Mum shut the door to her bedroom and I scrubbed the dishes clean, washing the sausage pan twice. I scrubbed and scrubbed at the stuck-on grease, which clung and clung until finally, all at once, it fell away.

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7

‘You never told her?’

Grandma shakes her head.

‘Why not?’

‘I couldn’t. It was a terrible thing to be mixed up in. If I’d told Mum and she’d left him, it would have been my fault.’

‘It was a lot to keep to yourself.’

‘What would you have done?’

I take a sip of my red wine. I don’t want to make her feel bad. We’re in the Admiral’s Bar and Lounge and it’s happy hour, half-priced drinks between five and seven. Grandma’s been nursing her gin and tonic and now it is just melted ice with a crescent of waterlogged lime. The walls are covered with kitschy maritime decorations: wooden helms and old sails, anchors and ropes, life preservers and chunks of coral. There is even an antique-looking lifeboat hanging from the ceiling. On a raised platform beside the bar, a woman in a floor-length black dress with a thigh-high slit is playing the piano.

‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. ‘It’s a hard question. Probably the same as you. Remember when Mom and Dad divorced?’

‘How old were you again?’

‘It was just before my ninth birthday. I remember going to spend weekends with Dad, how he would ask me all these questions about what Mom was doing, who was coming over, even what she was cooking. And then I’d go back home after the weekend and Mom would want to know where we went, who was there, where I slept, what I ate, how much Dad drank. And I didn’t feel like I was me anymore to either of them. I was their spy. And then finally I just said to both of them: it’s none of your business. Dad shut up about it, but Mom kept asking for the longest time.’

‘That was tough, wasn’t it? And you didn’t like Larry.’

‘Larry was an asshole.’

‘Whatever happened to him?’

‘I have no idea.’

I think back to that year and feel the fist of my old fury. At my dad, for leaving. At Mom, for accepting being left. At Larry, the boyfriend she’d brought home one day and who moved in the next. Who left smelly ashtrays in every corner of the house. Who cut his toenails in front of the TV. Larry disappeared, thank God, but nothing went back to normal, even after he was gone. Dad had left and everything changed. It was like—boom! Childhood’s over. The family I’d taken for granted was gone. There is no such thing as happily ever after now.