The Waffle House on the Pier - Tilly Tennant Page 0,18

not sure it won’t just mean sending her down the slippery slope.’

Natalie dropped the little pot back into her handbag. ‘The slippery slope to what?’

‘Like, running on adrenaline for years and years and then suddenly stopping to find that you’ve been completely exhausted the whole time but you were so busy you didn’t notice. Once you stop and you see it, you just can’t rev up again.’

Natalie glanced at Georgia, who was looking at her phone. She turned back to Sadie. ‘What does she need to rev up for? Isn’t she a bit past revving up these days? When I’m seventy-eight – if I make it that far – I want to have some strapping male care worker in a tight shirt wheeling me around in my bath chair all day; I don’t want to be rushing around.’

Sadie smiled slightly but shook her head. Natalie joked like that all the time but everyone knew that wasn’t really what she wanted for her future; she wanted to grow old with the man of her dreams… she was just having trouble finding him right now.

‘The waffle house… I don’t know. Without Gampy she doesn’t seem to have anything to keep going for. I’m scared that if we take the waffle house away as well then she definitely won’t have anything to keep going for.’

Georgia raised her head. ‘I see where you’re coming from,’ she said, locking her phone and shaking her freshly dyed violet hair free from her collar. ‘And I understand why you want to help your grandma keep the place but I don’t see how you can do that and continue your teacher training.’

Sadie chewed vaguely on her bottom lip for a moment. ‘I’d have to get help,’ she conceded finally.

‘Good luck finding someone you can trust,’ Natalie said.

Sadie raised her eyebrows. ‘There are plenty of people I can trust.’

‘Yes, but they’re not all available or willing. When you say you’ll get help I assume you mean free, voluntary help?’

‘I could pay someone, I suppose. Not a lot, but maybe if we started to make enough money…’

‘And I’m sure you’ll be able to offer a huge wage,’ Natalie replied with not a little sarcasm in her tone. ‘Along with pension contributions, holiday pay, sick pay… It’s not as simple as bunging someone a few quid every now and again, and I’m assuming you’ve considered all that?’

‘Yes, yes…’ Sadie shot back. She hadn’t considered any of that but she wasn’t about to admit it to Natalie, who could be so irritatingly shrewd about things that Sadie hadn’t even thought of. ‘But I sort of hoped that my friends and family might be able to lend a hand every now and again.’

‘You know we would if we could,’ Georgia said.

‘Oh I know that,’ Sadie replied quickly. ‘It’s not what I’m asking you.’

‘Yes, but you know we’d do almost anything for you because we absolutely love you and your grandma to pieces. If anything, it’s more of a case of how much use we’d be if we did have time to pitch in. You might find you’d be better off without our so-called help.’

‘You’d be great,’ Sadie said, though even she struggled to show any kind of conviction in her tone.

‘We’d be terrible and you know it,’ Natalie said. ‘I don’t know the first thing about cooking for a start. And don’t forget we both have full-time jobs of our own – there wouldn’t be as many hours to spare as you might imagine.’

‘Anything at all would be a help,’ Sadie said lamely, though she already knew her friend was absolutely right.

Natalie shook her head. ‘It’s not a practical solution at all, is it? Even if we could help you’d end up coming to rely on us and if something happened one day and we couldn’t come you’d feel let down and resentful. It might cause bad feeling between us. And if we let you down, we’d feel guilty too and a little resentful that we were being made to feel guilty, even if you were as nice as pie about it and didn’t intend that at all.’

Georgia fished a strawberry from her glass of Pimm’s and popped it into her mouth. ‘What’s the fam said about it?’

‘Nothing.’

Georgia frowned.

‘I mean, I haven’t exactly discussed it with them yet,’ Sadie added. ‘Obviously, we’ve discussed the future of the waffle house but I haven’t exactly told them I was thinking of taking it on. I mean, I hadn’t really decided if it was a good