By the time I got home I had fifteen minutes to change and get to work. I knew Jay would give me his disappointed-puppy face if I got there late, and I couldn’t handle the guilt, especially since Dylan had told me how much they rely on me to help with Say Cheese’s monthly tasting evening. I’d have to forgo the shower and hope for the best.
I pulled off my school dress, which was rapidly stiffening with its coating of paste, and put on the black T-shirt and jeans that are my work uniform. Aside from a few white spatters on my cheeks and arms, I wasn’t too crusty. Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be too much of it in my hair; I pulled it back into a ponytail and arranged it so that you couldn’t see any telltale specks of white. It wasn’t my best effort, but it’d do.
Luckily the village is only a ten-minute walk from home. I jogged there in six, puffing when I threw open the door. The clocks over the counter said it was 5.59 am in Paris, 11.59 pm in New York, 4.59 am in London, and 3.59 pm in Kingston. Jay was regaling a customer with the latest tragedy to befall Doodoo. After my colossal effort, I was tempted to interrupt so that he could note my punctuality. But, hearing the words “rectal” and “thermometer”, I decided it wasn’t worth risking being drawn into the conversation.
“Thank God you’re here,” said Dylan when he saw me. “Jay’s in a tizz because the supplier was late delivering the gorgonzola, and the figs he wanted to serve with it aren’t ripe. Can you start arranging the platters while I run upstairs and change?”
“I’m onto it,” I said, heading for the storeroom/prep area out the back of the shop.
As I went, Dylan uttered a shocked, “Ooh”. I turned to ask what had got his attention and found him rooted to the spot, staring at me.
“What happened to your hair?” he asked, his eyes wide with concern.
“Nothing.” I reached up to smooth my ponytail and my hand brushed over a big, solid blob at the back of my head. I was sure it hadn’t been there when I put my hair up, but I’d only had time to make sure it was okay from the front.
“Yep, that’s the nothing I was talking about. If Jay sees that he’ll need one of his little yellow pills to calm him down. What is it?”
“Flour and water, I think … it was muck-up day.”
“Hmmm … either someone really likes you and he’s trying to get your attention, or he really hates you and wants you to suffer.” To make his point, Dylan raked his fingers through a particularly matted section and tsked again.
“Ow. What makes you so sure it was a he?”
“Not imaginative enough to be the work of a female mind,” he said with a wink. “You’d better figure out how to hide that mess before Jay spots it.”
I stood in front of the mirror above the prep bench that we use to keep an eye on the door of the shop if no one’s out the front, and did my best to make a complicated bouffant arrangement to hide the evidence. When I finished, all I needed was a fake tan and some industrial-strength teeth whitening and I could have been a contestant in a second-rate beauty pageant. I was about to pull it out and try again when Jay called me.
“Al, assistance please,” he crooned in the posh voice he uses when a new customer walks in.
I threw an apron over my head and tied it on my way out. A familiar, chiselled profile stood at the counter, inspecting the Cheeses of the World poster on the wall near the cash register.
“Oh, hi,” said Josh Turner, turning his attention from the poster. “It’s Allison, isn’t it?”
I nodded mutely, too flustered to correct him even though only Mum and teachers call me by my full name.
“Are you here for the cheese tasting?” I asked when I regained the power of speech.
“Nah.” He held up a half-eaten Power Kick bar. “I need change for the payphone – my mobile’s out of credit.”
Jay must have been eavesdropping because when Josh uttered the word “payphone” he whipped his head round. The public phone out the front of the shop is one of his pet hates (along with balding men who grow ponytails, women who dress like their teenage daughters and people who don’t pick up after their dogs in the park). Ever since the phone was installed there’d been a steady stream of people coming in to ask for coins to use it. There’s an unofficial policy that we tell them we don’t give change, but I figured that was the rule for strangers, not for Josh.
I hit the “no sale” button on the cash register and swapped Josh’s five-dollar note for a handful of coins, letting my fingers brush against his for a millisecond as I dropped them into his palm.
“Thanks, Allison, see you round,” he called over his shoulder before the door closed behind him.
“Who’s the studmuffin?” asked Dylan, as he pulled an apron over his freshly ironed shirt.
“Just a guy from school.”
“And are you interested in getting to know him outside of school too?”
Dylan loved to hassle me about my lack of a boyfriend. After twenty-two years together, he and Jay were of the opinion that everyone should be in a relationship.
“In my dreams,” I said with what I hoped was a casual laugh, even though the statement was more fact than turn of phrase.
“I reckon you’re in with a pretty good chance if he’s dropping by your work to see you.”
“You watch way too many chick flicks. Much as I’d like to believe that a guy like Josh Turner would make up lame excuses to hang around me, the fact that he needed coins for the phone suggests otherwise.”
I knew it was too ridiculous to even contemplate. I mean, Josh was the sort of guy who went out with a girl like Larrie, not her younger, not-as-hot sister. But I couldn’t help fantasising about the possibility that Dylan might be right.
As I arranged the wedges of dolce and piccante gorgonzola on the platters and surrounded them with thin slices of crisp pear, walnuts and the ripest of the figs, I imagined us taking romantic walks together at sunset.
As I wove through the crowd of Kingston cheese lovers who congregated at Say Cheese each month to taste Jay’s latest discoveries, I pictured us sitting together in the seniors’ courtyard at school, subtly locking fingers behind our backs so as not to flaunt our love.
As I did the pre-close sweep, I imagined that the broom was Josh holding me in his arms while we danced on a moonlit balcony.
“It’s nice to see you so happy,” said Jay when he caught me waltzing back to the broom cupboard.
“What’s not to be happy about?” I replied. “It’s the weekend, I scoffed the rest of that delicious cheese, and in less than four weeks Larrie finishes school for good and life can return to some kind of normality.”
“I’m pleased to hear it. Now please promise me that before you come in tomorrow you’ll wash that muck out of your hair.”
He smiled as if he was joking. Reaching to the back of my head and feeling the hard, matted lump that had worked its way out of its hiding place, I knew he wasn’t.
Al Miller missed a spot.