‘Supposed to be. We have remote check-in. Please, please try to find the luggage.’
Another bite of the burrito, a kind smile around flapping tortilla. ‘Hang on,’ he says. He speaks quietly into the radio. ‘Lost luggage, flight …’ She holds out her ticket. ‘FR1839,’ he says.
He signals a hand up to her to wait, then walks away. Simone watches him leave. He scratches his behind lazily as he goes, and Simone thinks she is never getting that luggage.
She waits again by the baggage claim. Twenty minutes later, to her surprise, he arrives with her case wheeling behind him. ‘Almost ended up in another hold,’ he says with a rueful shrug. ‘Who knows what they’re thinking in this place.’
She thanks him, grabs the bag, putting an imaginary X next to 31 August: the day is almost done. Soon, she will get to press her cheek to Lucy’s. Not for long. And not as often as she wants to. But she still gets to do it for now.
Lucy has sent her a pin on a map. Like most things in Texas, there doesn’t appear to be much near to it, but Simone will be there before midnight.
Simone slides into the hire car and tries to get to grips with the controls. The parking button is on her right, not her left. She tests the pedals, the car jerks. She leaves, drives on the left, then remembers and swerves.
She turns on the radio and fiddles with the controls, trying to find a station that will keep her awake. Different accents, different songs. She lands on country, and, suddenly, she ishere, and she is excited. A strumming guitar plays out across the airwaves, and, as it often does, Simone’s mind turns to daydreams of food. Cooking outside on the fire just as it startsto get dark, huge steaks, warm, smoking tomatoes, and Lucy. Two weeks of just her and Lucy.
After a while, she dictates a text to Damien: ‘You awake? I’ve landed, and am driving.’ It’s five thirty there, but Damien is an early riser, the sort of person who is organized enough to go to bed on time.
Aah, he replies,I’d love to chat, but we’re in crisis over non-delivered fish!
‘Where is it?’ Simone dictates into her phone.
On route!!! Don’t worry!he replies, and Simone wants to tell him that it’senroute, and that shewillworry. About him, about the fish, the lot of it. She thinks of the back corridor in their restaurant where the fresh produce is delivered, perhaps her favourite place on earth. Nothing special to look at. Just a poured-cement floor, two worn stone steps, a pink back door. But every morning she takes a builder’s tea out there – teabag left in, no sugar, drop of milk – and sits and watches the fresh food come in, the day’s potential.
‘If it’s late, make sure to smell it,’ she tells Damien. ‘It should all be odourless.’
Any other co-owner – and husband – might bristle at this, but Damien doesn’t, isn’t like that.:)he sends (‘smiley face’ reads the car’s dictation), and so Simone can’t help herself and adds, ‘And touch your hand to it – check it’s properly cold.’
He calls her, now. ‘Hey,’ he says, a long drawl as slow-moving and considered as he is.
In the background, she can hear him quietly pottering. She’s worked with him for long enough to know what he will be doing: sorting the kitchen so the day runs smoothly. Prepping the vegetable station. At night he washes the pots from the cooking chaos – usually hers – and sweeps crumbs off counters into the palm of his hand.
‘I’m almost at the lodge,’ she says through the hands-free.
‘Say hi to her from me. Tell her I’ve downloadedCitizen Kaneto watch when she’s back,’ he says. And Simone is struck, suddenly, that in the mother/daughter bond, she sometimes forgets him, that the father/daughter relationship is just as important. Isalmostas important?
‘I will, of course,’ she says. Simone knows that Lucy has already watchedCitizen Kane, but she also knows that she will be kind enough to lie about it.
‘I don’t know how you do these long shifts. I’ve done one and feel like my legs are going to fall off,’ Damien remarks.
‘Cooking keeps you very fit. Offsets the calories from tasting.’
‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘Citizen Kane, tell her.’
‘She will like that.’
‘Do you know, I’ve never seen it,’ he says, and she hears their cat, George, meow in the background. Almost twenty years old, they had him before Lucy, before they opened the restaurant. Old and decrepit, he’s moved with them multiple times across London, the houses and the mortgages getting larger, George getting slimmer and slower. Now he sits in a bay window all day in their Victorian house; the first thing any of them sees when they come home. Of course, every day Lucy says she thinks this is the day he’s died there, something which Damien doesn’t find funny at all but Simone kind of does, but, so far, he’s in great health.
‘Good luck with your second shift. Most chefs would’ve had a lie-in.’
‘I’m better busy,’ he tells her; he feels no qualms about missing her, nor saying it. ‘Fourteen days to go.’
Simone feels a lurch of longing for him, her calm husband, the restaurant, that bay window, their old cat, and something else, too. All this driving on the right side of the road, the late hour … there is something unsettling about it.
She turns off the highway, the slip road on the right – there’s no one around, and she has to tell herself she isn’t simply driving up it the wrong way – and on to roads that get narrower and narrower until they’re just tracks covered by a lattice of late-summer trees, the scenery only headlights, fluttering moths in their twin beams, and Simone, her face reflected twice in the passenger and driver windows. She can see Lucy’s exact features lurking beneath hers; under the veneer of age.
And here it is, their lodge: a squat wooden building that sits with a handful of others on a wide, dusty street. It overlooks the mountains in Fort Davis, Lucy told her when she sent the booking confirmation. There are cabins with pine porches, craggy rocks, big bonsai-style trees all around, and not much more that Simone can see, such a contrast to built-up London. She stops and cups her hands around her face, looking out of the driver’s-side window. It’s so silent, the other lodges perhaps unoccupied: windows as blank as closed eyes, no cars around, security lights off.
Lucy spent a week here at Easter – Simone counted down then, too – at a spring camp that she wanted to come back to for longer this summer. She can see now why Lucy likes the landscape. It’s wild and different, just like her.
