‘He’s smoked every day since he was fourteen. He’s secretive about it, but if he stopped smoking he’d be hanging from a tree. It’s the other stuff interacting with it that causes the problems.’

‘He started the fight,’ Gordon said. ‘It was all about Daniel again.’

Kelly waved a cloud away. ‘That boy’s too slick.’

‘Jude Oxenford said I should ask you why Carl’s been told to stay away from the school grounds.’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘I want to know how it affects Ben.’

‘It doesn’t affect Ben.’

Kelly reflected on something else she missed about Gordon. For all their surface dissimilarities, he and she saw the world in fundamentally the same way. The overwhelming relief of being with him was how little effort it cost her to share. Like both of them being able to take one look at a kid like Daniel and think the same thing.

‘Daniel’s a lot slicker than his father,’ Gordon said.

‘Frontal’s never got over that chip on his shoulder towards us Chidgeys, so I kind of feel I know where I stand with him. The kid’s different. He’s everything Frontal wanted to be, and he knows it. Adults want children to be polite, but it’s the polite ones you have to watch. I find it easier to trust kids who can’t string a sentence together.’

‘I’ve disliked Daniel since I first laid eyes on him in second grade. I never feel that way about kids. Why would I distrust him at first sight?’

‘What does Lou say about disliking Dog instantly? Saves time.’ She flicked her roach over the rail and looked at Gordon with her hand over her mouth. ‘Whoops, that’s an eighty-buck fine, it says on the post!’

‘Better hope Frontal isn’t down there. He can do us a lot of damage.’

‘To which you’ve just responded by burning his letter. Where was the letter-burner in all those years we were married?’

‘We are still married.’

‘Gordon Grimes, you are full of surprises!’

She surprised herself by saying this. So often, during their married life, she found herself desperately missing Gordon even while he was with her. They each found their sandwich-generation roles so onerous, and themselves so unsuited, that very often the only person with whom either of them shared any understanding was the one member of their family they had freely chosen. During a rough patch with Ben a couple of years earlier, Gordon had lain in Kelly’s arms and confessed: ‘I don’t want to be a son, I don’t want to be a father, I only want you.’ She loved him for saying that. And then, a year on, she thought she had not loved him anymore.