Veronica thanked them both again for the cake. ‘With that and the veggies, you’ve made an old lady very happy.’
‘Less of the old,’ Charlie instructed before he turned to his daughter. ‘Are you ready to go, sweetheart?’ He took charge of the plates and cleaning the cake slice before Veronica stopped him. Clearing up would give her something to do when they left; it wasn’t always easy to fill the days. Sometimes they stretched out endlessly in front of her, and not in a good way.
‘Do I have to come with you while you get your hair cut?’ Layla whined.
‘Yes, because you’re getting yours cut too. Now put your shoes on – you can come again later, if it’s all right with Veronica.’
It was always all right with Veronica. And Charlie knew it, but he was so polite he always asked first. ‘I’ll look forward to it, and if the sun stays out and the heavens open and it rains, then who knows, we might see a rainbow.’
When Layla picked up her pen and ran her finger across the date squares of the kindness calendar rather than putting everything into her backpack, Charlie warned, ‘Stop stalling.’
Layla found what she was looking for. ‘Bake something for a neighbour,’ she read out loud before striking a line right through it. ‘We baked you a cake,’ she smiled at Veronica. ‘And I can tell Mrs Haines on Monday so I’ll get my name on the big calendar in class. Anyone who does more than twenty acts of kindness in a month gets a special prize at the end. Last month Elliot Bainbridge got Golden Time, ten minutes extra of play time while the rest of us had to clear up after art class.’
‘Sounds like the top prize.’ Charlie winked at Veronica. Kids at this age were easily impressed. Unfortunately this stage didn’t last anywhere near long enough. Perhaps Charlie realised that and had already decided to make the most of it. And he was never going to be a bad parent – he didn’t have it in him to fail. Not like Veronica.
‘And don’t forget, Daddy,’ Layla went on, ‘I have to get someone else involved with the calendar – it’s a way of spreading the kindness.’
‘We’ll see, I’ve got a job remember, a busy one at that.’ With a sigh and a wave, he led his daughter out of the door and in the direction of home.
Veronica watched them go from behind the shutters until Layla’s bright pink backpack was out of sight.
When Layla had mentioned needing another person to help with the kindness calendar, Veronica had almost leapt in to volunteer. Helping other people was one of the things she missed, but she supposed it made more sense for Layla to ask for Charlie’s help rather than an old lady who might end up letting her down.
Alone again, she went over to the Welsh dresser next to the bookshelves in the kitchen diner. She took out the framed photograph that had once stood on the mantelpiece with others: a family, the people she’d once had around her. But not anymore. Apart from the occasional Christmas and birthday card or the odd terse phone call, her family had more or less given up on her.
But Layla and Charlie hadn’t.
She bit back the tears that threatened to come, jammed the photograph back in the drawer, and began the countdown to when her favourite visitors, the neighbours who felt more like her family than her own, would come back later this afternoon.
Chapter Two
Sam
Someone had once told Sam that if she wanted to make God laugh, then she should tell him her plans.
Well, he must be rolling around the floor right now, because just when she thought life couldn’t get any harder, she’d been thrown another curveball.
Over the last decade she’d gone from a stay-at-home married mum to a divorced parent of one, and fought her way from being a customer service assistant to a customer services manager. Today she’d tumbled right back down the career ladder to unemployment after being made redundant. For years Sam had thrown all her efforts into her job, given that her personal life and family life were, for want of a better phrase, absolute shit, and she’d been thrilled to finally land the managerial position. But unfortunately the retail giant wasn’t a big enough company to hold onto its eight hundred employees when it merged with a competitor.
She edged her way out of the revolving door to the office, a cardboard box filled with her things. Inside lay a photograph of her and her daughter Audrey standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, smiling away as though things between them were perfect; a plant that looked so sorry for itself Sam suspected she’d throw it out when she got home; her favourite floral mug that held enough coffee to get her through a morning; a spare jumper she kept in her drawer in case the office air-conditioning was overzealous; and the nine packets of Post-its she’d taken from the supply cupboard not because she needed them, but because she could. Nobody in the office had really spoken as those dealt the raw deal had packed up and left. Anyone in the same boat was too angry or upset, and those who got to stay probably felt guilty about their colleagues and an enormous sense of relief that it hadn’t happened to them.
The only silver lining that Sam could see to this was that the ones on the receiving end got to leave work straight away – company policy – and wouldn’t be penalised for doing so. And her redundancy payout wasn’t bad, she supposed. It would keep her going for a
