I was well into my bacon and egg roll with relish and avocado, and Caitlin near finished her Bircher muesli, when Dad came and sat with us. He plunked Caitlin’s woven basket loaded with fruit and veg and things on the ground.

He kissed Caitlin and me. ‘How was yoga?’

‘Caitlin’s ready to teach the class,’ I said. ‘She’s a guru.’ I could tell this made her really happy.

Dad gave Caitlin’s thigh a squeeze. ‘And how about you, Pheebs, did you like it?’

‘It was harder than I remember it being, but yeah, it was all right.’

Dad went and ordered his breakfast and bought Caitlin and me a freshly squeezed juice. Between munching on his breakfast roll he told me, ‘Phoebe, knowing what we know about your mum, we were having kittens when she took you to dinner at the pub the other night.’

‘She didn’t drink,’ I blurted out.

‘We weren’t asking that, but thanks for sharing,’ Caitlin said.

‘The thing is,’ Dad started explaining, ‘we’re always going to be worried about you, as your parents, no matter who you’re with. And when you’re with your mum …’ Dad paused.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘I worry about Mum too. When Caitlin dropped me at the pub I was worried that Mum might have already drunk half a bottle. But she hadn’t.’

‘So what do we do next?’ Caitlin asked.

I looked around the markets, at all of the adults, thinking about how most of them would have had a few drinks the night before, maybe smoked some weed or whatever. ‘Maybe you should both come to those meetings that I go to. There’s adults there too, not just teenagers.’

‘You think that would really help?’ Dad said.

‘It can’t hurt. It didn’t give me the magic solution to stop Mum drinking, but it helped me realise that I wasn’t the only person in the world dealing with an alcoholic parent.’

‘Alcoholic?’ Caitlin repeated.

‘Yep,’ I said confidently. ‘Mum’s an alcoholic, whichever way you look at it. She has a problem with alcohol and so do you.’

‘But we don’t drink that much,’ Dad was quick to tell me.

‘Yeah, but Mum’s drinking is our problem.’

Dad got all teary when I said that, and Caitlin threw her arm around him. ‘Yes, it’s our problem,’ Dad agreed. ‘There’s a way through it, right?’

‘I think so,’ I answered before giving Dad a hug.

Dad, Caitlin and I walked into the meeting together the next week on a night where it was bucketing with rain. I knew that Dad felt good about it because rain was a good omen. It was Wapma, our ancestor, communicating with us in the form of rain.