‘Sid’s a bad influence – you never used to get into this much trouble.’
With a hard stare, Audrey retaliated. ‘Yeah, well, we used to be a family – things change.’
‘I’m still your mother – you don’t get to be rude to me.’
‘I’m not surprised Dad left you!’ she shrieked, her voice shaky.
Sam shook her head in despair. ‘I can’t even look at you right now.’
‘Fine by me, I don’t want to look at you either!’
And that was how the night ended, door slamming, swearing, but Sam couldn’t face any of it. She crawled into bed hoping that by the next morning she could somehow wake and find it had all been a terrible nightmare.
Sam woke the next morning and for one blissful moment forgot the night before. But it all came flooding back to her when she looked at the time and realised her body clock hadn’t got the memo about her redundancy. It was six o’clock and she was wide awake.
In the kitchen Sam boiled the kettle for tea. Jilly had texted her to ask whether Audrey had got home safely, ask how Sam was coping, but even her best friend’s constant support didn’t work to lift Sam out of her mood this morning. She stood looking out of the kitchen window, the morning rain shrouding the garden in a dismal cloak of misery.
Sam’s desperation over what to do about Audrey had been mounting up for a while, particularly since yesterday. She thought about how other people coped with family life’s ups and downs. The time Jilly had a stomach bug and her husband was away on business, Jilly had called her mum to come and look after the kids for an entire week, letting Jilly rest up and get back to normal. Sam’s colleague Marcus had struggled with his kids – he’d sent his wayward son off to stay with his grandad, who had been so strict when Marcus was growing up that he credited him with teaching him how to live in the real world. Sam had never really been sure what that meant – or whether it was entirely a good thing – but it seemed to have worked. Marcus’s son had come back with an entirely different attitude and all Sam knew was that now he was a lawyer, working in London and on his way to making partner. So something must have gone right.
When Sam tipped away the cold dregs of tea, the warm liquid not working any of its usual morning magic, her desperation about Audrey gave way to practicality and before she knew what she was doing, she found herself making a decision even she couldn’t have foreseen.
Sam had never asked anything from her own mother, certainly not since she moved away from the family home in Mapleberry, but what alternatives did she have?
All Sam knew was that if she didn’t do something, she wasn’t sure her relationship with Audrey would survive.
Chapter Three
Veronica
Veronica opened up the shutters in the sitting room so the sunshine as well as the floral scents from the garden could spill in through the windows. She wiped the windowsill, a favourite place for the dust to gather. She didn’t mind cleaning much at all. Some people moaned about it; on television this morning had been a feature about cleaning your home in only fifteen minutes each day, but to Veronica that seemed pointless. Cleaning and keeping things ship-shape was a way to fill her time when it was school term and Layla couldn’t visit whenever she liked, or when Charlie was on shifts and times for him to visit didn’t line up either.
Once she’d mopped the kitchen floor, Veronica made the gardener, Trevor, a tea, which she left on the front doorstep along with a couple of Bourbon biscuits for when he was ready. Trevor had been coming to the house, modest in size like most homes on the street apart from a couple of bigger residences at the end, for almost eleven years now. He kept everything looking marvellous, weeding the beds below the sitting-room window where passionate red geraniums flourished at the end of their cycle, mowing the lawn and trimming its edges, pruning bushes that overhung windows or the path, keeping the privet hedge on either side of the front gate a neat welcome for those who ever came to number nine Mapleberry Lane. A quiet chap not much younger than her, Trevor was very polite and if Veronica wasn’t in the mood to talk he’d simply tip his cap in greeting or farewell. She’d made an effort to chat with him this morning though and he respected some days she could manage more conversation than others. Layla told her she was unique and quirky, although Veronica thought those adjectives were perhaps a bit generous as she really wasn’t all that interesting.
With her own cuppa on the table beside her in the sitting room, Veronica took out her needle and thread to sew on Layla’s Grow Your Own badge to the sash she wore for Brownies. While she stitched, she thought about her next knitting project. She hadn’t picked up her needles in a few days, but it was halfway through the year already and she knew it was time to put in a phone order with the wool supplier and make a start on another cardigan for winter. She didn’t get to shop on the high street for new things so this was her way of treating herself. Perhaps she’d even go for something luxurious this time: a chunky wool in winterberry or a crocus-blue cashmere, or a rich plum colour she’d seen last time she looked on the website.
Just after four o’clock, after Trevor had packed up and gone home, Layla went past
