Please let me know by return. I look forward to—hopefully—seeing you on Saturday evening.

Yours sincerely,

Brendan Shepherd

It was that word—“hopefully”—that did it.

My mother liked Brendan, although it’s fair to say that she liked most people. Perhaps liked is the wrong word. She accepted people. Even the people who fell away after Dad was diagnosed. There were many who did that, dementia not being the most social of diseases. Even Dad’s GP admitted that, if she had to choose, she’d pick cancer. “Everybody has their own cross to bear,” Mam said when I’d give out about Dad’s friends from the snooker club who rarely called after he stopped playing.

“He’s a dependable sort of fellow,” she said of Brendan. She said other things too, but dependable, for her, was an important trait. Dependable meant arriving home on time. Being sober on a regular basis. Making it to your children’s school plays. Having money put by to repair the boiler when it shudders to a premature halt on a freezing January night.

Brendan was dependable. Is dependable. It’s just... I’m not sure what happened. Nothing really. Or nothing out of the ordinary at least. We went out together for a year, got engaged, got married, had two children. I mean, that’s a lot really. It’s certainly not nothing, but, I don’t know, it all seems like it happened a long time ago.

18

It is advisable to drive your vehicle in a defensive manner.
Be prepared to stop, sound the horn, and brake.

In the morning, there is cause for cheer.

Cheer might be overstating it. After all, I am still in France, still driving the wrong way out of Calais—that is to say in a Swiss-direction—and still on the wrong side of the road.

The cause for cheer might have something to do with the road itself. A quiet minor road instead of the motorway that Iris favored.

Or perhaps it is the spring weather. There is something cautiously optimistic about the white fleece of occasional cloud, the vastness of the milky-blue sky and the brightness of the young leaves unfurling green along the boughs of the trees lining the road.

Perhaps the cause for cheer might be Iris, who seems to have accepted that Dad and I are her traveling companions for the moment. Accepted might be a little strong. Resigned is probably more apt.

Or perhaps Vera and my mother were right; I just needed a good night’s sleep.

I think we are in the Champagne region now. As far as the eye can see, flat fields filled with neat rows of vines, interrupted by stone farmhouses with wooden shutters and smoke curling from chimneys.

Dad farts and says, “Good arse,” in a matter-of-fact kind of way, which makes Iris and me laugh, and the sound of our laughter is so ordinary and that is also a cause for cheer. I roll down the window and imagine the sound drifting outside, reaching across the fields like a warm wind carrying nothing but good intentions.