Yes Chef, No Chef - By Susan Willis Page 0,20
with the toe of her black court shoe and decided to ask her brother, Jack, to find a decorator. At the same time as Katie opened the front door her mum came through the kitchen doorway. “Katie, what a surprise,” she said. “I was just thinking about you this afternoon.”
Katie hugged her and planted a big kiss on her cheek. “You were?” she asked.
“Yes,” she said and started telling her a long drawn out story about one of her neighbour’s cousins. But when Katie took her jacket off and slumped down at the kitchen table her mum stopped abruptly, switched the kettle on, sat down opposite her and searched Katie’s face. Her mum always did this because she reckoned she could tell at a glance when something was wrong with any of her three children, and Katie knew better than deny there was anything wrong. She told her exactly what had happened.
Her mum’s big hazel eyes widened with shock. “But I can’t understand it? I mean, why is he behaving like this?”
Katie looked at her mum’s hands clasped together on the kitchen table and her finger slightly swollen around the wedding ring she’d worn since she was eighteen.
“I don’t know, Mum,” she wailed. “It just seems to be since he got his new job! Maybe it’s the stress…”
It was eight years since her father had died and at the time they’d all been totally devastated with the shock of him being there one minute and gone the next with a massive heart attack. For years afterwards every time she looked into her mum’s eyes she saw the absolute misery and loneliness of living without him and it was only during the last two years that she seemed to be coming to terms with it.
Her mum stirred three heaped teaspoons of sugar into Katie’s tea and she protested, “Er, I don’t take sugar, remember?”
“You look like you could do with it. It’s the best thing for shock,” she warned and stirred it quickly with the spoon while Katie watched the liquid quickly swirling around.
Katie sighed. “I’m not in shock now, Mum. I’m fine, honestly. I was upset last night but not now. In fact, now the temper and tears have gone I just feel really sad about it all.”
Her mum brightened. “Look, I’m sure he’s sorry by now and he’ll probably be ringing you by tonight, or you might get back to Sarah’s and find a bouquet of flowers waiting for you.”
Katie played along with her positive vibes and sipped the tea although she couldn’t help screwing up her face with the sweet sugary taste. Her mum smiled and told Katie she could always come home to stay if she didn’t want to be at Sarah’s and then changed the subject back to her neighbour’s cousin story.
Katie relaxed her shoulders and sank back into the chair in the warm homely kitchen and with only half of her attention on the story she looked around the room letting all her childhood memories flood through her. She remembered the smell from wet washing drying on the old radiator and standing on the stool next to the old knotty pine table where her mum had taught her how to cream sugar and butter together in the big ceramic mixing bowl for cake mixes. Maybe this was where her love for cooking had come from she wondered and subconsciously she always associated cooking with warmth and family love.
She knew according to all the books she read and the people in her immediate circle of friends that her normal happy childhood was unusual now-a-days and most women her age seemed to be from dysfunctional or one parent families with horrid memories to haunt them. Yep, she’d definitely been one of the lucky ones and shook herself to nod in agreement at the shocking end to her mum’s story. After helping her mum with a couple of household jobs she eventually left just before seven o’clock and made her way back to Sarah’s.
Chapter Five
By Wednesday morning with still no phone call, text or email from Tim she was full of fight and determination and had stubbornly decided if he could get through these days without contacting her then so could she.
Feeling more in control than she had since Sunday, she said to Sarah, “I mean, there’s no way I’m going to allow any man to ruin my life.”
They’d pulled up outside Kings Cross station and Sarah collected her case from the back seat of the Micra then