“You saw him?”
“Yes. I’d have known him anywhere. Funny, though.”
“What was?
“Well, she’d only been admitted that morning. I hadn’t told a soul. I suppose your mother must have got in touch with him. I mean, the man’s a lot of things, but he’s not psychic.”
Somewhere inside, a rush of realization.
Dad shrugs like it’s irrelevant in the end, that his wife’s ex-lover rocked up at her deathbed. “So how do you see things working out, between you and him?”
“I... I don’t know. Do you mind—me keeping in touch with him?”
“No” is the extent of the encouragement he’s prepared to give me. “But be careful. That’s all I’d say.”
A surge of affection, warm as bathwater. “You’ll always be my dad.”
His frown deepens. “Likewise. You’ll always be...”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. But that he even made a stab at it is good enough for me.
•••
“Friend of a friend my arse.”
“Joel?”
I’m in my new favorite bolt-hole, the garden, staring at frost-fringed roofs. The air’s icy tonight, but I haven’t bothered with a coat.
“You didn’t hear Mum was dying from a friend of a friend. You dreamed about her, right at the start. You dreamed she’d die of cancer, and you finished it because you wanted her to go and live her life, before it was too late.”
A sigh. “I suppose you were going to figure it out one day. You’re far cleverer than me, thankfully.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell me thetruth.”
“I dreamed... I saw her in hospital. Then two nights later, I dreamed about her funeral.”
“So you knew she’d have kids, go on to have a full life. You weren’t aselfish bugger at all—you were the opposite. You ended it because you wanted her to be happy.”
A yawning jaw of silence.
“Yes, all right?” he says eventually. “Yes. She had fourteen years left, and I knew with all my issues and lack of money and drinking, I wasn’t going to make her happy, in the short term at least.”
I breathe my pain into the rimy air, watch it balloon into tiny, angry storm clouds. “So that’s why you’ve been telling me to let Callie go.”
Warren exhales. The line crackles. “When I went to see your mum in hospital, I knew I’d done the right thing. That she’d lived a good life. That she was dying happy. I chose not to mess up what time she had left, and for what it’s worth, I think I made the right decision.”
Unexpectedly, I feel the boulder of guilt on my back lighten a little. Not much, but enough for me to notice.Warren knew too, Mum.
Maybe subconsciously I didn’t want to mess up the time Mum had left, either.
“Just so you know, Joel, with me and your mum it was true love. As a person I was fairly useless, but I loved your mum. When we held hands and looked at each other that last time, everything had been worth it, to know she was happy.”
I think of Callie cocooned in our bed. Of her present and her future and the end. I think about all those things. And then I know what I have to do.
71.
Callie
