Jaz gazed at me with adolescent contempt. Then she let herattention drift back to Spud, and then, as if she was talking to the park or the sky instead of to me, she said, “I reckon he’s tired.”
And without another word, we went home.
Chapter 24
Jaz settled in over the following week. Unfortunately, what she settled into was an unshakeable belief that Oliver was an arsehole and I was a loser. Which, all in all, made for a few tense days on Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson. Next Door’s Kid’s Mum and Next Door’s Kid’s Dad had at least accepted Jaz’s apology letter at face value—more than face value in some ways because Oliver had explained a bit of the context to them and, being nice middle-class people, they’d bent over backwards to explain how Extremely Sympathetic they were about Jasmine’s Special Circumstances. Although they made sure to explain it in a way that also made clear that if Jasmine’s Special Circumstances so much as mildly inconvenienced them or their son again, they’d be calling out a SWAT team.
Still, apology duly written and duly accepted, Oliver seemed to consider the matter closed, which I actually found a bit upsetting because as far as I was concerned, the matter was sort of ajar. Because it was becoming increasingly clear that me and Oliver had quite different parenting styles, and I would have quite liked to have a sensible, mature conversation about our different parenting styles. Except it was incredibly hard to find the time to have a sensible, mature conversation about our different parenting styles because we were both too busy parenting. It was sort of like we were in a boat, and we were both bailing water out of the boat, which meant theboat was sinking, but also neither of us were steering and we were probably overdue an iceberg.
So I did what I usually did in scary, complex, icebergy situations—I pretended it wasn’t happening. Which was pretty easy because my job, for however long it lasted, was an endless source of displacement activity.
“What do you call cheese that doesn’t belong to you?” I asked Alex.
Alex didn’t think about this one for as long as he usually did. “Casei, I suppose.”
I looked blankly into my camera. “What?”
“Well, ‘That doesn’t belong to you’ is sort of a relationship descriptor, so I suppose that implies you’re looking for the genitive, although in that case the grammar’s all mixed up. You’d more be describing the not-belonging-to-you-ness of the cheese. If you were just saying ‘cheese that isn’t yours’ or something like that, it’d take the nominative, whether it belonged to you or not.”
This was very much the wrong conversation to be having on a Friday. Or any day. “I was going to say, ‘Nat-cho cheese.’”
Alex blinked. “Pardon.”
“Nat-cho cheese.Nat, likenot. Thencho, like…now I come to think of it, like a slightly culturally appropriative way of sayingyourbut also together like the wordnacho. Like the food.”
It looked as though Alex understood. Which scared me. “Excellent example, Luc. So yes, innacho cheese, it’s actually thenachothat would take the genitive whilecheesewould take the nominative. Although I suppose thinking about it, that might also depend on whether nacho cheese is cheeseofa nacho or cheesefora nacho.”
My phone rang, and I had never in my life been so glad to be distracted from something I was already using as a distraction. “Hang on,” I told Alex, “I’ve got to get this.”
Slipping my headphones off, I answered the phone.
“Mr. O’Donnell?” I was pretty proud of myself for recognising Miss Collins’s voice. “Please don’t worry too much, but I wanted to bring this up early. Jasmine’s teachers are telling me that she hasn’t done any homework this week.”
Fuck. We’d fucked it up again. “Sorry,” I said reflexively. Then added, “We’ll get on that right away.”
“Otherwise,” Miss Collins continued, “she’s made a very positive start.”
I should have felt good about that but, selfishly, I didn’t. It was like she was saying that everything was fine, apart from the bit that Oliver and I were most responsible for. “Thanks,” I said anyway. “That’s good to hear.”
The nanosecond Miss Collins had gone, I was texting Oliver.Jaz hasn’t done any homework we suck as parents.
The reply took a while to come through because Oliver’s day involved some pretty big chunks of can’t-look-at-a-phone time. When it finally came, it was:We don’t suck as parents. Which was reassuring. Except it was swiftly followed up with:We should however be a little more proactive in our monitoring.
We don’t want to be helicopter parents, I replied. It was the gentlest way I could think of to broach the whole we-are-coming-at-this-in-extremely-different-ways issue.
Oliver three-dotsed me for quite a while, suggesting he was composing his thoughts. Thoughts that finally landed on my screen as:It isn’t helicopter parenting for us to make sure she’s doing her schoolwork. It’s doing her a disservice not to.
He was right about that. I just wasn’t quite sure Oliver’s style of monitoring would be well received.Your right, I sent back—followed by*yourfollowed by*you’rebecause fuck predictive text. Then I added,I’ll talk to her when she gets home.
If you want to wait, we can do it togetherwas the reply. And I tried really hard not to read mistrust into it, or to takeWe can do ittogetherto meanI can do it my way and you can watch.
But I didn’t want to get into that right then, especially not by text. So I sent back a casualIts coolfollowed byNo sense dragging it out.
That got nothing back for a while. Then, just as I was turning my attention begrudgingly back to work, I got anOkayand then about eighty seconds later aLet me know if you change your mindand then, two minutes after that,By the way, Brian and Amanda can’t make next weekend, Jennifer and Peter can’t make the weekend after, and Bridget and Tom are busy for the rest of the month so we might have to postpone dinner until February.
Ah yes. Because as well as looking after a homework-averse teenager, we were also trying—and had been trying since before Christmas—to host a dinner party with the friends we hadn’t seen in what had started as months and was now becoming months and months. Post-pandemic, when we were all really excited we could see each other again, we’d started a regular dinner party thing which had swiftly become an irregular dinner party thing which had then become an ad hoc dinner party thing and had finally become aHey, remember when we used to have dinner parties?thing.Were going to run into valentines at this rate, I sent back.
It’s all couples, Oliver replied,so maybe we should steer into it. Either way I’ll keep you posted.
