Matilda Next Door - Kelly Hunter Page 0,9

small concern. ‘Coffee’s ready.’

‘Right.’ He shut the freezer lid and let his feelings of inadequacy sink uneasily into his skin. ‘This the pie?’

His grandmother nodded. ‘One of Tilly’s. You’ll like it. And it’s not charity. We trade. What did we trade that one for?’

‘Sweet corn and string beans from the garden. And the time before that you traded your mother’s vegetable soup recipe for a cheesy vegetable bake, and then she had to bring some of the soup over to make sure it tasted right. And it did.’

‘It was passable.’ From his grandmother, that was heavy praise. And then his grandmother fixed him with a critical gaze that almost set him to squirming the way it had when he’d been eight years old and sitting at her table for the very first time, his mother dead and him too hungry for words and oblivious to the notion of having to wash his hands before eating. He’d never been told to get up and go wash his hands before. He had been told to get lost many times over, though, and he knew exactly what that meant. He’d washed his hands and gone outside to sit on the step, his arms around his drawn-up legs as he’d watched this new sky grow dark, and it was there Joe had found him. He’d scrambled to his feet and waited in baffled silence for some kind of cue as to what the man wanted from him. His grandfather had eyed him for a long time, his sadness so strong Henry could feel it pressing in on him.

‘I washed my hands,’ he’d finally told the towering man.

‘She meant wash your hands and then come back to the table to eat your dinner,’ his grandfather had said quietly, and so Henry had stood up and gone with him and sat down with his clean hands to one of the finest meals he’d ever eaten.

At the end of it he’d told them it was the best meal ever, because that was something a person did when they had manners, wasn’t it?

His grandmother had looked him up and down, scowled, and said, ‘You eat like a pig.’

Goddammit he hated being hijacked by memories of his childhood.

This was why he hated coming back to Red Hill Station.

‘I’m glad you’re letting young Matilda stay in your apartment,’ his grandfather said, as if willing Henry back to the reality of here and now. ‘She’s been talking about that trip of hers for years, and saving just as long.’

‘And why shouldn’t she have to save the money to go?’ his grandmother cut in. ‘Just because her parents have money, doesn’t mean she gets to spend it gallivanting off to the ends of the earth on a whim.’

Fragile in body and mind his grandmother might be, but her sour disposition had not diminished one bit.

Ignore her. Tilly’s words in his ear.

Take a deep breath and remember that a failing brain didn’t process information the way healthier minds did. Henry turned to his patient, mindful grandfather who he really was glad to see again. ‘I hope she enjoys her travels, then. I was happy to help her out with accommodation. Meant I didn’t have to clean out the fridge before I left.’ Not that he’d stocked it. Tilly would find little more than ground coffee, a bit of milk, some cheese, butter, a jar of olives, half a tub of natural Greek yoghurt that he probably should have thrown out weeks ago. ‘Is she seeing anyone?’

Two sets of eyes stared back at him with varying degrees of surprise. Was it really such a surprise that he would ask after the woman he’d known as a child?

‘We thought she was serious about that young doctor chap, didn’t we, Beth?’ said his grandfather eventually. ‘But when his time here was up and he asked her to go back to the city with him, she wouldn’t go.’

‘Foolish girl,’ his grandmother muttered and shook her head. ‘Does she think rich doctors grow on trees?’

‘She didn’t love him, Beth. Anyway …’ His gaze was still on Henry. ‘I’ll be needing the last of the peas from the garden for shelling later. Maybe you can help me pull the plants and turn them in?’

‘No problem.’

The coffee was instant—a far cry from the fresh-ground ethically organic whatever blend he usually picked up from the little deli on the corner. He swallowed it down and tried not to grimace. Maybe sugar would help. Or milk. Milk to soften the stale, bitter