by Sarah Morgan
Izzy toasted burger buns and put them on a plate in the center of the table, along with bowls of salad and the burgers themselves. “I didn’t put them together—that way everyone can take what they want.”
Flora decided that the best thing she could do with Izzy was make a fuss of the food.
She was about to reach for a bun when Izzy spoke.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d want one, Flora. My mother never ate the bun. She avoided carbs.”
Flora redirected her hand to the burger and salad and served herself. “I don’t eat the bun, either.” Her stomach argued loudly with her decision. Her brain argued, too, although a little more quietly. Was she really going to do this? Was she going to change her habits to please this girl? Yes, she was. She could hear Julia’s voice in her head, telling her to be more assertive, but there was no point in being assertive if it destroyed all chances of developing a relationship. It was just one burger bun, that was all, and it wouldn’t hurt her to skip the carbs.
Molly took a bite of burger, complete with toasted bun. “Are we having ice cream after?”
“We were, but you drank all that sugary lemonade so now we’re having fruit.” Izzy served herself, leaving Flora to deal with the full force of Molly’s disappointment.
She was the killer of ice cream moments. The death of comfort.
Meanwhile, Izzy was cool and composed.
Flora studied her, trying to work out which emotions were bubbling beneath the composure. Resentment? Misery? Nothing was on show. And then she saw Izzy’s hand tremble as she put a plate in front of her and realized she was nervous.
Instantly Flora’s own nerves fell away. She wanted to say something to indicate that she was a friend, not a foe. She wanted to say that she probably understood at least some of what Izzy was feeling.
She glanced at Jack to see if he’d picked up the tension in his daughter, but if he had there was no sign of it. He was tucking into his burger and was focused on Molly, listening as she talked a little about her day.
“Marcy is having a sleepover for her birthday, but I don’t want to go.”
Jack helped himself to more salad. “You don’t think it would be fun? You love Marcy.”
Molly picked at her burger. “I want to stay home.”
Flora felt a rush of sympathy. She remembered all too well those feelings of insecurity that had tied her to the house.
Jack frowned. “But—”
“—she doesn’t have to go if she doesn’t want to.” Izzy ate daintily. “She can have Marcy over here the day after or something. We’ll make cakes. Don’t pick the lettuce out of your burger, Moll.”
Molly poked the lettuce back inside her burger and took a martyred bite. “It tastes like grass.”
“You’ve never eaten grass.” Izzy’s eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled at her sister. Then she turned her attention back to Flora and the smile vanished as abruptly as lights in a power cut. “So, Flora, my dad says you’re a florist.” She was almost ridiculously formal, ticking off suitable conversational topics from a mental list.
Flora persevered. “Yes. I think my love of flowers came from my mother. She was a florist, too, and very talented. There was no plant or flower she couldn’t recognize.” She hesitated. “I lost my mother when I was about the same age as Molly.”
Molly reached for the ketchup. “Where did you lose her?”
“I mean—she died.”
Izzy froze for a microsecond and Molly squirted ketchup on the table.
Mistake, Flora thought in a panic. Big, big mistake.
Molly’s eyes were huge and shiny with tears. “Our mom died.”
Izzy threw her napkin over the ketchup, sent Flora a furious look and put her arm around her sister. “It’s okay, bunny. I’m here.”
Flora felt sick. What had she done? It had all been going so well and now she’d blown it. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Why, oh why, hadn’t she stayed silent? She didn’t even like talking about her own experiences. Instead of reassuring them, she’d left them feeling sad, threatened and anxious. And now they were bonded together against her.
Jack’s gaze was fixed on Molly, and Flora could feel his helplessness, and his fierce determination to protect his daughters.
She hadn’t made things better, she’d made them a thousand times worse.
“Come here.” He scooped his younger daughter onto his lap and pulled her plate closer to his. Molly leaned into him, her head on his shoulder, strands of her hair clinging to his shirt.
“I miss Mommy.” She crawled onto him, clinging with arms and legs, weighed down by sadness.
“I know. We all do, and that’s okay.” He held her with one arm and stroked her leg with the other. “But we have each other and we are going to stick together like all the ingredients in this yummy burger your sister just made.”
“Can I stay on your lap?”
“Sure, although I might eat your burger by accident as well as my own. As long as you’re okay with that.” He was rewarded with a small laugh from his younger daughter.
Izzy was frantically rubbing the table even though the ketchup was long gone. Her cheeks were flushed and she kept blinking. Flora wanted to reach out and take that tense hand in hers, but she didn’t dare. Instead she glanced at Jack to see if he’d noticed the reaction of his elder daughter, but his focus was on the younger.
Flora wanted to disappear. This was all her fault.
“I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t—it was thoughtless.”
Molly spoke from the safety of Jack’s arms. “When your mommy died did you live with your daddy, like we do?”
Flora’s breathing was shallow. She just wanted the conversation to stop, but she was the one who had started it.
“I moved in with my aunt. She was my only family. I lived with her until I moved into a place of my own. She died last year.”
Izzy put her burger down. “You have no family? No one at all?”
Jack frowned. “Izzy—”
“I have lots of good friends,” Flora said, “and friends can be like family.” Except they weren’t. None of them seemed to fill that big, empty gap inside her. Her aunt hadn’t filled it, either. In some ways her aunt was the one who had made Flora aware of the big, empty gap. She’d done her duty and taken in a child, even though she’d never wanted children. Flora was constantly aware of her sacrifice. Guilt had shadowed her until the day she’d finally moved out.
“Like family,” Izzy said. “But not actually family.”
“Actual family have the same blood,” Molly said helpfully. “They’re related.”
Flora managed a smile of assent and met Izzy’s sharp gaze.
The girl said nothing more, but the message was clear.
Maybe Flora didn’t have a family of her own, but there was no way she was moving in on this one.
4
Izzy
Izzy was sprawled on Charlie’s bed eating popcorn while her friends dressed for the party. Her dad was at home with Molly and this was supposedly her night to do her own thing and be a teenager. How? She felt about a hundred years old.
She joined in conversation about clothes and boys, but she wasn’t thinking of the party. She was thinking about her dad and Flora.
Flora.
Had they seen each other again? How serious was it? She’d spent so long studying the two of them she’d almost burned the burgers. She’d imagined them sneaking away from work to be together. What did they do when they met at lunchtime? Were they sleeping together? Where? She was pretty sure they hadn’t used the house, but there was always Flora’s apartment.
She imagined them curled up naked on a large bed, surrounded by fresh flowers.
Were they in love? What happened if they were in love?
Suddenly it was hard to breathe. There was no air in the room.
“Izz? Are you even listening—” Avery thrust a bottle of nail polish under her nose. “This color?”
“Looks great.” What if they decided to get married? Would her dad discuss it, or just announce it, like he’d announced that she was coming to dinner? She hadn’t been given a choice. She hadn’t been given a choice in any of the things that had happened to her lately.
Her life had been shattered. She still hadn’t stuck together the pieces, and now it seemed the shape might change again.
Her friends collapsed with laughter over something Izzy had missed and she forced a smile, trying to join in. Did she used to find hair and nails and what she wore important? She couldn’t even remember.
Drenched in panic, she tried to focus on her friends.
Music thumped out of the speakers and Izzy knew that any moment now Charlie’s mother would holler upstairs to turn it down because she couldn’t hear herself think. The predictability of it scratched at her skin.
It was Saturday night. In her previous life, Saturday nights were always reserved for friends, for hanging out, for doing teenage things. Being here should have felt good. Home made her think of her mom, and it was emotionally exhausting. Spending time with her friends should have been a distraction, but it wasn’t. She felt displaced.
“Charlie!!” The voice came up the stairs, decibels louder than the music. “Turn that noise down, now!”
Charlie rolled her eyes and cranked up the volume. “I’m drowning her out. She’s annoying the hell out of me. First it’s my grades, then it’s what I’m wearing, the way I’m talking…”
Avery blew on her nails. “I had a fight with my mom, too. She wanted me home by eleven. How embarrassing is that? Also, the car. They wanted me to learn to drive, and now there’s like a fight every time I want to borrow it. I can’t wait to go to college, and I’ll be applying on the other side of the country to get away from the nagging.”
There was a humming in Izzy’s ears.
They moaned the whole time. About trivia. Stuff that just didn’t matter. The contrast between what they thought was important and what she thought was important was so vast they might as well have been living on different continents. If she’d crawled past them bloodied and injured, would they even have noticed? That was how she felt on the inside.
Was she a terrible friend? If it mattered to them then it should matter to her, too, shouldn’t it? Or were they terrible friends, not understanding how she felt?
She reminded herself that probably qualified as “all or nothing thinking.” No one was terrible. Everyone was doing the best they could, but there were days when she felt their best wasn’t enough for her.
There had been a time when the trivial stuff had mattered to her, too. What would she give now for her biggest worry to be whether she wore the blue top or the red top?
“The first thing I’m going to do when I’m in college is buy a new wardrobe and new makeup.” Charlie swiped orange nail polish onto her nails. “Mom won’t see how I’m spending my money, and if she does find out she won’t be able to do anything. It’s going to be so great to get away.”
It didn’t seem to occur to them that moaning about their mothers might be tactless. They were supposed to be her best friends, but these days she felt isolated and alone.
Freaked out by her own thoughts, she grabbed the can and knocked back her drink. The sudden rush of sugar gave her energy. Maybe the sugar was the reason she decided to speak up. Or maybe it was because she was sick of being silent and pretending she thought what they thought. Felt what they felt. Maybe part of her wanted to shock them. She wanted to shake them and tell them to wake up to what they had.
She’d had a fight with her mother, too, and she hadn’t been given the chance to put it right. And now she had to handle those feelings all alone. She wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to them.
If she could turn the clock back, her motto would be a hug before bed, and nothing left unsaid.
But how could she not have talked about that phone call she’d overheard? There was no way she could have ignored it, although maybe she should have found a way to have the conversation without shrieking.
“Your mom cares, that’s all.”
Charlie admired her nails, spreading her fingers until her hand looked like a starfish. “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you. She cares about herself. Everything has to be the way she wants it. I might add a glitter strip to this. What do you think?”
“She cares about you, you dumbass.” Izzy scrunched the empty can in her hands, her knuckles turning white with the force of it. “She says all that stuff because she cares.”
Charlie rolled her eyes. “You have no idea. You don’t have any of this shit to deal with—” Her voice tailed off as she realized, too late, what she’d said.
“Yeah, I’m so lucky to have lost my mom. Makes life so much easier.” Izzy didn’t recognize her own voice. It was as high-pitched and shrill as the school fire alarm. If her friends had any sense they’d evacuate, but they didn’t. They sat there gaping at her. “I bet you envy me. No one to tell me what to do. No one to tell me to turn my music down or wear my skirt longer. I mean it’s great, really. I can’t tell you how cool it is.”
Charlie glanced at Avery. Avery turned pink and gave a tiny shake of her head, embarrassed and defensive at the same time.
Izzy was furious with herself. This was the second time in as many days that she’d lost it. What was happening to her?
Panicking because now she was going to have to have a conversation she didn’t want, she slid off the bed and walked to the window.
“Ignore me. I’m tired, that’s all.”
“Sorry, Izz.” Avery spoke in a small voice. “We weren’t thinking. You know we didn’t mean it that way. We were just being normal around you, that’s all. You said you got sick of people tiptoeing. Treating you weirdly, like a freak, you know?”
She knew.
Izzy stared out the window, watching as Charlie’s mother climbed into the car. Her mother had hated driving. She’d taken cabs everywhere. Everyone teased her because when she reversed out of the drive she often went across the corner of the grass, leaving deep gouges, stripes of brown across green. Izzy missed seeing those tire marks. Just one of those small details you didn’t even notice until a person had gone.
She felt a sudden urge to tell Avery and Charlie what was going on, or at least part of it. They were supposed to be her friends. She should treat them the way you were supposed to treat friends. Maybe, if she did that, she’d feel normal for a few seconds.
“My dad is seeing someone.”
There was a moment of shocked silence.
Avery dropped the nail polish back into her bag. “You mean, a woman?”
“Of course, a woman. Grief doesn’t make you change your sexual orientation.” She wrapped her arms round herself. Why did she feel so angry and moody all the time? Maybe she should join a gym. Take up kickboxing or something, instead of snapping the heads off those closest to her.
Avery sat down on the bed next to her, a gesture that reflected the impact of this news. “How do you know?”
“He brought her home.”
“OMG you met her?” Charlie abandoned the makeup and flopped down on the bed, too. “What’s she like?”
Smiley, Izzy thought. Smiley, pretty and absolutely nothing like Izzy’s mother. Her mom would never have worn bright colors, or let her hair tumble wild over her shoulders the way Flora did. Flora was arty, a little bohemian and—
Cool.
Izzy sat, drenched in panic. Where had that thought come from? Flora wasn’t cool, she was a homewrecker.
“Izz?” Charlie prompted her. “What’s she like?”
What did it matter what she was like? They were asking all the wrong questions.
She wished now that she hadn’t told them about Flora, but it was too late to take the words back.
“I met her for a couple of hours, that’s all.” But Flora had made her dad smile. Several times.
Izzy hadn’t seen her dad smile properly in a long time. He delivered forc
ed smiles of course. The ones that said he was doing okay. She knew all about those smiles. They originated from the outside and took so much effort your face ached. But spontaneous smiles? Smiles that came from inside, and were genuine? She hadn’t seen one of those from her father before Flora came to dinner.
“Does she have kids of her own?”
“I don’t think so.” But she didn’t know. She didn’t know anything about Flora and she’d been so panicked and threatened to see another woman in the house she hadn’t asked many questions.
“Probably doesn’t have kids, or she would have talked about them. But let’s hope she at least likes kids. Was she kind to Molly?” Charlie caught Avery’s eye. “What? We’ve all read the stories about wicked stepmothers. And Cam’s stepmother really is a witch. She brews all these herbs. It’s seriously creepy. I never drink anything that hasn’t come out of a sealed can when I’m over at his place.”
Izzy’s chest felt tight. “She’s not going to be my stepmother.” But they’d voiced her deepest fear. That this relationship wasn’t casual. That it wasn’t going to go away, it was simply going to get worse.
She imagined sleepwalking to the bathroom one morning and bumping into Flora. Worse, Molly bumping into Flora. Izzy would have to talk to her about sex. The thought made her sweat.
“I guess it might be nice to have an adult around,” Avery said tentatively. “They could look after Molly and we’d see more of you. I mean, you’re always busy doing stuff in the house.”
“I don’t mind. I like it.”
She didn’t want anyone interfering around the house, and she didn’t want anyone else taking care of Molly. How could they? They wouldn’t know how to handle her the way Izzy did. Having a stranger around would simply add to Molly’s stress, and her little sister was already stressed enough. The night after Flora had come for dinner, Molly had taken ages to settle. When she’d eventually fallen asleep, she’d had the worst nightmare of her life. She’d woken up sobbing and it had taken Izzy over an hour to settle her down again. She’d almost fetched her dad, but she knew he had to be up early in the morning and although she’d never admit it to anyone, she liked the way it felt when Molly crawled into her bed. It gave her something to focus on other than herself. It kept her head in the moment, rather than allowing her brain free rein to explore the past and the future.