Chapter 28
Having Jaz be part of our life, Oliver and I both agreed, was a wonder, a joy, a blessing, and a privilege.
But sweet holy mother of absolute fuck were we glad when she finally told us she was spending the evening with a friend.
“She’ll be okay, right?” I asked Oliver, when it was too late to change anything, even if she wasn’t.
“She’ll be fine,” Oliver reassured me. “I’ve double-checked with Trish’s mother, and they really are going to her house to”—he searched for the right words for a moment—“I think justgenerally hang out.”
“Cool.”
“Of course now I think about it, Trish’s motherdidsound rather a lot like Jasmine doing an old-woman voice.”
“Shit.” My heart actually, honestly-to-God, not-a-metaphor skipped a beat. “Should we… Oh, you’re taking the piss.”
“OfcourseI’m taking the piss.” Oliver put the last mug into the dishwasher and set it to an ecologically friendly cycle. “She’s having a normal evening with a friend, like teenagers do. It’s good. It’s a positive development.”
I looked down at Spud. “Hear that, boy? It’s just you, me, and Daddy Oliver this evening.”
Spud looked legitimately crushed. “Arooou?”
“Okay, don’t be like that.”
“Aroooou.”
“Oliver!”—I turned to my boyfriend—“Spud’s being a dick.”
“He’s not being a dick.” Oliver dropped into a half crouch, and Spud scampered over to him. “You’re not being a dick, are you, boy?”
“Ruff.”
“Traitor.”
Oliver stood back up and led Spud out of the kitchen. “He just misses Jasmine. Which is another good sign. It means she’s settling in well. Now come on, we should be going.”
We should. We should definitely have been going. This would be our first meal out in ages. I grabbed my coat and went to stand by the door like an overexcitable puppy.
Oliver, substantially less overexcitable and nowhere near as puppyish, attached Spud securely to his lead. “Do you have the bags?” he asked without looking up.
I said “Yes” instinctively, then “No” honestly. Then I went back to the kitchen, retrieved a couple of the other sort of doggie bags, came back and said, “Okay, actually yes. But Spud isn’t going to want to poo in the pub, is he?”
“I’m sure he’ll wait until he’s outside. And heprobablywon’t need to go at all. But if he does, we’ll be very glad we brought the bags.”
Our first date had been at an extremely swanky high-end restaurant. It had also been part of a wider plan to rehabilitate my public image, save my job, and generally stop my life from being ruined. Well, given where I was in those days, from beingmoreruined. Somehow, though, this trip to a decently reviewed local pub with our rescue dog that we were slipping into the two-to-three-hour window when our foster daughter was out the house seemed way, way higher stakes.
“He’ll be okay, right?”
Oliver gave me an indulgent smile. “Spud will be okay. Jasmine will be okay. They’ll both be okay. Neither of them are going to poo anywhere they shouldn’t or bite any strangers. Now come on, I know we don’t have a booking to be late for, but it’s a popular place and it does fill up.”
So we set off. The pub we’d picked was only a short walk from our house because while Spudcouldgo in the car, he didn’t much like it, and all three of us felt like we could do with the exercise. Of course, we’d also picked it because it was dog-friendly, but that had narrowed our options down far less than I’d expected. Whether from a gradual cultural shift or the sudden need to accommodate a bajillion lockdown puppies, half the venues in London seemed to have gone puppy-positive.
This particular venue advertised its puppy-positivity with a sign reading “Dogs with well-behaved owners welcome,” which I tried to find annoying but secretly found cute.
Other than that, it was just a very nice, very straightforward English pub, with one of those white-paint-black-beams facades that I wanted to call Tudor, but mostly because that was the only historical period I actually knew.
“There are…alotof people here,” I said, a bit nervously, as we were shown to our table. “And a lot of dogs.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud, less nervously.
