As she did each week (save the last three), she’d arrived thirty minutes before the children were dropped off so that there’d be time to make them a hot drink and a nutritious snack before they did their homework (Katie was very exacting about her children’s intake, insisting temperature played a vital factor in their digestive process).
Now that they were both deep into primary school, Jayden (7) and Zack (9) had a proper ‘home from school’ routine. Return home, place shoes in the appropriate section of the shoe locker, hang coats up on the rustic, but decorative wall hooks, book bags into the ‘children’s recreation and study room’ and into the kitchen for a snack before homework. This, apparently, went like clockwork for Katie, her mother Mallory and, on the rare occasions her brother was home on childcare duty, Dean. Not so much on Sue’s watch.
Door banged open, shoes kicked off, coats dropped where the child stood, book bags deposited wherever and straight into the kitchen for a noodle round to see if there was something good to eat (usually Katie’s hidden stash of chocolate for ‘afters’ which she claimed were solely for emergency, but, Sue had noticed, were regularly replenished. And then the demands began. Auntie Sue, this chocolate isn’t hot enough. It’s too hot. Mummy wouldn’t make us eat this. Mummy would make us something good. Mummy lets us watch television before we do our homework. Can you find my iPad/PlayStation/remote?
When Sue had first agreed to look after the children quite a few years back now, she’d absolutely adored it. The cooking, the cleaning, the caring, the nurturing, that warm, sweet child scent when one or both of them would clamber up onto her lap to hear a story over and over and over again. She loved it all, convinced it was a precursor to the days when she and Gary would be able to do the same with children of their own. But, of course, things hadn’t panned out quite the way she’d thought. Their children never materialized, Sue poured her affections into her niece and nephew, and the leniency she had afforded them as a loving Auntie had turned into a presumption that they could behave however they liked and that she’d smooth over the edges so Mummy never had to know they had been little terrors moments before they morphed into little darlings when Katie blew in after work.
She could’ve established her own rules, of course, but Katie was so specific. If Gary was here, she’d ring him up and tell him Katie had been making more rules and he’d say something to make her laugh or feel a bit braver as he had when she’d once admitted, after one too many glasses of Zinfandel, that she was a little bit afraid of Katie. The ‘sugar cereal incident’ was burned so vividly into her psyche she daren’t go off piste again. So, she muddled along the best she could, fixing, refixing, heating, cooling, finding, tidying, searching, wiping, unravelling, sweeping, wiping again and popping a smile on her face when Katie’s headlights filled the kitchen as she whipped her BMW into place next to the house.
‘Right! Good,’ Katie said once she’d kissed her angelic children who were diligently sitting at their desks finishing up some homework. ‘Are you alright for a little talk?’
‘Of course,’ Sue took off the pinny she sometimes wore when she was there and, like a domestic servant, waited until Katie had seated herself before she, too, sat down at the long wooden kitchen table (Irish elm, the last of its kind apparently).
‘Right, Suey.’ Katie clapped her hands together and looked her straight in the eye. ‘We all know you’ve been through a tough time and now that you’ve had a few weeks to, you know, cry it out or whatever, I’ve taken it upon myself to rip the plaster off, as it were.’
Sue quirked her head to the side. Plaster? What plaster?
‘We think it’s time you started looking at other income streams, considering …’
Considering what? That her husband was dead? That the cash machine had eaten the last of her cards? That she hadn’t yet divined a solitary ounce of courage to enter Gary’s office and find out if there was something, anything, to explain why he’d done this.
The idea of one more tea with the missus … sometimes they just don’t have it in them. Shame’s too high. Spirit’s too low. Whatever.
That had been the other thing the tactless DCI had intoned to the other when they hadn’t seen Sue standing behind them.
Didn’t have it in him to what? Wait for her to get ketchup so he could have his tea the way he liked it? Bear the relentless rain of February? Book one more Sunday lunch with her increasingly exhausting family? They were wearing, she knew, but was that any reason to end it all? Love her? Was that it? Did he not have it in him to love her anymore?
Katie glanced towards the children’s recreation room where the television was now on (Katie had okayed some Disney Channel until bath time), then redirected her considerable focus back on Sue. ‘Your father mentioned about the debit card situation.’ She whispered the words ‘debit cards’ in the way one might whisper ‘prostitution.’
Sue’s flush went every bit as hot as if she had been found turning tricks out on the Bicester gyratory. She looked at her hands. ‘I thought I’d look into things this weekend,’ she said, cringing at her own lie. ‘I’m sure it was just some sort of mistake.’ Where were all of these hangnails appearing from?
Katie tapped her on the knee and drew Sue’s eyes back up to hers. The gesture made her feel like a child
