Without even bothering to reply, Jaz pushed past him and into the corridor.
“Jasmine, come back here.”
She turned. “Getting the cleaning things, aren’t I? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“You willnot”—Oliver was setting a personal record for tense—“walk away from me while I am talking to you. You will not speak back to me. You will not do anything like”—he gestured at the bathroom floor—“likethisever again. Or else—”
I knew I wasn’t a great parent. Jaz had told me multiple times that I wasn’t a great parent. Okay, she’d told me that I was an actively shit parent. But if there was one thing I knew forcertain, it was that you never dropped anor elseunless you had something to back it up. Because you were definitely, definitely going to get…
“Or else what?”
“Or else,” said Oliver with the fakest calm I’d ever heard him fake, “I will be forced to contact the agency and tell them that unfortunately, while Lucien and I have tried to be supportive of your needs, we are unable to provide you with the care you require.”
And in Jaz’s eyes, I saw something. A look I recognised far too well. The self-destructive comfort that came from proving that you’d lived down to somebody’s expectations. And then she walked into her room and slammed the door behind her.
* * *
“That wasfucked, Oliver,” I stage-whispered as I followed him into the hall. With Jaz upstairs and guests downstairs, there was kind of nowhere we could safely have a row, but a row was coming whetherI liked it or not. “You do not get to make decisions like that without consulting me.”
Oliver stopped by the front door and looked at me in genuine confusion. “Decisions like what?”
“Like what?” I was still keeping my voice low, but I felt like it was mostly making me raspy rather than stealthy. “Like ‘threatening to send Jaz back into the system’ is like what.”
The look in Oliver’s eyes was infuriatingly, almosthideously, calm. “I was just stating the facts as I saw them. We won’t be able to keep Jasmine if she doesn’t learn to—”
“You know what,” I interrupted, “I feel like this is going to be a long conversation, and we still have a dining room full of Millennials who used to like each other. How about we stick to one crisis at a time?”
At least Oliver didn’t say,Well, you’re the one who brought it up, although I was pretty sure I heard him think it. He nodded, and we went back through to see what we could salvage from the remains of the dinner party.
It turned out that there wasn’t much. Brian and Amanda had gone, as had the James Royce-Royces, leaving Peter and Jennifer in the front room waiting for a cab and Bridge and Tom in the dining room waiting for us.
I was barely through the door before Bridge was on her feet and hugging me.
“I’m sorry I ruined dinner,” she told me with such sincerity that I felt like a shithead.
“You didn’t ruin dinner,” said Tom for what I strongly suspected wasn’t the first time or the fifth. “James did.”
I tried to make a conciliatory face over Bridge’s shoulder. “I don’t think anyone did, really.”
“Although Jasmine’s antics didn’t help,” added Oliver, with a sourness I really disliked.
“Can you lay off Jaz. Please,” I pissy-begged, peeling myself out of Bridge’s arms.
“I fear laying off her is what brought us to this situation in the first place.”
For a conversation we were going to be having later, this seemed a lot like now. “Oliver, stop it. Seriously. I know you’re stressed, but…but…” Utterly but-less, I ran out of steam.
Bridge glanced between us with the kind of concern you didn’t want your friends to be showing you. “Is everything okay? Is Jaz okay?”
Oliver and I eyed each other in a how-big-a-lie-do-we-tell-here way.
“Yeah,” I said, finally. “She was trying to dye her hair and managed to knock a bunch of shit over.”
“It does happen when you’re that age. When I was fourteen I tried to dye my hair pink because I thought it would make Andy Whitwell like me. But I didn’t read the instructions properly, so it came out snot green and ruined my parents’ best towels.”
We stood there for a little while, nobody quite able to say,How about we never do anything like this ever again, and then Peter stuck his head through the door.
“Our taxi’s outside.” He paused, and I recognised the sort of cognitive dissonance a certain kind of nicely brought up middle-class person got when they were socially obliged to be grateful for something that had made their life objectively worse. “Thanks for dinner.”
