Chapter 1
The key sticks in the lock the way it always does, and I give it the little wiggle it needs.
I’m five minutes late. That’s all. Just five minutes later than I said I’d be, and there was nothing I could do about it because the couple on table four ordered second coffees at quarter to and I couldn’t leave the cups sitting there. Mrs Pearson needed her change in specific denominations because she always does, and the floor by the counter needed a sweep, or Gary would have done it himself, and he’s sixty-three with a bad back, so I’m not leaving it for him. Five minutes. That’s nothing. That’s barely anything at all.
But he’ll have noticed. He always notices. Just be in a good mood. Please. I cannot do a bad mood tonight, I am so tired, just please be in a good mood.
I push the door open.
Trent is on the sofa with the TV on and his eyes come to me immediately, before I’ve even got my bag off my shoulder, like he’s been watching the door, waiting for me. Maybe he has been. I stopped trying to figure out what he does when I’m not here a long time ago. I stopped a lot of things a long time ago.
“You’re late,” he says.
“Sorry, clean up took longer than I thought.” I keep my voice even. He doesn’t like apologetic; it irritates him somehow, makes him worse. I’ve learned to be matter-of-fact, just explaining, just giving him the information like it’s straightforward and reasonable because it is straightforward and reasonable. I need him to see that. “I couldn’t walk out and leave Gary to manage it on his own.”
He looks at me. That look. The one that goes through me like he’s checking a list, like I’m a thing to be inventoried rather than a person who has just spent eight hours on her feet carrying plates and smiling at strangers and counting change and now just wants, more than almost anything, to sit down for five minutes before she has to go back out and do a different version of the same thing all over again. I keep my face neutral, and I wait. I will not get to sit down. I know I won’t. But I want it anyway.
“You better not be lying to me, Candace.”
Candy.
The correction happens automatically, somewhere behind my ribs, the name slipping into place the way it always does when he uses the other one. He never calls me Candy. He says it’s childish. He says it’s not a proper name for a grown woman. I’ve stopped asking him to. I stopped asking a long time ago, and now I just do it in my head instead, quick and quiet and private, the small correction that costs nothing and changes nothing and is somehow still the only thing some days that feels entirely mine.
“I’m not lying,” I say. “I’m just tired and I still have to be at the bar in two hours.”
He holds his hand out.
I take my phone from my pocket and give it to him. This is just choreography now, I know every step. I watch him scroll, and I let my mind go carefully, deliberately blank. Because thinking about what he’s looking for, or whether he’ll find something to be angry about even when there’s nothing there, which there never is, there is never anything on my phone worth being angry about, only leads somewhere dark and circular, and I don’t have the energy for dark and circular tonight.
Bubbles texted me at lunch with a picture of a dog she saw outside the newsagent, a fat little mutt with an extremely serious expression, and I sent back a string of heart emojis and went back to wiping down the counter. That’s it. That’s the full extent of my day’s communications.
He scrolls anyway. His thumb moves slowly and methodically. I look at the wall just past his left shoulder. I breathe, and I wait. I think about nothing, and I breathe a bit more. I have gotten very good at waiting. It’s not something I ever particularly wanted to be good at. I am good at it anyway.
He hands the phone back.
I put it in my pocket and don’t say anything. Neither does he. But I can feel the verdict still forming somewhere behind his eyes. The quiet calculation of what kind of evening this is going to be, and I know better than to speak into that particular silence, so I stand there, and I let him reach whatever conclusion he’s going to reach. I keep my face open and I wait some more.
“I’ll make you dinner,” I say, when the silence has stretched long enough. “Before I go. I’ll do the pasta bake that you like.”
Something in him shifts. Not a lot, but just enough, just that small settling that tells me the atmosphere has moved from uncertain to manageable.
“Fine,” he says, and turns back to the TV.
I go into the kitchen, and I start pulling things out of the cupboards, and I breathe slowly, carefully, just through my nose. The pasta bake takes forty minutes from scratch. I don’t really have forty minutes, but I offered, and he accepted. This is the thing I’ve learned over time: find the thing that will level him out and offer it before he has to ask. Then he feels like things are fine, like things are under control, like I am cooperative and he is reasonable, and everything is exactly as it should be.
It works. It always works. I am grateful that it works. I try very hard not to think about the fact that I know it works and what that says about the shape of things.
He comes into the kitchen while the onions are softening. I hear him before I see him, the rhythm of his footsteps that I’ve learned to read the way you read weather, the way you look at the colour of the sky and know before you even step outside what the day is going to be. I keep my eyes on the pan, and I keep my face neutral and I wait.
“You can suck my cock later,” he says, almost casual, almost the same tone he’d use to mention we’re out of milk. “As an apology for being late home.”
Somewhere inside me, something twists. Something that has been twisting for such a long time now that I barely register it as a thing any more, the way you stop hearing a noise that never goes away. I think about my bar shift starting in two hours. I think about the onions and whether I need more garlic and whether there’s enough cheese left in the fridge.
“Okay,” I say.
He goes back to the sofa.
The pasta bake goes in the oven at ten past and I set the timer and I go to the bedroom and change into my bar clothes. I sit on the edge of the bed for exactly thirty seconds because that is all I am allowing myself, thirty seconds, no more. I close my eyes and I breathe and I let my shoulders drop and then I get up and I go and check on the pasta.
While it cooks, I take my tips out of my jacket pocket and count them. Thirty-two pounds. Not bad for a Tuesday. I’ve been out of dry shampoo for two weeks and the conditioner I’ve been using is the cheap one, the flat one. Not the good one in the blue bottle that actually does what conditioner is supposed to do. Nothing dramatic. Nothing expensive. I’ve just been meaning to get to the chemist, and I haven’t quite had enough left over. Today I might, today there might just be enough to do it and maybe grab a coffee on the walk in tomorrow morning, the proper kind, not the one I make from the jar at home.
I’m still counting when Trent comes in.
“That your tips?”
“Yeah.”
“I need them.” He says it the way he says most things he’s already decided about, flatly, without explanation, with the expression of someone who has never once lost this particular argument and knows it.
I learned early on which things are worth the fallout and which things aren’t, and I made a list, and I stuck to it and thirty two pounds and a bottle of conditioner is not on the list. It doesn’t matter.
I hand them over.
“I’ve got something lined up,” he says, and I watch him pocket the notes without counting them.
I close something small and quiet inside myself and I let it go.
He gets a particular light in his eyes when he has an idea, bright and certain, already somewhere ahead of himself, already spending money that hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve seen this look more times than I can count. “Something big. Genuinely big this time. There’s a contact, it needs to move quickly, or the window closes. I just need to show willingness to get into the conversation, and then we’re in.”
I have a face I do for this. I’ve refined it over time. Open and receptive, interested without being too eager because too eager somehow reads as condescending and not enough reads as doubt, and I’ve spent a long time calibrating it.
“That sounds promising,” I say carefully.
“It is.” He’s already moving back towards the living room, already in his head somewhere two steps ahead. “Don’t be negative about it.”
“I’m not being negative,” I say, to his back.
The timer goes off six minutes later.
I serve up the pasta bake and put it in front of him. He looks at it and nods, and tonight that is what passes for fine. I pick up my bag, and I check I have my lip balm and my work lanyard and the last few coins from the bottom of my purse for the bus if it comes to it.
“Don’t be late back,” he says, not looking up from his plate.
“I won’t,” I say.
The night air is cold enough to notice, and I pull my jacket tighter as I walk. My feet ache in the way they ache after a full café shift, that low steady throb that starts in the ball of each foot and works upward. I think about the five hours ahead of me and I think about getting home and taking my shoes off and I think about nothing else for a bit because sometimes nothing else is the safest thing to think about.
There’s a dog outside the newsagent. A small fat beagle sitting next to a bike rack with an expression of tremendous personal dignity, watching the street like he’s been appointed to keep an eye on things and is taking the responsibility seriously. Something in my chest does a small involuntary thing when I see him, something warm that I don’t entirely expect.
I keep walking.
But I look back once, just once, at the beagle still sitting there in all his dignity, and somewhere in the dark where nobody can see it, something that might be a smile crosses my face.
