“Have you got everything you need?Put the chèvre down over there, darling, on the cheese board. No, the other one. The smaller one. That’s it. With the honey.” She’s having a two-way conversation between me and her lovely new husband, George.
“Olive?” she says back into the phone.
Mum remarried last year and it was a weight off my shoulders. She has rebuilt her life in a small rural village in Yorkshire. After a decade of unfulfilling jobs, she finally found her place as a buyer at a local farm shop five years ago, before meeting George, the sweetest beekeeper and all-round good egg. It took a long time, but I think she’s really happy again.
“Is the honey still sweet in Yorkshire?” I say, with enough sass to make my mum laugh.
“We’ve got friends coming over and it’s a whole thing,” she says. “George is in a tizz and I’m trying to keep him calm.I know you’re not used to entertaining, George, but I can do this with both hands tied behind my back. Oh goodness, George, you’re wicked.”She cackles at what must be an off-screen sexy gag between them.
“Ewwwww,” I say.
“Are you ready, Olive?”
“I’m just finishing packing,” I say, tossing a cardigan into the suitcase. Although Sicily in July can be a furnace, there can be cool nights by the sea, and up in the hills of Mount Etna. I allow myself to feel a tantalizing hope we might head up there. There is something thrilling about the pull of the volcano towering over the Sicilian coastline, constantly puffing steam and fiery red ash like a sleeping dragon,while farmers and villagers quietly live and work, aware that she can wake at any moment.
“You’ve always been a terrible packer,” Mum says with a weary chuckle. “Did you make a list?”
“I made a list!”
Mum is a days-long packer and list writer. Dad was a throw-it-all-in-an-hour-before-we-leave kind of guy. It drove her mad. He’d frequently arrive without basic things like underwear and a toothbrush, and we’d have to dash to the shops to the sound of Mum tutting and Dad telling her torelax. God, it infuriated Mum, even if the memory of it makes me smile.
“It’s going to be quite a trip down memory lane for you,” she says. “Are you okay? I think of you all the time, Olive.”
“I’m fine. I’m nearly done,” I say, plonking down on the bed next to my suitcase and staring at myself in the mirrored door of my wardrobe. I touch my hair and wonder if I should go to the salon at the end of the street before it closes. Ginny suggested it.“No need to go to Italy with a man that handsome looking like the Unabomber,”she’d said.
“I’m nervous about all of this,” Mum says quietly.
“It’s okay, I want to do this book for him,” I say.
“I know... but I feel like I’ve let you down, Olive—”
I sit up a little straighter and cut her off. “Mum, please. For the last time, it isn’tyourfault I saw so little of Dad. I made those decisions, not you.”
“I should have made more of an effort to let you see his side of things,” she says.
Since Mum remarried, her once-bitter recollections of Dad have noticeably softened to wistful memories. But in a way, that’s what happens with the parents when they meet someone else,isn’t it? She’s been able to finally move on and start a new life and leave the past behind her.
Whereas Dad will always be the father who prioritized a restaurant over me.
I chastise myself for thinking about it again, but there has been a lot of recalibrating going on in my head lately. Reexamining what happened all those years ago. Kate suggested it’s part of trying to make sense of the inheritance. She thinks I’ll only feel truly happy about it once I feel worthy of it.
“I just have regrets, that’s all,” Mum says.
“Iknowhow he used to override you, Mum. Dad shouldn’t have sold our home to fund that bloody restaurant. And he should have found a way to pay you out properly when you divorced.”
I’m going to right that wrong when I sell it. I stare at myself in the mirror hard. I need to keep my eyes onthatprize.
“I couldn’t ask him to sell Nicky’s, even then,” she says.
“He still should have.”
“He sent money,” she reminds me.
I think of the pokey flat in Burnt Oak we shared and shake my head at the memory of me announcing to Mum I’d be going to study journalism instead of catering college as I’d always planned—my last act of revenge against my dad. She was proud of me, and that felt good.
“Mum, please,” I say, putting my head in my hand.
“Not now. Fine,” she says.“Oh, how sweet, thank you. George’s put a cuppa in front of me.Thank you, darling.”
