The kitchen door slams closed behind her and Amanda leans heavily against the white washed brick of the courtyard wall. It’s already gone ten o’clock but the concrete is still damp with dew. The café is full of the breakfast bunch: today mostly broad-shouldered railway workers in their luminous orange trousers and muddy black boots. They trail dirt across the linoleum tiles and sling their thick arms over the backs of the chairs, fingers poised to brush against her thigh. There is a smear of egg on the back of her hand and so she wipes it across her apron before reaching into her pocket for a cigarette. The craving for nicotine doesn’t usually come this early in the morning. She strikes a match and inhales deeply, thinking again of the man at the window table, who looks so like her father. His silk grey hair, the long thin, washed-white fingers of a pathologist.
The good-daughter would have gone to University. The ideal-daughter would have gone to Medical School. And the perfect-princess of a daughter would have eventually followed him into the morgue to be a doctor’s doctor; diagnosing the dead. Amanda told him about the café right on the edge of the park where they pay £4 an hour and throw the meals in for free. She said she was sick of being around ‘precious’ people, whining the word so that it sounded like an un-oiled door. She hoped that he might be able to picture her here standing against the back wall in her short skirt with her hair slicked back in a greasy ponytail, smoking a filter less cigarette, and that this might be enough for him to say, “You’re right Amanda, you’re not my daughter” and “I do not love you”. But as usual, he had said nothing. And nothing since.
The window next to her head creaks open, “Amanda,” says Bob, “whatcha doin’ out ‘ere?”
“I’m just having a quick fag, be there in a minute.”
“Little Miss Poshpants to smart to smoke in the kitchen like the rest of us then?” The chef chuckles his raspy laugh and ducks his head back in the window.
Amanda rubs the cigarette under the heel of her shoe and swings open the kitchen door. Bob is slouched on a stool, one elbow resting on the edge of the cooker. A frying pan spits on a ring of blue gas. There’s a spatula lying in the film of bubbling grease. Above the cooker are the shelves of condiments that Bob reaches for in his moments of inspiration – salt, a box of ground pepper and an economy sized bottle of brown sauce, it’s lid long gone. There’s a bottle of pickled eggs, floating like eyeballs in their embalming fluid. Amanda opens the refrigerator and takes out the beef sausage curled in its bowl, pokes at the translucent blue skin, sniffs the meat and then replaces it.
The railway men are working on the tracks that run across the other side of the park. They came in first thing this morning puffing and slapping their hands together, going off with steaming tea in polystyrene cups. Amanda’s had to tell Bob to order more sugar sachets. And now they’re all back for their breakfast, full English with two sausages and black pudding mostly.
“Is everything OK, mate?” asks Amanda tentatively, standing a little bit further away from the table than she usually would. The man who looks like her father is staring down at his steak. He has his elbows on the table and his head is resting on his hands. The knife and fork are untouched alongside one another on the paper napkin which Amanda has folded neatly in half. She likes these little details; it’s what makes this a job to her - taking pride, setting standards for herself. Those that use the napkins, and there are not many, leave them in scrunched balls on the table or drop them onto their plates where they discolour with mushroom juice. She sat him here specifically because he is alone. Who better to enjoy the view than someone with no one to talk to? Condensation has bloomed on the windows. Amanda has never noticed before that the blue and gold lettering across the top of the window: “PARK TIME Café” reads “EMIT KRAP” from inside. There’s an initial silence and then he mumbles something without looking up.
“What’s that?” she says, stepping a little closer.
“I said,” says the man, slowly and still quiet quietly, “I didn’t want this.”
He doesn’t lift his head but rubs at his temples and then across his forehead with the tips of his fingers. The steak has begun to bleed across the plate and into the chips.
She steps back from the table and apologising. Her hand is in her apron pocket feeling for her notebook. The mans says a tiny bit louder, “I didn’t want this.” It’s just enough for her to catch the knot of anger in his voice. He puts both hands down on either side of the plate, fingertips pressing against the red linoleum surface, his nails flush pink with the pressure. He says it again “I didn’t want this”.
“It’s a steak, medium rare, with egg and chips. Just like you ordered.”
He still doesn’t look at her.
“I’m sorry Sir,” says Amanda, “But is there something wrong with the food?” Would you like to order something else?”
He clenches his hands into small neat fists and Amanda knows, because her father has told her, that each one is the size of his heart.
“I mean life,” says the man, still stooped across the table, turning his face to look up at her. His eyes are sky blue, peppered with yellow and raw red around the edges. He looks as if he has not slept. There’s one wild, curled grey hair protruding from his eyebrow.
“I mean: I never wanted life to be like this” says the man.
Amanda clears her throat and in what she recognises to be an artificially lilting voice says: “Would you like a nice cup of tea?”
He lifts his hands slightly off the table and without taking his eyes off her, bangs them stiffly back down. The salt cellar sways briefly and then topples over, losing it’s scuffed silver cap which rolls across the tabletop and clunks on the to the floor. Salt and rice grains like fingernail clippings, leak onto the table.
“You’re not listening to me,” he says, but now the whole café is listening. Conversation around the small sunny room has stopped. There’s a screech of chair leg as one of the four men near the door, shifts to get a better view. Joe, over near the corner window, has paused, his steaming mug of tea inches from his face. Even the foreman has looked up from his book. The plastic curtain strips flap and Bob emerges from the kitchen. The man lifts his hands again and Amanda shifts her weight from one foot to the other. He turns them palm up, fingers slightly curled. His forearms start to shake and the eggs quiver on the plate. “Oh god, oh god, oh god” he says, increasing in intensity, building volume, like a siren. And then the hands go up over his face and he sucks in deep breaths through his fingers, shoulders shaking. He’s sobbing now, but quietly, whispering over and over again “Why don’t you understand me?”
Amanda bends down onto her haunches next to the man, balancing herself with one finger, setting the notebook on the table. From across the room Joe calls out:
“Amanda. That guy giving you trouble?”
She shakes her head gently and reaches out towards the man’s slumped back. He is wearing a blue fleece and beneath it a t-shirt that has ridden up at the back to reveal a strip of white flesh above his trousers. She pats the table gently instead.
“I’ll come back a bit later shall I? Would you like a glass of water?”
Nothing.
Amanda goes over to Joe and his friend and reaches out to begin to clear their table. Joe takes hold of her wrist with his huge hairy hand, she can feel the gold of the thick ring on his index finger, warmed by the tea.
“Darlin that guy ain’t givin you no trouble is he?” Amanda shakes her head and smiles. She picks up the yellowed plates and stacks them then returns with a cloth and wipes the splashes of tea and a blob of tomato sauce from the table. These tables do not wipe clean; the grease just spreads around. Amanda teases Bob that they were once white and it’s drips of tomato sauce oozed from the ends of bacon butties and sausage sandwiches that have turned them red.
Amanda walks through the plastic strips curtain into the kitchen. Bob is back on his stool, a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, the door to the courtyard is open and there’s a strong smell of burning. She crinkles up her nose and waves her hand in front of her face. Bob gestures at the toaster, out of which two charred pieces of toast are protruding, “Got distracted by all that lot.” She picks them up and tosses them into the lidless plastic dustbin near the cooker.
“Where’s Pedro?”
Bob shrugs. “It’s Saturday Amanda.” He mimics the gangsta hand gesture Pedro greets them with, “Ee’s in ‘is bed, wita bleedi’ ‘ead.” The stool creaks as he rocks back and forward with laughter.
“Well it’s sure as hell not going to be me washing these dishes.” She stacks the plates on the pile, not bothering to scrape them. Drops the cutlery into the long cold water in the sink.
There is only one glass left at the very back of the shelf and it’s been standing upside down so the base is covered in that sticky kind of dust you only get in kitchens. She rinses it under the running tap, squeezes in a gloop of fairy liquid and watches it run down the side of the glass. One of the railway workers peers through the plastic flaps.
“Looking for the bog?”
Bob gestures him out through the backdoor. He crosses the courtyard and swings open the blue toilet door. He has to stoop to get in.
She scrubs and rinses out the glass and then begins to fills it for the man who looks like her father. The cold water runs up over the brim of the glass, over her fingers and splashes into the sink.
Amanda remembers the low roofed shed at the end of her father’s garden and him stooping in and out to get his tools. It was the third week in September and he was digging out potatoes so she took him a glass of water. But she had forgotten the three blocks of ice he liked and so he sent her back for another. He slipped his baby finger under the base so that it wouldn’t slip through the knobbled material of his gloves and took a long sip.
“You could clean these for me,” he said gesturing with his free hand at the pile of potatoes.
Amanda fetched a bucket, a scrubbing brush and the hosepipe running at a trickle, upended the wheelbarrow and sat on top of it. He pressed the fork down into the soil, set a boot on top of the tines and then leant his weight onto it, bent the earth up in an arc. It made a tearing sound and the potatoes rose like moles. Potatoes are ready when the leaves of the plant begin to curl and die; these had been left too long. There was barely enough stem left to tell where to dig and yet with each incision another resistant potato was extracted.
“Sometimes,” grinned Amanda’s father, “You have to dig a little deeper.” He rubbed the potato up and down against his thigh and then threw it to her. It was as cold and heavy as a stone. He leant on the handle of fork with one bent arm.
“So what’s your favourite subject at school?”
Amanda wiped the back of her hand across her face.
“Have you been thinking about what you’re going to do next summer?” He peered at the sole of his boot, scraped it against the head of the fork. “You have to start making some decisions Amanda, don’t let your brains go to waste.” He began to dig again, picking at the surface of the soil looking for the base of stem and then clearing clods of earth before setting to work.
“I wanted to be a GP you know? That’s why I went to Medical School in the first place. But when we started doing rounds on the wards I realised it was never going to happen. I can’t get people to tell me what I need to know.” He grunted, leaning his full weight on the fork, “It’s so much easier to go in and have a look for myself!” He laughed.
“Do you know that’s actually what autopsy means? To see for oneself.” He picked up the glass and drank the rest of the water, crunching the ice blocks between his teeth. “Unlike the living, when the dead speak they can’t hide a thing.”
Amanda turned the potato over in her hands. It was all brown except for a smear of reddish mud on the white flesh where the fork had pierced the skin.
“There’s still lots of time to decide,” said Amanda.
He gestured at the potato she was holding ready to drop into the bucket, “That one’s not done yet,” and turned back to the fork.
“You don’t even know what subjects I’m doing.”
“Of course I do.”
“Ok, name one. Name one A level I’m taking this year.”
“Biology?”
“No.”
“Chemistry?”
“No.”
“Well how are you going to get anywhere without biology or chemistry?”
She threw the potato at the bucket and missed. It skipped across the furrows of the patch and rolled a half circle on itself before coming to a standstill.
“Why do you suddenly care anyway? I chose my subjects two years ago.”
“It was you who started on about the subjects.”
He stabbed the fork into the earth, picked up the potato she’d thrown and dropped it into the bucket.
“I was just trying to show an interest.”
“If I don’t tell you are you going to cut me open to see for yourself? You’re so good with sharp objects: knives, forks, words.” She stood up, “Well I’m not fucking dead yet in case you haven’t noticed.”
And she saw it in his face just for a moment that look of surprise you see when someone is shot in a film; the widening eyes. They know what’s happened, even thought it doesn’t hurt yet.
She put her hands in her pockets and walked past him and when they were shoulder to shoulder facing in opposite directions said, “I don’t want to come here anymore.” The wooden gate shuddered against its frame behind her and she marched out along the back of the hedges. Before she even reached the field she heard the hollow thump of another potato hitting the side of the bucket.
When she returned to the house the barrow, the bucket, and the fork were all gone. Her mother was waiting for her in the kitchen.
She lifts the glass and takes a long drink of water. Tips it out and then washes it again. Re-fills it, adds three blocks of ice from a cracked plastic tray in the freezer.
The man is sitting up a little straighter; his elbows are back on the table. He has one hand across his forehead and he’s pulled the plate a bit closer. He has the fork in his right hand and he’s prodding at the chips, moving them round on the plate. He nibbles a tiny portion off the end of a chip, lays the fork back on the plate.
Amanda puts down the glass and says quietly “I brought you some water.”
The man sniffs and wipes the back of his hand across his nose. He nods slightly without looking up.
“Can I get you anything else?” He doesn’t move and so Amanda starts to turn away.
“Wait,” says the man, “Could you sit here and have a cup of tea with me.” Amanda tucks her hands into the pocket of her apron. She hears Joe clearing his throat.
“Uh, not right now, ok? We’re a bit busy at the moment, but maybe later when these guys are back at work.” She gestures with her thumb over her shoulder at the tables of constructions workers, twists an earlobe between her thumb and forefinger. The man turns slowly, twisting further and further round at the waist, scanning the room, he takes in Joe and his mate, the four guys at the table near the door, Bob who as emerged from the kitchen with a plate of toast. He springs back to face the window like a coil.
Joe is drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Amanda offers the two of them another cup of tea. He ignores her, wipes a paper napkin across his face, lets it drop onto the floor. They’re off they say and stand up. He takes her hand and presses a balled up five-pound note into her palm, closes her fingers around it and says, “That’s for you, Amanda”. They’ve left the bill and a pile of coins on the table.
“Wot was all ‘at about?” Bob nods his head back at the restaurant, “With that bloke at the window.” He follows her to the courtyard where they both light cigarettes.
“Think he’s probably just a bit lonely or something. Wants me to sit and have a cup of tea with him.”
“Well it wouldn’t kill ya would it?”
Amanda rolls her eyes.
“Aw, come on Amanda, he seems harmless. Why don’t you just have a cup of tea with the bloke.”
“Sheez, you’re not paying me enough for this kind of customer service.”
The man is sitting up now. He has pushed his plate so far away from him its on the other side of the table, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think his friend was about to come back and eat it. He is staring out of the window. She sets the two cups of tea down beside the untouched water glass. .
“Do you take sugar?” She fishes a handful of blue sachets out of her apron pocket and slides them onto the table. She pulls out the chair, dusts the seat and sits down, puts her hands on the table and then in her lap. The man doesn’t look up. He’s stroking the handle of his fork. Amanda runs her fingernail along the aluminium edging on the table, a thread of dirt snakes out from the grove.
“Are you feeling better?”
“I’m Martin,” he says. “I’m sorry about freaking out.” He looks briefly up at Amanda and then the red-rimmed eyes go back to the fork. “I’m..” she begins, but he cuts her off.
“Yeah, I know, Amanda.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know, there’s only one letter difference between Martin and martian. One little ‘a’. Not so much difference at all really. Martian. Martin. Martian. Martian Martin. Martin Martian. That’s me.” He pulls a paper napkin from the aluminium dispenser on the table and lays it out in front of him.
“The thing is,” said Martin, “that I’m lonely.” He flattens out the napkin and then folds it in half diagonally, drawing his thumbnail across the fold. “I just want to have some friends. But every time I try to talk to people, they get scared off. ” The two ends of the napkin are brought together and it is halved again.
Last week tried to strike up a conversation with someone on the train. He had seen the man before; they were often on the same train into work in the morning. Martin said “Good morning” and asked the man what he was reading. He had been reading the newspaper. Martin asked whether anything interesting had happened. The man said that it had not and lifted the paper up in front of his face. Martin commented on the story on the front page (hospital reforms) and began to tell the man about his experience of having been in hospital a few years previously.
“And then he got up and changed seats.” The napkin is now a folded pressed triangle, he lets it go and it springs out into a pyramid. “I hadn’t even told him about the x-rays or the food.”
Amanda imagines what her father would find inside Martin; a big empty space with rattling pips of anger that would ping against the Petri dish after he tweezed them out. He extracts another paper napkin from the dispenser, smoothes it out.
“Did you know that it’s impossible to fold any piece of paper more than seven times? Doesn’t matter what the size of the paper is. Seven times.” He counts as he folds: “One, two, three…” and then sets another pyramid beside the other.
Amanda folds and unfolds her hands under the table. She can hear Bob stacking pans in the kitchen the faint rhythm of a song from the radio he keeps on the shelf.
“It’s happened all my life. At school I was in love with a girl called Valerie. Well not ‘in love with’ but I don’t know, it was my first crush or something like that I suppose. She had this long straight blond hair that she wore in bunches, tied up at the side of her head with red plastic baubles on black elastic bands. I used to imagine being allowed to stroke those bunches, twirl them around my index finger. I bet they were as smooth as silk.”
He had made her a valentine’s card from a doily his mother had let him have. He’d cut out a pink heart and mounted the whole thing on white cardboard. There had been glitter too. Valerie hadn’t wanted to take the card but he’d pressed it on her, saying “It’s for you” until she’d opened it in front of him, a giggling friend dangling from each arm, read it. She barged past him and at the front of the class tore it into pieces over the waste paper bin.
He adds another to the collection of pyramids on the red desert tabletop.
“Did you get teased?” asks Amanda taking a sip of tea. It’s still too hot and gasps as it burns her tongue.
“For a bit, but I was too peripheral for anyone to bother about me for any length of time. Oh, I’m sure you can imagine. You would have been one of those popular girls right? I can just see you. Swinging your bag over your shoulder and leaning against the wall, making comments about the boys as they walk past.”
“Actually,” says Amanda, “I wasn’t. I didn’t really like school at all. I got teased.” She takes a napkin out of holder. “About was my father. ‘Amanda’s dad speaks for dead people.’” She tips her head from side to side and sings: “Na na, na ha, naa naa.” Laughs. “He’s a pathologist. An enthusiastic pathologist,” she laughs again. “My god, Martin, you’re right. Look at that! Seven folds. No more.”
“He offered to come and talk to our class the one year. Brought his bag of equipment. And he’s pulling the things out one by one. Like a magician you know. With this grin on his face. ‘This is the magnifying glass’,” She pulled imaginary equipment from the beneath the table, “And what have we here children? Why it’s the Stryker saw. For cutting the breast bone.” He’d gone on and on. About the dust the saw made and how if it wasn’t for autopsies one in every three deaths would be wrongly diagnosed. Someone’s mother had called in to complain.
“But the worst thing was that line, ‘I speak for dead people’. Do you remember the film? He thought he was being so current.” Amanda pauses and takes a sip of tea. Martin has stopped folding the napkins.
Martin says: “There’s definitely something strange about me you know. I don’t know what it is, but people can obviously smell it or something. Do I smell weird to you? He looks up. Amanda lets go of her mug of tea, clenches and unclenches her fists.
“Actually Martin, I was just going to say some more about that story.”
Martin pushes the pyramids into two straight rows.
“He, my father that is, was being ushered out the door, and I was sort of slouched down in my chair, half hiding, relieved it was all over, and then he suddenly remember me and stepped back into the room, looking all around. The teacher pointed at me and he waved and shouted, ‘Bye Amanda.’ He was so pleased with himself you know? So proud.”
“I don’t see what’s so bad about that?”
“The thing that’s bad about it is that he has no awareness of what’s going on around him; with people around him. He just doesn’t notice other people.” She adds her pyramid to the pile.
“He doesn’t see living people. Ha! It’s like he doesn’t try to think about what they might be thinking or feeling.”
“And you think that’s his fault?”
“Yes I do. I mean Martin you know, you say you’re lonely and no one wants to talk to you but until I told you that story, and then I had to tell you to carry on listening, you didn’t notice another person in this café.”
Amanda tears open one of the sachets of sugar and tips it into her cup.
“You walked in here and you were all like ‘poor me, come and sit with me’ and you didn’t even notice that there were other people in here or that I was busy. You’re so wrapped up in yourself that other people don’t matter to you. That’s why they’re not interested in you. Because you’re not interested in them.”
The teaspoon clinks against the side of the cup. Martin swallows.
“I’m sorry, that wasn’t really aimed at you. The anger. I don’t know you but I just, well I think it would help if you worry a bit more about other people and a little bit less about yourself.”
Martin takes the teaspoon out of his tea and sucks it. “It’s not as easy for everyone as it is for you, to work out what other people are thinking.” He sets the teaspoon down on the table. “Or needing. The world would be much simpler place if you didn’t have to dig it out of them whole time. If people just said what they meant.”
He pays his bill but doesn’t leave a tip. He says he’ll be back next Saturday and that next time he’ll pay for her tea too. “Ok,” says Amanda.
She walks home across the park as the late afternoon sun dips behind the skeletal beech trees, kicking up the yellowing leaves and thinking of a party they’d had at the old house, before her parents split up. She’d been sent to her father to tie the bright red bow on the back of her dress. He knelt down to do it, holding his breath as he threaded the ribbon through the small white eyes and pulled it tight against her ribs. She felt the pressure of his finger in the centre of the bow as he looped and knotted it.
For most of the night he stood silent as a butler at the sideboard making the drinks. People took their glasses from him and stepped away into the middle of the room or over to the window. Her mother swished from one guest to the next, bracelets jangling, laughing, her head thrown back, touching someone on the arm. When Mr McKenzie whispered in her ear, her eyebrow lifted, a hand came up to her mouth and she giggled. Her father looked down at his drink, stirred the ice with his finger.
Amanda was taken up to bed but couldn’t sleep and when she heard the back door open and close she knelt on the bed and peeked out at the garden. Her father was sitting on the bottom step, in the pool of light cast from inside, breaking twigs into smaller and smaller pieces.
The rhythmic thumping of the work on the railway drifts across the park. Every now and again there’s a flash of orange between the trees along the track. Amanda crosses her arms over her chest, rubs her shoulders and then clenches her heart-sized fists.
That conversation at the museum, how old had she been? Five? Six? There was a plastic heart with four separate sections painted in different colours and you could take them apart and hold them up against the poster to match the shape and find out which bit you were holding. Amanda held the left ventricle against her chest and said: “It must fill up almost all of me, my heart”. And her father put the piece of plastic heart in its correct place with the others, and then folded her fingers into a ball and said, “People’s hearts are only about as big as their fists. But, if you eat too many chips and you don’t do enough exercise, then you’ll get big and fat and your heart will explode from working too hard!” He grinned.
Amanda looked at the drawings and writing on the museum wall and then back to her father, “But how do you know Daddy?”
“I’m a special type of doctor honey, I look inside people to find the secret of why they died.” She imagined her father finding secrets in people like marbles scooped from the mud at the bottom of the school pond.
“Does it hurt?” asked Amanda, “Having the secrets taken out?”
“No. The people are dead. Don’t you understand me?” said her father speaking more emphatically, “The people are dead. Nothing hurts when you’re dead.”
Her mother is ironing and watching TV.
“Why did I leave your father? Well the thing was, the traditional gift for a tenth wedding anniversary is tin or aluminium, so Darling, I’m sure you’ll agree I was on a deadline to get out of there after the ninth.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously Amanda, it’s a long story, and I’m tired.” She drapes a skirt over the back of the sofa.
“Do you know what I remember? I remember stopping at that car accident, when he got out to help. And you told me not to look. But I still did. And Dad was leaning into the car. I remember this woman’s head lolled out, just for a minute, and he caught with his palm. And then him getting back in the car and reaching out for your hand on the edge of the seat and there was blood underneath his fingernails. And I saw you, I saw you flinch, and take your hand away.”
She puts her down the iron and picks up the remote to turn down the television.
“Darling, there’s never a single simple explanation for these things. Why does anyone leave anyone? Because they don’t love them anymore?” Her fingers puff at the curls in her neck. “Because they don’t think they can live with them anymore? Because the thought of being alone is better than the thought of being together?” She walks round and flops onto sofa, cradles a cushion in her lap. “Or because you realise that you’re not really together anyway and you’re actually already alone?”
“Your father…” she trails off, weaves a tousle on the cushion between her fingers. “He, you know, he finds it hard. He’s just not good with people. He can’t talk like normal people can talk. He’s a man of extremes: either he’s not saying anything or he’s saying too much. Do you know what I mean?”
Amanda runs her hand along the fabric seat of the chair. This is where she would sit, summoned for punishment, while he filled his pipe, in the great leather chair opposite. Shoes dangling above the floor, listing her sins in her head. She had not cleaned the bath. The pipe tap, tapped against the glass ashtray. She had talked back to her mother. A matchstick scratched at the upturned bowl. Her math teacher had written “Not good enough” on her test paper. The tobacco wrapper rustled open and closed. He never lit it until he had finished speaking. It waited on the arm of the chair.
“But he also has this need to be with people. God, even people who don’t like him. He finds it so difficult to be alone. I loved your father Amanda. But he didn’t make it easy. Why are you so angry with him sweetheart?”
At the school prize giving he had taken her mother by both hands and kissed her abruptly on both cheeks, said a little too loudly “Well look at my girls.” And he was so proud of her he’d said. Hugged her too tight. He wasn’t really. He’d been hoping for three A’s and no B’s.
“Sometimes I think it’s because he wants me to be like him. And sometimes I thinks it’s because he wants me to better than him. But mostly, it’s because he wants me to be more than just me.”
“What bollocks. Of course he doesn’t. He just wants you to have the best you can. For you. He doesn’t want you to waste your life. ”
“But he just wants so much from me, you know? It’s the wanting that makes me angry.”
“And what about you, how much do you want from him? This whole café business is all about wanting him not care isn’t it? That’s a lot to ask of someone who loves you don’t you think?”
Amanda looks at the empty leather chair.
“Sometimes I think its because I’m so used to being angry with him that I don’t know how else to be.”
Her mother sets the cushion back on the sofa, stands up and smoothes her skirt.
“I’m going to throw something together for dinner, you hungry?”
“Don’t worry about me,” says Amanda, “I think I’ll see what Dad is doing.”
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