Sandy had texted them, told them not to come, but they’d come anyway, appearing on her doorstep, with faux concern on their I-told-you-so faces. Dad in his bloody camel coat, like the bank manager he was. He was such a cliché. Manager of a small branch, Rotary Club in the evenings, golf at the weekends.
And Mum.
Actually, Mum looked different.
She’d stopped dyeing her hair. Obviously she looked older. It was nice, though, grey mixed in with mousy blonde making it ashy. It suited her. Her face was different too. Had she always had those lines at the corners of her eyes and round her mouth? Her jawline was softer, saggier. She’d put on a bit of weight.
Sandy hadn’t let them in. It would have been giving in to them, wouldn’t it, letting them win? She couldn’t go back to being their little girl, accepting their way even when she disagreed. She needed them to see her as she was now – independent, a mother herself. They should respect that. Respect her.
The conversation, if you could call it that, hadn’t lasted long. Now, with her front door shut, she was back to sitting on the sofa with Jodie for company. Waiting.
She pictured Mum’s face again, the softening, the sagging, and it made something soften inside her. What had it taken for them both to come here? Mum had looked genuinely upset. She hadn’t seen Mina for years – had she actually been missing her all this time, the way Sandy missed her now? Perhaps they, of all people, could understand how she was feeling, what she was going through.
She slipped her feet into her flip-flops. Jodie looked up from her phone. ‘I’m just going outside.’
The air was cold and sharp, a stiff breeze blowing along the walkway. She leaned against the concrete balustrade and looked across the courtyard. It had been half an hour or so. They’d be long gone, wouldn’t they? Where would they have parked? On the street somewhere? In the multi-storey?
Below her, a photographer angled his lens upwards and snapped, snapped, snapped. She flicked him the Vs. Honestly, people had no respect.
She heard a door opening behind her. It was Kath’s and she could hear her voice.
‘You’re welcome, love. You take care now.’
Dad stepped out first, doing up the buttons of that bloody camel coat. He looked up at Sandy and froze. Mum emerged behind him. ‘What’ve you stopped for, Richard? Come on, it’s cold. Let’s get home. Oh—’
Caught unawares, Mum’s face was unguarded. It was the face Sandy had seen from her cot, the face she’d seen when she’d run out of her classroom at the end of the day in infant school, the face that had soothed her and sung to her when she had a temperature. There was no judgement there, just love. Uncritical love.
‘Mum? Dad? Please don’t go.’