Page 10 of Silver Lining

“You didn’t go to court?” He sounded agitated. I understood that feeling. The anger had once paralysed me and made me careless.

“I fought. And I still travelled to Miami to try to see my children. In the end, she took out an injunctionforbidding me to go near them. No contact whatsoever. Veronica had remarried by then, to a judge.”

My voice was barely a whisper, having to admit that. It hurt. I had dealt with this for so long, and still I couldn’t swallow the ginormous lump forming in my throat.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault. It’s just the way things are now. Which is why I’m here in this house that I really need to sell because I can’t afford it, and I can’t work because I messed up my company, and I now owe money on child support because I have completely depleted my savings and everything else too, and maybe if I started working again, took on some small projects, I could save up enough to afford to… I don’t know. Get the ball rolling. I just… This house—this was my children’s home. Their rooms are still upstairs, and their things, and I just…”

“Hope,” he said quietly. “Hope is the last thing we give up. I see your thinking. I understand. I probably understand more than you know.”

“I have hope. I will always have hope. That’s why I sit here, day after day, crying instead of doing anything else. Because that hope is futile. It will never happen. My children will grow up, and perhaps one day they willseek contact. How will they find me if I’m not right here where they left me?”

“There’s social media. Legal ways of enabling contact with an adult child.”

“I know.” I did. I was just stuck in this mindset. “They only remember me here, when they were children and we laughed and things were simple.”

He didn’t respond. I didn’t blame him. My rantings were often too much, even for my doctor and that therapist.

I wondered where my phone was. It had rung earlier.

What did it matter?

He left after a while of me sitting there in silence. He was still talking, but I failed to listen. I rocked gently, a quirk my body had seemed to acquire, my eyes glazing over to the mess around me.

I was better than this. But I still sat here. Frozen in time.

Hope. Perhaps I’d lost that as well.

I awoke sometime the next day, rudely shaken awake by the patio doors opening and Stewart once again entering my home.

Uninvited. Unasked.

I sat up in bed, trying to get my mouth to comply and say something, but he just smiled at me and carefully unbuttoned the cuffs on his shirt.

Another shirt and tie. Like the deranged grandfather he obviously was.

I’d apparently said that out loud, which made him smile.

“I always dress like this. It’s a comfort thing. I think as long as I can get out of bed and dress nicely, there will be some good that can come from it. Even today, when I intend to give this place a thorough clean.”

“I didn’t ask for that.”

“I know you didn’t. But tell me this.” He handed me a cup of tea—I hadn’t even registered he’d brought it in with him—and dragged a chair over to the bottom of the bed. He sat, sipped his own tea, and then set the cup on the floor and went back to folding up his sleeve, almost all the way to his elbow. He paused to admire his handiwork, then did the other one.

He had hairy arms, muscular, strong, and a standard watch, nothing fancy. It wasn’t a model I recognised. I’d once owned a collection of fine timepieces: gifts from Veronica. I’d sold them off, one by one, to pay for the things that had all been a waste of time. And money.

“You can either live like this until it consumes you. Fine. Your choice. Or you can let your lonely, bored neighbour, who has nothing else to do but feed the two ungrateful felines upstairs twice a day, give this place a good scrub. Give me something to do here. I will clean up, sort out that sad excuse for a fridge and batch-cook you something to eat. I can actually cook now, did a course and everything. Small silver linings of getting made redundant. You suddenly have time.”

“Time.” I chuckled. “Time is all I have. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Exactly,” he said almost triumphantly. “So today, we’re going to clean up, go get some groceries and make a nice stew to last us the rest of the week. How does that sound?”

“And you are doing this why, exactly?”

“Because I can. And because I have been watching you pace up and down the garden in that filthy dressing gown for weeks. I’ve had enough. So yes, I am interfering, because I can. Because there is something we can do here, and it certainly isn’t more crying.”

“I can cry if I want to,” slipped out of my mouth before I strangely burst out laughing. Mostly because he waslaughing, and it was…weird. Laughing was an uncomfortable thing to do. I hadn’t done it in a long time.

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