Page 79 of Queen of Nothing

What exactly I miss about Grandmother, I don’t know. I can’t pick out a single redeeming quality in her.

But I’ve been gone for a long time. Long enough for time to have caught up with Grandmother.

She might not be there anymore.

She might have passed on.

Nonna, too.

What if Nonna’s villa and Craven Cottage are empty now with only memories to haunt them, and the death rituals have been and gone, and I am all the way across the world, hidden in some town out of the way of civilisation?

It’s a thought that weighs me down.

And after my shift ends, and I should head straight to Ms Brown’s, that despair in me takes me to the phone booth.

I pull over, put the car in park, and switch off the engine.

I lean my temple on the car window, and my angle shifts to get a direct view through the open door to the scratched phone inside.

My fingers drum on the steering wheel.

My shoe taps on the floor.

My teeth bite down on the insides of my cheeks.

And I think of Mother.

The rain doesn’t fall today, there is no drizzle to wet the roads, but there is a stagnant dampness in the air.

An eternal humidity in this place.

It murks the plastic walls of the phone booth, makes it harder to see inside.

So I get out.

And I walk into the phone booth.

I stay in here a while.

The moment I’m back in the car, my bag vibrates on the passenger seat. My phone is buzzing.

The fright jolts through me, because I know that’s Serena calling.

Probably because I finished work almost an hour ago.

I scramble to accept the call.

The moment I hit the button, the lies spill out of me, “I was held up. I just finished—and I’m almost at Ms Brown’s.”

I put the call on speaker, then slot the phone into the holder that’s stuck to the dash.

I turn the car back towards town.

Her tone is distant, distracted, and I apparently worked myself up for nothing, “I figured you stayed late. But I hoped to catch you before you left—I just noticed you didn’t take the list this morning.”

My teeth bare in a grimace.

Fuck.