Grace was killed eighteen months ago, by a taxi driver who was over the limit. He swerved off the road, and Grace died on the pavement where she’d been walking.
It was instant, they told us. She wouldn’t have suffered.
While we’re waiting for Ben, the conversation turns to work. “Tried my hand at your dream job today, Cal,” Gavin says to me, sipping his lager.
I smile, slightly puzzled. “How do you mean?”
Gavin’s an architect, and each year his team volunteers their time for a local good cause. He tells me he’s spent eight hours today undertaking habitat management at Waterfen—our local nature reserve, my private haven.
“You can imagine how that went.” Esther winks. She works long hours for low pay as a policy manager for a social-welfare charity. “Eight hours of outdoor graft for desk junkies.”
Inhaling the honeysuckle, I picture a day spent spellbound by meandering hedgerows and wild woodlands, tawny reed beds threaded together by a cool ribbon of river. I do occasional volunteer work down at Waterfen, submit quarterly reports. It’s piecemeal and unpaid—breeding-bird surveys, habitat monitoring—but that’s okay. It satisfies my cravings for horizons unhemmed by buildings, earth unmuddied by people, air unsullied by artifice.
I smile at Gavin. “Sounds interesting.”
He grimaces with the sort of self-loathing only unplanned exertion has the power to induce. “That’s one way of putting it. I thought I wasfit. And let’s just say that restacking log piles five times my height, lugging fence posts around, and breaking my back pulling up whatever-it-was is not my idea of fun.”
I register the scratches along his forearms. There’s a faint dusting of nature, too, still visible in his hair. “Ragwort?”
“What?”
“Was that what you were pulling up?”
“Yeah, whatever,” he mutters darkly, swigging his lager. “It was hell.”
“Sounds like heaven to me.”
“Well, the warden said they’re advertising for an assistant’s role soon. Be better use of your ecology degree than serving coffee. Why don’t you—”
Even as Esther cuts him short with a cough, I feel something stir inside me, the waking flex of a sleeping creature.
“Why don’t you what?” Ben plonks his rugby player’s physique next to me, pint in hand, surveying our faces expectantly. He embodies exactly the end of a working day—shirtsleeves rolled up, hair askew, eyes off-duty.
“Nothing,” I say quickly. In the drained glass to my right, I notice a ladybird out of its depth in the dregs. I slide my fingers against the tidemark, perform a rescue. It flits away.
“There’s a job coming up at Waterfen,” Gavin says. “You know—the nature place, where you can go and be tortured for charity? Apparently it’s Callie’s dream career, so—” He breaks off and shoots Esther a look, which is his usual way of objecting to being kicked in the shin.
Ben straightens up from ruffling Murphy’s ears. “I thought you loved the café.”
His bafflement scours me like sandpaper. “I do,” I assure him quickly, ignoring Gavin’s raised eyebrow. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”
Ben’s expression becomes relief, and I know what it means—that for the café to be in safe hands would mean the world to Grace. Leaving my job to become manager after she died seemed so obvious it was almost logic. Ben was committed to a marketing role he loved, while I was stagnating at the paint-tin company. I’d been there for eleven years—eleven years of organizing my boss’s diary, making her coffee, answering her phone. It was only ever supposed to be a stopgap after uni, a quick way to make rent—but three months in, it became permanent, and a decade after that, worthy of a long-service award that amused Grace no end. “Ten years loyal to one woman,” she’d teased, when I turned up at hers with the bottle of champagne I’d received. “It’s like a weird little marriage.”
That was just a year before she died.
I adopted Murphy from Ben not long afterward. He’d been Grace’s dog, really, but there was a no-canines policy at Ben’s office, and plenty of love going spare at the coffee shop.
Owning a café was the first steady anything Grace had done in the six years since we’d left uni—but even that started out as a whim. She used an inheritance to impulse-buy the lease on an old children’s clothing shop, taking us all by surprise. She’d been traveling the world in the interim, working as she went—waitressing, telesales, handing out flyers in costume. Occasionally she’d call me from some faraway country, regale me with her latest adventures and disasters, and I’d come off the phone piqued and envious. I’d fantasize briefly about catching a flight myself, feeling the dopamine thrill of having finally fled my own tiny patch of globe.
I wondered, often, what it would be like to take off like that. I was drawn to places of vast wilderness, endless skylines, dizzying panoramas. We’d learned one term in school about South America, and ever since, I’d lusted over a particular national park in the far north of Chile. Our geography teacher had visited, just two summers earlier, and by the end of the lesson we all felt we’d journeyed there with her. I related her adventures to my dad that night, asked if we could holiday in Chile next summer. He laughed and said we’d ask Mum, which I knew immediately to be his way of saying no. He was probably correct in thinking that no one in their right mind would acquiesce to such a request from a ten-year-old.
So I traveled to thealtiplanoin my mind instead, pored over pictures of snow-capped volcanoes and sweeping vistas, dreamed at night of alpacas and llamas, falcons and flamingos. It became my escape, whenever I needed one—to drift off to that corner of Chile, made fable by my imagination.
I always promised myself I’d go. But after leaving university I had precious few savings, and I wasn’t too sure I suited Grace’s legendary work-as-you-go approach. I had none of her boldness, and far too much of my own self-doubt. The timing never seemed quite right—I was job-hunting, trying to save, working hard, dating. And so the years slipped by, and Chile remained a far-flung dream.
I know it’s always seemed to Ben that managing the café was a welcome route out of a job I was bored stiff in. But all it’s really done is remind me that serving coffee isn’t my passion. I’m still living in the town where I was born, and meanwhile there’s a world out there—pulsating with possibility as it turns, turns, turns.
8.
