Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe - Debbie Johnson

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Second. Poor Jimbo is almost thirteen now, completely grey around the muzzle and round as a barrel. He mainly sleeps, snores and snuffles, occasionally punctuated by moments of vast and unexpected energy, where he chases imaginary rabbits and scares much younger dogs.

      He’s a lovely beast, with very eloquent eyebrows and a powerful tail that can sweep a table clean when he’s feeling happy. He’s already on tablets for his arthritis and his heart isn’t brilliant, and he has all sorts of lumps and bumps that so far haven’t been anything serious.

      I know he’s not going to be around forever and secretly fear that when he finally goes I’ll have some kind of nervous breakdown. That all my carefully managed grief and sadness will come spilling forth and drown me in emotion. That I’ll start crying in the vet’s surgery and everyone will be washed out, down the street, like they’re on some kind of weird water-park ride made of widow’s tears. Which sounds like the kind of water park Tim Burton would design.

      I have had way too much coffee, it seems.

      Lizzie doesn’t reply to my defence of Meatloaf as a valid driving-song choice. I see that she has put her ear buds back in and is now pretending to be asleep. So much for that brief detente. I glance to my side. Nate is gazing out of the window, head lolling, eyelids heavy. He looks about three years old and my heart constricts a little, remembering a time when he was. The very best of days.

      I press play again, but turn the sound down, just in case Nate does want to drift off. It’s not his fault his crazy mother got him up at stupid o’clock to drag him to the far reaches of the country for the whole summer. It’s not Lizzie’s fault, either, and I get why she’s angry.

      She didn’t want to come. She’s fourteen. Her friends are her world and I have the suspicion there’s a boy on the scene as well. There usually is at that age. David died during her first year at high school, so she got off to a rocky start. She was the Girl With The Dead Dad for ages, subject to the same mix of pity and fear that being bereaved always seems to provoke in people.

      It’s taken us all a long time to get anything like equilibrium back, and hers seems to be wrapped up with her pals, with angsty rock music and with black eye liner. So, no, Lizzie really didn’t want to come to a small village in the countryside, even if I did try and sell it as a very long holiday.

      She even asked if she could stay at my sister’s instead, which upset me so much I had to fake an urgent need for the toilet and lock myself in the loo while I wept. This is something I do quite a lot these days, as her tongue gets sharper and her hormones get louder and I fail to get any tougher.

      She’s seen enough of me crying to last a lifetime, I’m sure – and it’s better she thinks I’m suffering from IBS than continues to see me soggy. Anyway, getting your feelings hurt by your teenage daughter seems to be par for the course from what I remember. I can still recall the door slamming and the eye rolling and the telling my mum she just didn’t understand.

      Now I’m getting payback from my own daughter. I suppose it’s all part of the great circle of life, but not the kind they sing about in the Lion King.

      The problem with crying about one thing is that it inevitably leads onto crying about another. This is one of the many pleasant side effects of grief – you have a bit of a blub about one thing (like an especially sappy John Lewis commercial or a stroppy daughter) and you end up weeping about Everything That Hurt You Ever. But once I’d got that out of my system and left the sanctuary of the downstairs lav, I did consider it.

      I know Rebecca, my younger sis by two years, would have welcomed Lizzie into her life, and her flat in the city centre, and would probably have been a heck of a lot more fun than I am.

      Becca, you see, doesn’t have kids. Or a dead husband. Or even an elderly Labrador. She has no responsibilities at all, which is just the way she likes it. She got her teenybopper heart broken when she was seventeen, and since then has remained steadfastly single and carefree.

      Lizzie would undoubtedly have had a ball staying there for the summer, but I had to say no. Apart from anything else, Becca knows as much about boundaries and discipline as I do about particle physics. I may well have come home to find Lizzie pregnant, in rehab or starting a new life as a tattoo artist. All three risk factors could equally have applied to Becca herself.

      Funnily enough, after that idea was knocked back, Lizzie didn’t ask to stay with my parents … mainly because she’s not stupid and knows their idea of a wild night out is getting all four corners in bingo at the church hall.

      My parents are very sensible – so obviously they hadn’t wanted me to do this either. They thought I was nuts, though they phrased it more sensitively than that. They tread carefully around me these days, which is kind of heartbreaking in its own way. I yearn for the days when my dad can look me in the eye and be rude to me again.

      Maybe, I think, surveying the now-thickening traffic as we join the M5 and follow the signs that faithfully promise we are heading towards The South West, they’re all spot on. Maybe Lizzie and Nate and my mum and dad are one hundred per cent accurate with their assessment: maybe I am nuts. Plus, now I come to think about it, Becca didn’t try and talk me out of it at all, which is probably a sure sign that I’m making a poor life choice.

      But somehow … I know it’s the right thing to do. I just know it is, with a certainty I’ve not felt for a very long time. I feel scared and anxious and I miss David like hell – but I also feel something odd. Something fluttery and strange. Something that vaguely resembles hope and optimism, and a sense of potential. Perhaps it’s just the sheer shock of it all, I don’t know – but even if Lizzie hates me for a while (possibly forever) and Nate is bored, and my parents consider getting me committed, I know I’m heading in the right direction. Even without the sat nav.

      It’s all as unexpected to me as it is to my family. I’d say I’m not an impulsive person, but I don’t really know if that’s true or not. I don’t really know what kind of a person I am, not in this version of reality. I was with David for so long – most of my life – that my entire identity was wrapped up with him. I’ve never been on my own – I’ve always been with him. I’ve never been just Laura, I’ve always been one half of David and Laura. Daura or Lavid … nah, neither of those work. We’d never make it in Hollywood.

      Something about this – upping sticks and dragging us all off to Dorset – feels like the first step to finding out who I’m going to be next. That sounds weird, a bit like I’m an international spy with a bundle of fake IDs and foreign passports and stacks of Euros hidden in a heating vent.

      But I know it’s important, this feeling. It’s taken me a long time to accept that there will even be a ‘next’ – to accept that I have to try and make a life for myself without David. Basically because I didn’t even want a life without David – in fact I still don’t. But it’s not just about me, it’s about the kids. I can’t just shrivel up and fade into the West without him, much as Lizzie might like that right now.

      I have to keep moving. I have to push on, to find the courage to even believe that there will be a ‘next’. It’s been over two years since he left us and that tiny, fluttering feeling – that hope – is what’s keeping me going on this insane drive. Or, possibly, that tiny fluttering feeling is just all the coffee on an empty stomach. Either way, we’re going. It feels like the right thing to do – plus, well, I got the job. That in itself is a minor miracle, all things considered, and it would be downright rude to reject a miracle, wouldn’t it? Even a minor one.

      I sent off that ridiculous letter two days before the closing date and genuinely never expected to hear from them. I mean, who in their right minds would give a job to a woman like me? A woman who not only wrote, but actually posted, a tear-stained letter that was the very definition of over-sharing?

      Apparently, Cherie Moon would. Perhaps I should take that as fair warning – Cherie, my new boss, the woman who holds our destiny in her hands for the next month and a half, is entirely probably not in her right mind. Also, as Becca had helpfully pointed out, she did have what sounded like a ‘very cool but probably made-up name’.

      The

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