back into place when he briefly passed out. The other foot, the good foot, was brown and cracked and the toenails had aged, coarse and square and yellowed. Dark hair sprang along the ridge of the foot-bone and on the lower knuckles of the toes. Michael’s face was clammy beneath her hand. She moved her hand away a bit and he grunted and rolled his head towards it. Stubble bristled her palm. ‘Fuck, Thane, can you go any faster, how useless is this car?’
‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Thane. ‘It’s the adrenalin, it’s draining from me. I feel faint.’
‘You fucking hippy. It’s no better back here.’
‘No, you have to drive.’
‘Get out then.’ She shouted it.
He stopped right there in the road and in a slamming of doors they swapped places. ‘I’m not licensed,’ she said into the rear-view mirror.
‘Just drive fast,’ he said. ‘Drive as fast as the car can go.’
And the road spooled into them like a retracting tape measure.
Michael and his foot survived, and Ruth fell back into line with her marriage to Ben. Andrew married again: Beth, the widow of a man he used to work with at the polytech. He’d gone to the man’s funeral, he told Dorothy, and Beth had wept into his lapel and said, ‘Thank god you’re here. You’re the only one he liked in that whole place.’ ‘Can you believe it?’
There would never be mutual visits, holidays together, but in the evenings, when she’d closed up the art room at the hospice and gone back to her quiet apartment, Dot and Andrew often spoke on the phone about their children and grandkids: about Amy’s struggle through the ranks of retail management and Donald’s coming out which had been no surprise, and what to do with crazy Hannah ditching an engineering internship for the ludicrous short-term goal of touring with a band, and how in hell any of them were ever going to afford their own home, and wasn’t it good that Grace was back at work now Meg and Frankie were both in school. Together they thanked god for the barely surviving public education system and the fact that Hannah seemed to quite like slumming it and Donald was the one with the business mind, his software-development business in profit. Sometimes Andrew even bitched to Dot about Beth’s sullen sons, who were taking their own sweet time to accept the marriage. ‘They’re still grieving their dad,’ Dorothy said, and Andrew said, ‘I know that. Jesus, I don’t need you to analyse the world for me, Dorothy, just listen. Be a friend.’
But it wasn’t Andrew she turned to when the eggs began to burn or her glasses disappeared. They should come with a sonar locator, she thought, there would be money in that, just as you could ring a cell phone to find it you should be able to do the same with house keys, remote controls, wallets. What was it Donald said, the Internet of Things? She lived alone. Only Diego, the caretaker who’d become a friend, saw the lists, but then the lists would appear in odd places, not on the fridge but tucked in the back of the bathroom cabinet, not taped to the front door but rolled into a wine glass. Lists were only useful if you could find them, and then only if you could read them, and reading was no problem apart from the giant hole torn in one afternoon when the recipe for spinach soup escaped her and she went blank, the bench spread with potato peelings. Spinach stalks. Onion peel. What to do with these? The cookbook was useless, the instructions made absolutely no sense, may as well have been in Mandarin. She slammed the book shut and wanted to weep. It was much later that night, tossing some apple skins into the compost bucket, that she discovered the white cubes of peeled and diced potato, the fresh green leaves nestled there in the dark.
18. Daniel
It was a new grocery store; new for Dorothy. She had taken a bus, also new, one of the yellow double-ended ones with a concertina segment in the middle that held two carriages together. Those buses belonged somewhere with wide roads and manicured roundabouts, not here with the narrow bricolaged streets and everyone parking arsy-versy where they pleased. All they did here was jam the traffic, but the council before the current council had ordered them and everyone was stuck with the decision, it would have been ‘bad management’