Page 71 of Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society
She takes a few seconds to think about how to handle him, because she doesn’t want him flying off the handle and waking the kids. Or Cora. For some reason Lorraine wants to protect Cora from the knowledge that her son has done something dishonest and stupid.
‘We’ve always made financial decisions together,’ Lorraine says, her voice calm the way Rose’s was once when an angry man tried to bully her out of a parking spot.
‘I had an opportunity,’ he says quickly, more quietly.
She looks at him and finally he looks back at her.
‘To invest. In some shares,’ he explains.
To gamble, he means. Investing in the stock market is a gamble. She should have known the TAB wasn’t the beginning and end of it. Stupid –stupid. That’s how she feels, for not asking him about those TAB receipts at the time. If he’d known she’d noticed maybe he wouldn’t have kept going.
‘So you mortgaged the house to do that?’
He nods and looks away again.
‘And now … what? Because of this crash you’ve lost the money?’
Now he’s definitely crying, and for a second she thinks he’s going to try to hug her but she is not going to comfort him.
‘I owe money,’ he sobs.
Lorraine needs a few more seconds to think about this. To try to comprehend how much money he might be talking about if he took out a mortgage.
‘So does that mean we lose the house?’ she enquires with as little emotion as possible.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, sniffing back his tears and whatever is streaming out of his nose.
Something else occurs to her. ‘So you’ve been doing all that extra work to pay back the mortgage, not to cover our expenses?’
He nods.
‘Don’t tell Mum,’ he says, his voice raspy. ‘Or the kids.’
Lorraine pushes herself away from him on the bed and tucks her legs up against her chest.
‘You don’t have any right to tell me what to do and not do,’ she says, and her voice is as icy as she feels.
Mike is surprised; she can see that. She’s never stood up to him like this. Clearly she should have. When he said he was going to buy the house in his own name and her mother said she shouldn’t let him, but Lorraine trusted him, didn’t she? That’s when the standing up should have started.
Too late now for that. Not too late for whatever comes next, and it’s not going to be her bailing him out.
‘Sleep somewhere else,’ she says, turning her back to him.
‘But – ’
‘Get out,’ she hisses.
She closes her eyes and wraps her arms around her legs, then waits until she hears his loud tread on the stairs before she puts her head on her knees, wondering if it’s too late to call Cynthia to ask her what she should do.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Themorning has moved fairly swiftly after the hiccup at its start, when Charlie didn’t want to go to school.
‘I want to be asleep,’ he said to Elizabeth, who wondered if this was a matter for concern or if he was genuinely tired.
Since Jon died, some nights she wakes up in the early hours, usually around two o’clock, and in the past few weeks she’s seen Charlie’s light on every now and again. She doesn’t go in – her mother told her when he was a baby that children have their own sleep patterns and unless there’s something going wrong, like he’s chronically tired, she shouldn’t try to change his. So the nights when his light has been on she has lain awake, feeling like a sentry, waiting for it to go out, which it always has.
There is part of her that wants to ask Charlie if he’s waking up and thinking of his father, as she is; there might be shared comfort in that. It’s not Charlie’s role, though, to support her, to make her feel that she’s not alone in this grief. That is her role for him. So when he says things like ‘I want to be asleep’ she feels as if she is failing him.
