“What?” Mum exclaims.
“You said that thing with the tsunami was Granny’s last journey because she had found a new job. What job was it?”
Mum’s fingertips brush against Elsa’s when she whispers the answer.
“As a grandmother. She got a job as a grandmother. She never went away again.”
Elsa nods slowly. Mum caresses her arm. Elsa opens and closes the glove compartment. Then she looks up as if she’s just thought of something, but mostly because she’d like to change the subject, because she doesn’t want to think about how angry she is with Granny right now.
“Did you and Dad get divorced because you ran out of love?” she asks so quickly that the question actually surprises her.
Mum leans back. Pulls her fingers through her hair and shakes her head.
“Why are you asking?”
Elsa shrugs.
“We have to talk about something while we’re waiting for the policeman to come back with the people you’re the boss of and everything gets mega-embarrassing for you. . . .”
Mum looks unhappy again. Elsa fiddles with the rubber seal. Realizes that it was obviously too early to start making jokes about it.
“Don’t people get married because they’re full of love and then divorced when they run out of it?” she says in a low voice.
“Did you learn that one in school?”
“It’s my own theory.”
Mum laughs very loudly, without any warning. Elsa grins.
“Did Granddad and Granny run low on love as well?” she asks, when Mum has finished laughing.
Mum dabs her eyes.
“They were never married, darling.”
“Why not?”
“Your granny was special, Elsa. She was difficult to live with.”
“How do you mean?”
Mum massages her eyelids.
“It’s difficult to explain. But in those days it can’t have been so common for women to be like her. I mean . . . it can’t have been so common for anyone to be like her. It wasn’t common for women to become doctors in those days, for example. As for surgeons, forget it. The academic world would have been quite different . . . so . . .”
Mum goes quiet. Elsa raises her eyebrows as a way of telling her to get to the point.
“I think if your granny had been a man of her generation rather than a woman, she would have been called a ‘playboy.’?”
Elsa is silent for a long while. Then she nods soberly.
“Did she have many boyfriends?”
“Yes,” says Mum cautiously.
“There’s someone in my school who has many boyfriends,” states Elsa.
“Oh, well I wouldn’t want to suggest that the girl in your school is a—” says Mum, feverishly backtracking.
“He’s a boy,” Elsa corrects.
Mum looks confused.
Elsa shrugs. “It’s complicated,” she says.
Even though it really isn’t. But Mum doesn’t look massively less confused.
“Your granddad loved your granny very much. But they were never a . . . couple. Do you understand?”
“I get it,” says Elsa, because she has the Internet.
Then she reaches out and takes Mum’s index fingers and squeezes them in her hands.
“I’m sorry that Granny was a crappy mum, Mum!”
“She was a fantastic grandmother, Elsa. You were all her second chances,” says Mum and caresses Elsa’s hair as she goes on: “I think your grandmother functioned so well in chaotic places because she was herself chaotic. She was always amazing in the midst of a catastrophe. It was just all this, everyday life and normality, that she didn’t quite know how to handle.
“And it was just . . . I mean . . . the reason there aren’t any old photos of Granny is partly because she wasn’t home very often. And slightly because I tore up all the ones there were.”
“Why?”
“I was a teenager. And angry. The two belong together. There was always chaos at home. Bills that didn’t get paid and food that went off in the fridge when we actually had food, and sometimes no food at all, and . . . God. It’s hard to explain, darling. I was just angry.”