Page 52 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
‘I think they have a choice. You can do whatever you feel you need to do to heal.’
‘But I love my family.’
‘You can love your family and still be angry with them. Youcan love them and still wish they had treated you better. Loving someone doesn’t mean they don’t have to take responsibility for what they did. But you need to do whatyouwant.’
‘I am angry, when I think about it.’
‘So you tell them that and let them step up. What you need is important. If you give them another chance to be what you need them to be they, should consider themselves the luckiest people in the world.’
I nod.
‘Thank you.’
Blade turns away from me, tilts his head upwards to drain the last of the beer.
‘Let’s pack up. We’re moving locations tomorrow, remember.’
Zara
London
Zara has no time to think about what she looks like or prepare anything much because Edith is following her around the house. She has started doing that increasingly, like an attention-seeking pet. She moves to the sink—Edith follows. She goes across the room to the fridge—Edith is behind her. She even stalks Zara to the bathroom. Zara takes her time now, wondering if she’ll still be outside when she emerges. She opens the door and yep, she’s there. She starts talking immediately.
‘I think I might have been a bad mother.’
‘Oh.’
Zara realises this is a sitting-down conversation and so she closes the bathroom door and ushers Edith into the living room and gestures to her to sit down.
‘You are a wonderful mother,’ she says.
‘Blade is scared of me.’
‘He’s scaredforyou. That’s very different.’
‘Is it? The fear is the same. Of, for, they’re irrelevant here. I’ve made my child full of fear. I’ve always asked too much of him.’
‘Lots of people our age are scared. It’s a generational thing.’
‘Some days all I remember are the bad days. When I raised my voice at him. Or missed a school play. When I let him watch TV for a full day so I could have some peace. That’s all there is in my brain.’
‘Everyone has those bad days.’
‘But they have the good moments too. Mine start to disappear, to fragment and blur around the edges, then move out of reach. I’m left with my mistakes and flaws.’
Zara tries to imagine for a moment being only her flaws, being the time she lost her shit and yelled at her sister or when she didn’t quite tell a friend the truth and never owned up because she got away with it.
‘I came out of the shower and all the good memories had gone. It’s empty,’ Edith clarifies.
Zara glances at the time, realising lost memories will take more than the fifteen minutes she has.Screw it.You stick up for your girlfriends—and Edith needs her.
‘So we make new memories. Right now.’ Edith’s brows pull together, confused.
Zara gets her phone and feels a pang of guilt but then picks herself up. She messages Eliza, her beautiful date who is kind enough to bring cupcakes to her friend and who she thinks—hopes—will understand.
Can I make a last minute change to our date venue? Elm’s Terrace. There’s wine and me and Edith. Turns out I can’t leave her after all. Emergency memory-making needed. Sorry x
As soon as Eliza is inside the little terraced house Zara is able to relax and abolish the nerves that had inconvenientlybuilt up. She doesn’t check herself in the mirror frantically or wonder if her laugh sounds rather loud and off-putting. She has given her date the task of choosing a game from the shelf in the far corner of the living room, whilst she prepares a plate of snacks, and Eliza goes for a simple pack of Uno.
