‘God, no! I leave that to my husband. What is it with men and barbeques? If I asked him to shove a burger under the grill in the kitchen, he’d make a right song and dance about it, but ask him to stick a sausage on the barbie and he’s there! He’s even got a stupid apron that he wears.’ Stacey rolled her eyes indulgently. ‘I swear a barbeque brings out the caveman in them.’
Nora laughed. She’d witnessed that very thing with her friends’ husbands and partners.
Stacey asked, ‘What are you doing on the weekend? Something more exciting than eating a burnt burger in the garden surrounded by screaming kids, I bet.’
‘I’ll be in the salon until two on Saturday, but I’m going to that new tapas bar in Thornbury in the evening, and I’m hoping to have a long lie in on Sunday, followed by lunch at The Black Horse.’
Stacey sighed. ‘I envy you. I’d sell my youngest for a lie in. He’s seven now, but he still gets me up at six in the morning.’
‘Just wait until he’s seventeen,’ Kendra warned, as she placed a rubber cape around her client’s neck prior to re-styling the woman’s shoulder length hair. ‘He’ll sleep in, all right, but you’ll still be exhausted because you won’t be able to drop off until he gets home. It was gone one o’clock before mine got in last night. And he’s got college this morning. I had hell’s job to get him out of bed.’ All the time she was talking, Kendra was running her fingers through the client’s wet hair, checking its length before she took the scissors to it.
Nora joined in, ‘And by then you’ll probably be menopausal as well, so your sleep will be disturbed anyway!’
‘I’m coming back as a bloke next time,’ Stacey declared adamantly. ‘They don’t have problems like periods, or childbirth, or the blasted menopause. I’m not looking forward to that, I can tell you.’
It definitely wasn’t a barrel of laughs, Nora thought. ‘Right, that’s your foils done. I’ll put the timer on for thirty minutes, and we’ll see how it goes. You might need a bit longer. Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee? A magazine?’
After instructing Lori to make the client a drink, Nora retreated to the back room for a quick swig of the cold cola the girl had fetched for her, and one of the muffins Kendra had brought in for their elevenses. Okay, so what if itwasonly teno’clock? She was hungry: the custard slice hadn’t touched the sides.
Sinking into the battered office chair to eat it, she was glad to take the weight off her feet. Only another seven hours and she could go home and have a nap. This really was getting ridiculous. She was only forty-seven, yet lately she felt more likeseventy-seven. Stacey was right, men had it easy when it came to hormones.
Sighing loudly, Nora tucked into the muffin, and she’d just finished washing it down with another swig of fizzy pop when her mobile rang.
It was the surgery.
Yay! The result of her blood test must be in – HRT at last!
‘Miss Bunting? It’s Dr Watts. I’d like you to make an appointment to see me. It’s about your results.’ He sounded more sombre than a confirmation that she was well on the way to menopause warranted, and a chill shivered down her spine.
‘Sooner rather than later, if you can manage it,’ he added, and the chill became an artic blast of dread.
‘Oh, no, you can’t do this to me. I need to knownow, not in a week’s time or whenever I can get an appointment. Is it…?’ She couldn’t get the word out, but she was fearing the worst.
‘The menopause? Well, yes, your hormone levels do indicate that you’re in perimenopause, but I’m more concerned with your HbA1c level.’
‘Mywhat?’
‘I’m sorry to say but your blood glucose is sixty-six.’ He paused before uttering the words that would change her life forever. ‘You have diabetes.’
Elijah Grant slid the final tray of lemon crumble muffins into the industrial sized oven, set the timer, then limped slowly over to a high-backed stool beside the work prep table, and eased himself onto it with a wince. His leg ached abominably, but then, he had been on his feet since five-thirty this morning, so even with the boot for support, it was going to hurt.
He hoped the hospital would tell him he could take it off when he went for his appointment at the clinic later today. On the other hand, at least it was a boot and not a plaster cast, so he counted himself lucky he hadn’t completely fractured his tibia. A stress fracture, they called it, where the bone was weakened by excessive training or overpronation of the foot whilst running. The first was his own fault – the second could partly be compensated for by the correct footwear.
Elijah glared at the blue boot in distaste. He hated the damned thing and kept taking it off. Although it provided support to the healing bone, he was concerned that his leg was losing muscle mass and strength. And since he was rather slim, he didn’t have that much muscle to lose, so he wanted to hang onto what he had.
He’d been tempted to not wear the boot at all today, but he knew he’d regret it if he didn’t. He kept telling himself he shouldn’t try to run before he could walk, but that’s what he was– a long-distance runner. Running is what he did, who hewas. Okay, he was a baker aswell, but baking was for paying the bills and giving him something to do when he wasn’t running. Running fed his soul, and ever since he’d managed to get a stress fracture and had therefore been unable to run, his soul had been hungry. Starving, in fact.
While he waited for the timer to ding, he checked the RunMad app. It was his favourite thing to do – apart from actually running. The app was his social life and entertainment rolled into one; more so now that he wasn’t able to get out and train.
When he wasn’t out pounding the streets, he was looking at other people’s uploaded routes, times, elevation and distances, or he was watching videos about running, or reading blog posts about running, or drooling over adverts for the latest performance trainers or rehydration drinks. To say he was obsessed was putting it mildly.
The first account he checked was Cameron’s, and Elijah was both proud and envious to see that his son had done a twenty-mile training run yesterday in a little under two hours forty-five minutes. He noted it was one minute faster than the last twenty miler Cameron had done.
Marathon running was an endurance sport, and a time-consuming one at that. To run the kind of distances Elijah and Cameron ran, you had to be prepared to put in hours and hours of training.
He clicked on the ‘kudos’ button, showing Cameron that he was giving him a virtual pat on the back and a thumbs up for his run, and commented, ‘Nice one.’ Then he scrolled through his feed to see who else had posted runs. Some people (not many), Elijah knew in real life, having taken part in races with them, butmost he only knew as a thumbnail photo and a username. Still, that didn’t matter. It was the runs they’d done that mattered to him.
After commenting on a few more, he put the phone away, and just in time too, as Andrea, who managed the retail part of the bakery along with supervising the other staff, stuck her head around the door. She was always teasing him for having his phone in his hand, so he was pleased he’d not given her the opportunity.
