d it come from?” he asks, looking at my entirely buttonless T-shirt dress over leggings.

“My... self,” I say. He twitches a smile, and lets go of my hand. I miss it.

Burning with embarrassment, I stroll over to where a lady called Violet had Matilda snuggled on her lap. Apparently the cat is enraptured by her story. Miles and I take a seat next to them.

There’s a fresh pot of tea on the table next to us, so I pour three cups. No milk for Miles, two sugars for Violet, and just a spot of milk for me. I pass her a cup and she takes a sip.

“How did you know that’s just how I like my tea?” she asks.

“Oh...” I think for a moment, realize I don’t know how I know. But I know what way Mum always knows. “Family talent, I guess.”

“So anyway, then,” Violet tells me as if I’ve been there for the start of the story. “I said to her, I said, ‘I love you, Caroline Fisher, and I don’t care who knows it.’ This was the sixties, mind you. There was a lot of hair spray. Highly flammable. My pal Debbie Rogers set fire to her hairdo with a cig...”

“And then what?” Miles asks.

“She had to get a haircut,” Violet tells him. “She were the first round here to have a pixie cut. Thought she were the bee’s knees, silly cow.”

“No, I meant with Caroline Fisher!” Miles chuckles.

“Oh,” Violet’s face falls. “She said, ‘Don’t be a daft hap’orth, Dee, I’m married. We can’t ever be together. What would people say?’ And that were that. She moved away with her husband, and that was the last I heard of her.”

“Oh no.” Miles holds Violet’s hand tight. “I’m so sorry. It’s hard to love someone from afar. I hope you found happiness eventually.”

“Well, fifty years or more passed,” Violet says. “Things happened—a lot of things. Some of them lovely, some of themhard. But I was content, more or less. And then one morning—it was in March, I remember, because all the daffs were out along my path—I opened the door and there was Caroline Fisher. It was like not a second had passed in those last fifty years.”

“Just as beautiful as you remembered her?” Miles prompts.

“Even more,” Violet says. “And I thought, Oh no, you don’t, madam. I haven’t spent fifty years getting over you just for you to come back and break my heart all over again, lady.”

“So, you sent her packing?” I ask.

“I made her a cup of tea and she sat at my kitchen table and looked around at the life I’d made. It weren’t a fancy life—not a lot of money or stuff. But there had been enough of everything. And then she saw my wedding photo.

“‘You got married?’ she said.

“‘People expected it,’ I told her. ‘He was a good man. A good dad.’

“‘I left my husband,’ she said.

“I was like, ‘Oh?,’ pretending I wasn’t that bothered, like.

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