her it will be with her, she kisses me full on the lips and heads down the hall to her room, leaving me to turn off the television and the lights and retire myself.
Sunday
I get up early and cook her breakfast but she wakes up sick and vomits in the toilet for a solid hour. Apparently cooking bacon is one of her triggers and I apologise profusely. This is not one of the things you need to be sorry about, she tells me. I accept it and dump the bacon down in the carpark bins as far away from her as possible, and log the event in my memory. Then I make her dry toast and she eats it quietly and recovers.
“Do you mind,” she asks, “if I have some space for a few days?”
I’m disappointed but I know that I can’t rush her, I can’t smother her. So I have a back-up plan, one that I’ve been keeping up my sleeve. It’s something I need to do, and I’ve been busy lately.
“Sure. Anyway, I’m going back home for a couple of days,” I tell her. “I think I should return Phillip’s car.”
“Can you get the time off?” she asks. She’s narrowed her eyes and I know she’s thinking of something, she’s planning something. I’m practicing trust and so I resist the temptation to grill her.
“Yes,” I say. “Kenny can take over. He’s actually grateful that I’ve taken Wade back from him, so much that he’s happy to help me out when I need it.”
“Good.”
“Yeah. In some respects leaving when I did put me in a better situation than before. Hey, I’ll take a win when I can get it.”
She smiles a little. She’s amused that I’ve turned something horrendous into something to my advantage. I’d have complained and done nothing before, but this new Judd looks for opportunities and takes them.
“When will you leave?” she asks, standing against the kitchen bench, her arms folded over her chest.
“What are you up to today?” I ask her and she tells me she has some work to do for her job that’s due tomorrow. I take the hint and give her what she needs.
“Well, I could get going now, I suppose. I’ll call you when I get home,” I tell her. Home is where I grew up, not here, but they both seem like home to me. I wonder why she hasn’t asked me if I want her to come, but then I realise that she’s still feeling embarrassed about what’s happened between us and having to face my family might be too much. And I think she has work commitments and I don’t want things to get hard for her.
I leave her, drive back to my flat, pack for a few days at Elmsbrook. I put my bag in the trunk and put the top down.
I make a couple of calls before I leave. Wade won’t answer his phone, I’m not expecting him to. Kenny does, of course, and isn’t overjoyed with the news he’s working tomorrow and Tuesday. I owe him one, he says, and I say I’ll pay him back which I won’t. Or maybe I will, with a month of Sundays.
I head down to home through the Sunday traffic, getting there in less than the usual fifty minutes. The house is how I left it, but it’s empty, and I let myself in with my keys and invade my old bedroom. I’d been relegated to the basement on my last visit, but there was no way on god’s green earth I was going back down there.
I could have tried to find my mother, I doubt she was far, maybe even at Linda’s, but her car was gone, so that wrecked that theory. I could have called her, but I had another call to make, one that I had promised. I climb out on the roof and make myself comfortable as I look out over the quiet street as I have done countless times before.
It’s a while before she answers.
“Hey,” I say. “It’s me.”
“Hey, Judd.” She sounds tired, and a little breathless.
“I’m here,” I tell her. “Safe and sound.”
“Good,” she replies.
“You alright?”
“Sorry. I’m just in the middle of something. Can I call you back in a bit?”
“Sure,” I say and she hangs up.
I’m suddenly nervous and so I try Wade again. I trust her, I do. I just need to talk to him, for business reasons, of course.
His phone rings out, damn him.
But my phone rings a second after I give up on Wade and I answer it quickly because I think its Quinn, but it’s not.
“Hello? Judd?” A male voice. I’ve heard it before. “It’s Grant Upton.”
“Oh, hi,” I say.
“Sorry to bother you.”
“You’re not.” I’m busy doing nothing right now, just sitting on the roof of my childhood home.
“Right,” he says. “Anyway, I just wanted to touch base with you.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t have a chance to talk to you properly yesterday. How did you do with sleeping over assignment?”
“Good. Wednesday, Friday, last night.”
“Excellent. How did it feel?”
“Good,” I tell him, and realise that gives him nothing. “Ah, strange at first, but normal too, if that makes sense.”
“It does.”
“And she fixed up that bed for me.”
“That’s right.” There was a slight raise in his tone, like maybe he was excited. I must have meant something big. Of course I knew it did, but it was nice to have it confirmed professionally.
“Yeah. I was sleeping on the couch, which isn’t new for me but horrendously uncomfortable, and so she had a bed put into our spare room, got it all set up.”
“And what do you think about sleeping with her eventually, in your old bed?”
“Well, to be honest, I think sleeping with her will take some time, and it won’t be in my old bed when I do.”
“Why is that?”
I grit my teeth at the thought of the answer. “That’s the bed I found them in.”
“Yes,” he says sadly, “of course it is. Does she know how you feel about that?”
“Yeah.” I think for a second, worry that I’m an ass. “Am I being unreasonable?”
“No, not at all. How you feel is perfectly reasonable. Of course, I’d say that if you were okay with the bed. Your feelings are you own. Don’t second guess them.”
We’re silent for a few seconds and so I tell him what’s been on my mind the last day. “I’m thinking of moving back in. Permanently. I’ll ask her if I can.”
“That’s great.”
There is silence again, and for some reason I have the need to apologise to him because he’s becoming like a friend to me.
“Ah,” I start hesitantly, “you may have noticed Quinn and I laughing before we left last week.”
“We saw you.”
“It wasn’t about you.”
“It was.”
“Sorry?”
“You were laughing at the ‘bedroom’ question, right?”
I don’t answer. My mouth is open. He’s nailed it.
“That’s fine. It’s actually a serious question. But, that’s not why we brought it up. You needed that laugh together to defuse the tension between you and so we dropped it in.”
“Deliberately?”
“Intentionally. But we take sex very seriously, Mary and me. We take it seriously between the two of us, and we take it very seriously between the two of you. You do need to get to know each other again, trust each other, so asking those sorts of questions is important. You might not be ready yet, but you will be, I hope, very soon.”
I swear under my breath. I’m not expecting this kind of candour, not from him, not from his wife.
“Exactly,” he replies, hearing me. “But I hope it will be more than that when you do. You need to reconnect as friends, as companions, as lovers.”
“Okay,” I say and I’m now feeling like I want this conversation to end, but I know it will when Grant says it will. He does. He says see you Saturday and says his goodbye.
I’m left sitting on the roof, totally bewildered. I say that word again, only louder, and head back into the house.
I want to go to the store and give Phillip back his car, but I want to avoid Penny if I can. She’s not expecting me and she’ll see my re
turn as some sort of sign. The sign says we’re over, but I don’t know how to say it. I’m a coward and I don’t want to be, so I drive over and park the Porsche next to my car that he’s been driving around the last few weeks. It’s dirty and there are a few dents and scratches that I didn’t remember being there before.
Two years ago we replaced my car with a newish cream colored Jeep. I was trying to placate my wife over some ongoing issue and so I gave her the new car and took hers. It is a four wheel drive that never saw dirt, until now, though I don’t think he took it anywhere that might need the four wheel part. He just didn’t wash it.
I walk into the family store with a half-smile and an easy walk. Phillip and Horey are behind the counter and Paul is nowhere to be seen. I can’t see Penny either, for which I’m a little relieved about. Phillip sees me immediately and jumps the counter, grabs me in a bear hug and the breath is knocked out of me.
“Judd,” he says finally releasing me.
“Phillip,” I say back and then recognise Horey.
“Back already?” by brother asks me.
“Yeah.”
“Paul’s got a surprise,” he tells me enthusiastically. “But I’ll him and Alice tell you.”
“I think you’ve already told him,” a voice says from behind me. Penny appears and I feel instantly nervous. What are the chances that my luck could be that bad that she was in the store at the same time as me? I thought my luck had improved. But then, maybe, it is good luck that she is here. “Judd Altman,” she says, fond of saying my full name. She wraps her arms around my neck and plants a kiss on my mouth, her lips soft and warm and I remember them well. I kiss her back, not dismissively, but with regret for love left behind.
I said I was going to call her