“Uh-huh.”
Verity was beyond excited at the idea of a sleepover with Aunty Star. She kept watch at the front window and when she saw Star crossing the street, she grabbed her rucksack and rushed down the stairs to meet her. Maggie followed her down and stood in the doorway, keeping the porch light off so that Star couldn’t get a good look at her face as she waved Verity off. Verity bounded out onto the street to greet her aunty and was so insistent to get over to the curios shop that Star didn’t have a chance to get within six feet of her sister.
“So, you’re all good? Yeah?” Star called over. “Nothing you want to tell me?”
“Nope. All good.” She forced a smile. Her cheeks felt like setting concrete as they lifted in response to her mouth’s movement. “Sameera’s dad is coming to pick Verity up in the morning at eight thirty for a playdate so that we can crack on with the festival. I’ll text him and tell him to pick her up from yours.”
“Okay, no worries.”
Finally, having her sleeve tugged by a very excited niece, Star turned with a hesitant wave and left.
Maggie kept the rictus grin on her face until she closed the door and then she let the smile melt down her face like candlewax.
She spent the next hour vigorously cleaning the shop in an attempt to get her thoughts straight. Her sadness was a physical pain, throbbing with its own heartbeat. At the same time, humiliation burned her, searing her cheeks and making her stomach twist so that in one breath she wanted to curl up in a ball of her own mortification, and in the next, she wanted to set the world on fire and watch it burn to ash. Her feelings were too big. There wasn’t room for them in her chest. She needed to scream them out, but there was nowhere in this goddamned village where a person could lose their shit without being seen. In the end, love would find a way to kick you in the fanny one way or the other. She set about mopping the floor with a violence that left no stain safe, and as the disinfectant fumes rose out of the steaming bucket, so too did the rage that was unfurling within her, and it wasn’t only Joe who had incited it.
When there was nothing left to scrub in the shop and she felt she had her anger under control, she climbed the stairs to the flat and knocked on Patrick’s bedroom door. He was sitting on his bed, reading. The bottoms of his white socks were a dirty gray and the room was littered with discarded underwear and hoodies. He sat up straighter when she walked in, locking eyes with her for moments but unable to hold her gaze.
“You could have come to me, quietly, taken me to one side.”
Patrick didn’t meet her eyes at all now. “You should have told me we were losing the house,” he countered.
“Yes. With hindsight, I should have told you, and I’m sorry that you had to find out in the way that you did. I was trying to protect you, but I went about it the wrong way.”
“You don’t need to protect me.”
“I will always try to protect you because I’m your mother and I’m hardwired that way. But your behavior today was unacceptable.”
He looked up quickly and away again but not quick enough to hide the guilt in his face. He knew what he’d done.
It was a fight to keep her voice level, but she wouldn’t raise it and give him an excuse to fight back. He wanted to rail against the unfairness of their eviction, he wanted someone to shout at because the situation made him feel helpless, but she wasn’t going to give him the chance.
“You made me look a fool, and the worst part is, you did it on purpose because you were angry that I’d kept something from you, and you wanted to hurt me. Well, mission accomplished.” She shook her head. “How dare you try to pull that macho, man-of-the-house, misogynistic bullshit on me. I thought I’d taught you better than that.”
He had the grace to look ashamed. “I was so angry, Mum.” Tears stood in his eyes. He was still her little boy even though he was grown now.
“That’s not going to cut it. You don’t get to behave like an arsehole just because you’re angry, that’s not how respect works. You made me feel small and stupid. I do not deserve that.”
He looked up at her then. “I know. I’m sorry.”
She drew her hand across her forehead. She felt wretched. She and Patrick didn’t fight, never had, even when he was in the middle of his sullen teenage years.
“Okay.” She nodded. “I’m going to bed.”
“Do you really think I’m a misogynist?”
She looked at her boy. She so wanted to make him feel better, but at the moment she was barely holding it together. The anger had acted as an Elastoplast over her heart, but now the rage had gone, the plaster was unsticking, and she was about to come apart at the seams.
“I don’t know what I think at this moment; my brain is mush. I know that I love you and I’m tired and heartbroken and I need to go to bed.”
“Heartbroken because of me? Because of my behavior?”
“No, my darling. You won’t want to hear this, but since it’s over I suppose it’s a moot issue anyway. I love Joe. And I thought he loved me too. I guess that makes me just another desperate middle-aged woman. So, that’s it. The whole story. We’re being evicted and I’m a fool.”
When he looked at her, his eyes were full of compassion and worry. “I didn’t know that you actually loved him. I thought it was a fling or something. If I’d known, I never would have . . . We’ll work it out, like we always do, it’ll be okay . . .”
She forced a smile into her trembling lips and tried to make herself sound like a mother and not someone whose life was falling down around her ears.
“Don’t you worry about me. Nothing that a good night’s sleep can’t fix,” she lied.
She left before Patrick had the time to scooch off his bed and give her a hug because a hug in that moment would break her.
Pulling his bedroom door closed behind her, she ran to her room as the tears began to fall. Her head pounded from the pressure of holding in her sorrow. She waited until her face was firmly pressed into her pillow before she gave way and let the torrent roll over her. It was all too much. It wasn’t simply about Joe, though his betrayal had been the final straw. Nor was it only the eviction, or losing her father, or arranging the whole funeral, or losing her business, or organizing a goddamned winter solstice festival, or trying to plan and pay for the Christmas her children deserved, or having to be so fucking upbeat all the time because if she wasn’t, the people around her became nervous, because so long as Maggie was all right, then everything must surely be okay in the end. It wasn’t only the thought of having to pack up her entire life. Or the thought of having to rebuild her business in an unknown location, or having to change careers entirely and start again, be the new girl at forty-four years old.