Page 97 of Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society
‘Get it,’ Cora repeats, and it looks like she’s clenching her jaw again.
Mike stares at her, then at Lorraine, as if Lorraine has given the order. But he leaves the kitchen and within seconds his heavy tread is on the stairs.
Through the open door Lorraine can hear the television on, which pleases her because it means the boys probably haven’t heard their conversation. But now she’s not sure what to do: is she meant to chat to Cora about the fact that Mike is in the house and expecting to stay, even though Lorraine has told him over and over again that she doesn’t want him to? She and Cora have never had a chatting type of relationship. Or much relationship at all. It could be classified as a close-quarters acquaintanceship. Sometimes Lorraine thinks of them as being in a platoon together: fighting for the same cause – the wellbeing of the boys – but under no obligation to get along.
‘Um,’ is all Lorraine can come up with.
‘I do not like what he has done,’ Cora says in a rush, like she’s been waiting weeks to say it, which she probably has because Lorraine hasn’t given her the chance to talk about it. Mainly because she’s just been trying to cope with the financial mess and still doing the books for the business and working and running the household.
Lorraine grimaces. ‘Me neither.’ Then hot pasta sauce splatters on her face and she yelps, whipping around to turn down the heat, then busies herself putting water on to boil. She almost forgot the spaghetti part of the spaghetti dinner.
‘His father,’ Cora says, and Lorraine thinks she can hear something like a sneer in it, ‘his father was like this. A risk-taker.’ Cora makes apfftsound.
‘Did he lose all your money too?’ Lorraine says blithely, as if what Mike and his father have in common is a penchant for brown socks.
‘Yes.’ Cora sniffs and pulls out a chair from the kitchen table, which Lorraine takes as a sign that she’s planning to settle in for a long chat. Great.
Cora shakes her head. ‘And Michael knows this. He hated it. And now …’
She inhales sharply and Lorraine recognises that sound: imminent crying. Not at all what she wants to deal with as she tries to remember if she put salt in the pasta water. Cora’d better not expect her to be sympathetic, not after being such a grumble bum all these years. More than that, she knew Mike had gambling and god knows what else in his veins and she told Lorraine nothing!Nothing!A warning would have been good. Lorraine probably still would have married him because he’s a nice side of beef, but at least she could have managed her expectations about what the marriage would be like.
‘It’s done now, Cora,’ she says flatly. She can hear Mike stomping down the stairs.
‘He cannot move back,’ Cora states. ‘He does not deserve to.’
Lorraine glances at her and can’t quite believe what she’s hearing. Is Cora actually going to tell her own son to get lost?
Even if Terry and Simon did something this diabolical, Lorraine doesn’t know if she’d have it in her. Or maybe she would. Hard to tell. If they were married to a woman like her, maybe she’d come down on the wife’s side. Because she knows what she’s done for that man over the years. How she’s helped him. And it’s only just occurring to her that Cora may have an idea about that too.
Mike re-enters the room with his gym bag. At least, that’s the optimistic name for it. He doesn’t go to the gym – he just calls it his gym bag in case he ever does.
‘I don’t think it’s right,’ he says, but he addresses his mother not Lorraine.
‘You know what is right,’ Cora says, ‘and you have not done this for your wife and your boys.’
She sniffs and Lorraine is sure the tears are going to come, because they haven’t appeared yet, but instead Cora stands and moves ever so slightly towards Lorraine.
‘We have to look after those boys,’ she says. ‘And that means you must stay elsewhere, Michael. I will not have them learning how to do bad things from you the way you learnt from your father.’
She sniffs again, but this time it’s accompanied by a lifting of her nose.
The water is boiling so Lorraine shoves spaghetti into it. Probably too much but she can always freeze leftovers.
‘Mike,’ she says over her shoulder, ‘it’s not that we don’t love you. But you’ve made a huge mess. Clean it up, then we can talk.’
She has no idea how he can clean it up, but it’s not her solution to find. Making dinner is preoccupying her right now, and it seems to her that these small jobs of running a life – and other people’s lives – are more important to her than getting the money back. Or her husband back. As much as they can feel like a grind, these small jobs are, at this point in her life, not onlyhow she keeps going day after day but how she shows the people she loves that she loves them.
Not that she’s close to loving Cora. Not yet. Maybe soon. Especially if she keeps up this new attitude.
Stirring the pasta, it takes Lorraine a few seconds to realise Mike has gone.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
‘Blessedis the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love Him.’ Elizabeth knows the verse – it is from James and she has gone to it often over the past year. She hasn’t told Reverend Willoughby this so she doesn’t believe the reading was chosen with her in mind, but it feels like it. Everything about today’s service feels like it’s designed to help her, just when she needs help. Before Jon died she would have believed she could see God’s hand in that – that He knew her so well that He was providing succour through His words. She saw God in so many things: in her relationship with Jon and her luck in finding him, in being Charlie’s mother, in having friends, in being a friend, in her parents, in her home. Now, each time she goes to that verse, she asks herself if it’s not because it’s reassuring but because she really wants a guarantee of a reward for what she’s enduring. For grief is a trial, the worst she’s ever gone through. And she thought a thirty-hour labour was bad.
She has asked herself what the test is – living without Jon? Or grief itself? Perhaps it’s knowing that Charlie has lost his father, which at times is a more difficult awareness for her than knowing she lost her husband.
So the verse is a crutch, she thinks; a talisman, maybe. If she incants it often enough she will believe there’s a reward for every day being hard.
