Katie ate two single-serve packets of honey-toasted muesli, and slurped every spoonful of milk, savouring either the sound, or the flavour, or the way it made Dettie fidget impatiently.
‘Come on, come on, girl,’ she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘We don’t have all day.’ She’d taken an aspirin, but it didn’t seem to be working. She rubbed her eyes and drew circles on her forehead with her fingertips, humming a kind of tuneless music to herself.
Everyone else was done and their plates had already been cleared, so when Katie finally finished, they paid the bill and got up to go to the toilet. By the time Sam returned, Jon was already out in the car park, circling the car, examining it. Katie was with him, having not waited for their aunt, and was waving her arms dramatically as she spoke, bouncing, and holding up her handkerchief in the breeze to dry.
Sam watched her as he crossed the restaurant, through the jangle of the cash register and the burble of the television on the countertop, trying to work out what it was she might be saying. He could still remember his mother giving that handkerchief to his sister while he was in hospital, the way she had closed Katie’s fingers over it as she told her to keep it safe. About how it would hold her tears, and she’d be happy again when it dried. But as he thought back he found he was having trouble recalling the exact sound of her voice. Just as the tone of his own speech had gradually faded from his memory, it seemed his mother’s was slipping too.
The thought made Sam’s stomach lurch. He closed his eyes, concentrating, trying to hold on to the last of it, to summon it back to his ears. Suddenly it was important—desperately important—that he succeed. The thought of losing it was terrifying.
Then there it was. He could hear her clearly. So clearly she must have been standing in the room. Just behind him.
‘…my children home,’ she said. Her exact voice. Warm and flinty, and sounding oddly choked, but definitely her.
He turned, checking the restaurant tables. Two truck drivers and a man in overalls, a young couple, half-asleep, and the television, facing away from him, chattering on with some kind of news report. She wasn’t there. But he could have sworn—
Dettie, who was waiting by the door, gripped his shoulder, hard, and heaved him out into the street. He tried to resist, pointing back inside, but she was striding towards the car, hissing. ‘Come on. Get in. Everyone. Go. Hurry.’
‘What’s wrong, love?’ John said, jumping down from the railing he’d been perched upon.
‘Nothing. We just—we don’t have all day. Now get in.’
She unlocked the doors, quickly, and ushered them all inside, desperately scanning the restaurant window behind her. And as the car wheezed to life Sam thought back to the moment she had grabbed him. About the spiteful, angry look she had been shooting at the television set.