We sat on the bottom step for ages.

It took a while to understand what she was actually talking about, not because she was crying, but because it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Dad always comes back, I’d said.

And Mum was, like, ‘Well, not this time. I told him not to bother.’ With her elbows on her knees and head in her hands, Mum ran her fingers through her hair over and over and over. She was stressed; it’s what she does.

‘Why would you say that to Dad?’

‘Because, Dylan, we’re broken and I don’t know how to fix us.’ She shook her head and blew air up her face. ‘I’ll tell you because you’re old enough to know, but you can’t tell the girls. Not yet. Your father and I will tell you all together, but the truth, so you know, is this. Your stupid mid-life crisis father’s got a special friend he’s been texting from a phone he keeps in his golf bag. And stupid him left his golf clubs in my car. And like he does with his dirty clothes and his shit that haunts this house, he was too lazy to take his clubs out of my car. So, when I’m coming home from work, I hear this noise coming from the back of the car, it’s like someone having sex back there. It’s this woman’s voice going, “Oh, yeah. Oh, baby. Oh, yeah.” What a troll. And I think it’s on the radio so I don’t think much about it, but then it happens again. So I turn the radio off as it stops. Then I get a text from your father saying can I please put his clubs into the garage ASAP because they’re really expensive and someone might steal them if they see them in the car and they’re not insured and “thanks, darling, thaaaaaaanks, XXOO.” What an arse.’

Mum had stopped crying now, but she was still working away at her hair with both hands, fanning it out, letting it fall.

‘It was weird. As soon as I got that text I knew something was going on. So I pulled over and waited for the “Oh, yeah, Oh, baby. Oh, yeah,” to come back, but it never did. Then I got your father’s golf clubs out of the back and went through the pockets. There was a phone in his shoe. On the screen it said, two new messages from HCW: “How about it?” and “When’s our next conference, Studley?”’

I had no idea what to say to Mum.

‘Don’t cheat, Dylan. If you’re going to cheat, leave. Show respect. Your father has no respect. I left his precious golf clubs on the side of the road and came home.’

The cogs in my head were cranking through Mum’s story, but there was so much going on it was hard to make sense of it. ‘Did you really leave his golf clubs by the side of the road?’

‘Yes, and his shoes and his hat and his umbrella and anything else that was in there.’

‘He’ll lose his shit when he finds out.’

‘Oh, oopsie. I really couldn’t care, Dylan. He’s going to lose a lot more than his shit, too. His girlfriend can get him some new clubs. I’m sorry, Dylan,’ she said again. ‘It really was never meant to be anything like this. Ever.’

Mum said it was better if no one knew about it until she was able to process the news properly. She needed to come up with a story, or a reason or something logical so she wasn’t shamed into being the left-behind wife for some manky little executive assistant with big tits. Dad had another conference to go to, but when she said it this time she made little inverted commas with her fingers. So, if this wasn’t a work conference, maybe the other conferences he was always going to weren’t conferences either. I’m not even sure what he does. He works for an insurance company, I know that. Dad either sells insurance, or he has a team or is part of a team or runs a team or something and they sell the insurance, I think. He’s busy. Always.

Now it was Mum’s turn to suck in the big breaths and straighten up. ‘He is going to kill me if he finds out I’ve told you what’s happened. The girls don’t need to know, especially Ronnie. She won’t understand, anyway. It’ll just make a mess of Hayley, who’s messy enough already. She knows something’s going on, but she doesn’t need to know it’s this. Okay?’

I nodded.

‘Okay, Dylan?’ She finally took her head out of her hands and looked at me. Mum looked awful. She looked like those pictures of crack addicts we get shown at school. The skin around her eyes was glowing red and her hair was all over the place. Worst of all was the look in her eyes. Mum was shattered. And it wasn’t just in her eyes, it was her whole body; her head seemed to hang off her neck and there was a huge, hopeless slope to her shoulders. She looked lost. I’ve never thought of her as a loser before.

I gave her a hug and left her there, on the bottom step, with her head back in her hands. When I reached the landing at the top, I turned to look at her. She was crying again.

I never got to tell her the stuff I wanted to, but now it didn’t seem to matter so much.