‘You took your time,’ Ray grumbled when I emerged into the kitchen twenty minutes later.
I paused, my hand on the fridge door, and stared at him. He was just as cantankerous as I remembered. Maybe even worse. He was an ex-fisherman, although according to him there was no such thing. Once a fisherman, always a fisherman. It didn’t matter if he hadn’t stepped foot on the deck of a boat in over a decade, he said. Salt water ran through his veins and he’d be longing for the thrill of the hunt, the smell of the nets and the feel of the bucking ocean beneath him until the day we planted him in the ground. As far as I was concerned, my mother was a veritable saint for taking him in when it became obvious he couldn’t live on his own any more. If it’d been left up to me, he’d be living in the Acadia Retirement Village. But it wasn’t, and now here I was, tasked with babysitting a man whose dislike for me was matched only by my dislike for him. ‘If you’re going to complain,’ I informed him, ‘I’ll go and take a shower first. A nice long, leisurely shower. My legs need a shave. So do my armpits.’
That shut him up.
I made porridge, something I hadn’t done since high school camp, with Ray supervising and offering suggestions.
‘You need to stir it more,’ he said. ‘Otherwise it’ll clump.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘I don’t like clumpy porridge.’
‘It’s not clumpy.’
‘How do you know it’s not when you’re not stirring it?’
‘I just do.’
He added a large knob of butter and four heaped teaspoons of sugar to his bowl of porridge and ate it with the gusto of someone who seemed to think it might be his last breakfast here on earth. Considering he also added three teaspoons of sugar to his cup of tea, he might not have been too far wrong.
‘You know sugar is bad for you, right?’ I said, leaning against the bench with my fingers wrapped around a lifesaving mug of coffee.
‘Meh,’ he mumbled. ‘Lots of things are bad for you.’
‘Yes, but sugar is right up near the top of the list.’
‘The scientists used to say that about eggs, and animal fats. Now they tell you they’re healthy for you again. They can’t make up their minds.’
‘I don’t think they’re going to change their minds about sugar.’
‘Not in my lifetime, maybe. But eventually. Anyway, I don’t care. I like it.’
I watched him push his empty bowl across the bench top in my general direction. ‘Let me guess, you don’t know how to work the dishwasher.’
‘Technology and me,’ he said. ‘We don’t mix.’
‘You captained a lobster boat, Ray.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Different how?’
‘You start the boat, you turn the wheel to steer it. Easy. You learn how to drive a boat by feel. By touch. By instinct.Thosecontraptions have too many settings.’ He pointed a wobbly finger at the dishwasher, frowning as if it might suddenly come to life and launch at him.
‘It’s hardly rocket science. You stack the dishes inside and put the powder in this little space here.’ I rinsed the bowl, stacked it on the bottom shelf and demonstrated. ‘Then you push a button and ta-da. It cleans the dishes for you.’
He refused to watch, scratching at an age spot on the back of his hand instead. ‘I need you to get my newspaper.’
‘From where?’
‘Where do you think? The moon?’ His watery, bloodshot eyes glared up at me through the gray wiry strands of his bushy eyebrows. They were impressive, but also alarming, and hadn’t always been like that. Did eyebrows just start growing all out of control like that when you hit a certain age?
I drank my coffee and waited.
‘It’ll be in the letterbox,’ he said, caving. ‘Obviously.’
‘Do you always use sarcasm to get what you want instead of manners?’
