Melissa shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’m not just saying that; I honestly, truly don’t mind. Hugo’s wonderful.”
“I know. But this was only supposed to be for a few days.” We had been at the Ivy House for over three weeks by this point. Melissa had made a couple of trips to her place and mine, to pick up more clothes, but somehow the subject of moving back had never come up. “Maybe you should go home.”
She leaned back against the counter, eyes scanning my face, soup forgotten. “Do you want me to?”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I love you being here. It’s just that”—saying it to her felt like a commitment somehow, one I wasn’t sure I was ready to make, but it was too late—“I’ve been thinking I might stay on for a while longer.”
Melissa’s whole face lit up. “Oh, I’ve been hoping you would! I didn’t want to ask— I know someone else could take over, but Hugo loves having you here, Toby. It means the world to him. I’m so glad— And of course I’ll stay. I want to.”
“It’s one thing now,” I said. “But it’s going to get worse. And I don’t want you dealing with that.”
“As long as you’re here, I’m here. Oops—” She whirled around to the soup, which had started to hiss and foam ominously, and turned down the gas. “This is ready. Did you put the toast on?”
“It’s not just Hugo,” I said, with incredible difficulty; the words hurt coming out. “You’ve done a fair bit of taking care of me, this last while.”
That made her smile at me, over her shoulder. “I like taking care of you.”
“I don’t like you having to do it. I hate it. Specially what with your mother.”
“That’s not the same thing,” Melissa said instantly, turning from the cooker, and there was an absolute, iron inflexibility to her voice that I’d never heard there before. “You didn’t do this to yourself. Any more than Hugo did. It’s completely different.”
“It comes to the same thing, though. This isn’t what you should be doing. When we’re eighty, sure, but now . . . you should be out dancing. Going to festivals. Having picnics. Sun holidays. All the stuff we—” My voice shook. I’d had this conversation in my head a thousand times, but I’d never had the strength to do it out loud and it was just as tough as I’d thought it would be. “This isn’t what I want for you.”
“Well, if I could pick anything in the world, this isn’t what I’d want for you, either,” Melissa said matter-of-factly. “But it’s what we’ve got.”
“Believe me, this isn’t what I want for myself, either. Jesus, this is just about the last thing—” My stupid voice cracked again. “But I don’t have a choice. You do.”
“Course I do. And I want to be here.”
All this unruffled composure wasn’t what I was used to from Melissa—I had held her while she freaked out about Niall the pathetic semi-stalker, for God’s sake, when she burst into tears over refugee kids on the news or starved puppies on Facebook—and it was kind of disconcerting. When I’d had this conversation in my head, I had been the steady one, comforting her.
“I want you to be happy,” I said. “And there isn’t a way for that to happen while you’re here. While you’re”—I had to take a breath for this—“while you’re with me. I’m supposed to make your life better. Not worse. And I think, I really think I used to do that. But now—”
“You absolutely make my life better. Silly.” She reached out to put a hand to my cheek, kept it there, small and warm. “And so does being here. It’s not just because of Hugo that I’m glad we’re staying, you know. Being here is—” A quick breath of a laugh. “It’s been so good for you, Toby. You’re getting better. Maybe you don’t notice it yet, but I do. And that’s the happiest thing that could happen to me.”
In my head this conversation had always ended with good-bye, with her going weeping back up into the sunlight like Orpheus, leaving me alone to dissolve into the thickening dark. That didn’t really seem to be on the cards. The shift left me feeling very strange, light-headed and deflated all at once, scrabbling for footholds. I couldn’t find a way to explain to Melissa all the things she had all wrong. “No,” I said, pressing her hand against my cheek. “Listen. You don’t—”
“Shh.” She tiptoed to kiss me, a proper kiss, hands clasping at the back of my neck to pull me close. “Now,” she said, smiling, when she leaned away. “We need to feed Hugo or he’ll faint from hunger, and then you will have something to worry about. Put the toast on.”
* * *
?By the next morning, Hugo seemed fine; stronger than he had in days, actually, humming as he puttered around the living room looking for some book he wanted to reread and was sure he’d seen just a couple of years ago. I went out to the bottom of the garden—I had taken to drifting down there for my cigarettes, so we could all keep pretending I didn’t smoke—and lay on the grass under one of the trees. Outside my patch of shadow the sun was blinding; gold coins of light spilled over my body, grasshoppers zizzed everywhere, yellow poppies bobbed.
I felt like talking to Dec, or even better, Sean. I hadn’t actually spoken to either of them since that visit in the hospital; they had kept the texts coming, and I had even managed to text them back once or twice, but that was as far as things had gone. I was starting to notice that I missed the pair of bollixes. When I had finished my smoke I rolled over onto my stomach and pulled out my phone.
Sean picked up almost instantly, and there was an urgency to his “Hello?” that startled me. “Dude,” I said. “How’s tricks?”
“Fuck me,” Sean said, and it was only with the rush of glad relief in his voice that I got it: when my number came up he had been scared shitless, that I was ringing to say good-bye, that it was my parents ringing to break the news— It occurred to me that I had been kind of a dick to Sean and Dec. “The man himself. What’s the story?”
“Not a lot. You?”
“Grand. Jesus, dude, I haven’t talked to you in— How’re you doing?”
“Fine. I’m down at my uncle Hugo’s. He’s sick.”
“He OK?”
“Not really, no. It’s brain cancer. He’s got a few months.”
“Ah, shit.” Sean sounded genuinely upset; he had always liked Hugo a lot. “Man, I’m sorry to hear that. How is he?”
“OK, considering. He’s at home. He’s kind of weak, but nothing too bad so far.”
“Tell him I was asking for him. He’s a good man, Hugo. He was good to us.”
“You should come over,” I said; I hadn’t known I was going to say it till I heard the words. “He’d love to see you.”
“You sure?”
“Definitely. Come.”
“I will. Audrey and I are going to Galway for the weekend, but I’ll come first thing next week. Will I bring Dec?”
“Do, yeah. I’ll ring him. How’s he getting on? Jenna stab him yet?”
“Fucking hell.” Sean blew out a long breath. “Like six weeks ago, yeah? when they’ve been back together about five minutes? she decides they need to move in together. I tell Dec he’d be bloody insane to do it, which he totally agrees with. Right up until Jenna throws a screaming wobbler and says he’s just using her for sex, and somehow by the end of the conversation Dec’s decided he has to prove she’s wrong by moving in with her.”
“Oh Jesus. We’ll never see him again. She won’t let him out the door.”
“Wait. It gets better. So they go apartment-hunting together, right? They pick out a nice little place in Smithfield, put down the security deposit and the first month’s rent, few grand. Dec gives notice on his place. And a week later—”
“Oh no.”
“Yeah. She breaks it to him that she was just punishing him for toying with her feelings, she’s got no intention of moving in with him, in fact she’s dumping him. Bye.”
“Shit,” I said. “How’s he doing?”