The Waffle House on the Pier - Tilly Tennant Page 0,40

and dignified, as she’d always been, the woman Sadie had always been proud to call grandmother even when she’d been unable to say so. They didn’t sell much apart from the odd hot drink and some crepes to take out for a hungry family with northern accents.

By midday things had started to pick up as day trippers and holidaymakers turned their thoughts to lunch. It wasn’t exactly a return to the mad rushes of the waffle house’s heyday but it was busier than Sadie would have liked for her first day as a significantly important member of staff. As a teenager, when things got busy, Gammy or Gampy would step in and take the heat off her so she never felt the stress of a full dining room. But that wasn’t going to happen today. If they were overwhelmed now, Sadie would have to step in to take the heat off April, just as she would once have done for her granddaughter.

The difference was, Sadie felt as if she didn’t have the first clue what she was doing. Back then she’d ably assisted (so she’d thought) but now she was in charge, whether she liked it or not and whether she knew how to do that or not. April was on hand with all her years of knowledge and experience, of course, but while she could tell Sadie how this thing switched on, or how long that dish took to cook, or the codes for the till, or a million other little things, it was clear that she wasn’t a hundred per cent present. Often Sadie found her slack-jawed and absent in the kitchen as she went through with a new order, or to find out whether a previous one was ready, and it was abundantly clear that all the real drive and impetus to keep things ticking over would have to come from her. And seeing how her grandmother was operating now, she had to wonder for the first time whether this had been the case for longer than anyone had realised. Had this been happening while Gampy had been alive? Had he been the one keeping things running smoothly? Had he been keeping Gammy on task, allowing her to function, making sure she was safe? Had he been doing all this because he was afraid to share that she might no longer be the vital, fiery, turbo-charged woman she’d once been?

Grief was a funny thing, and there was no doubt that April had been affected deeply by hers. In fact, it was hard to deny that she was still grieving, and probably would be for many months to come. But there seemed to be more than that at play – at least Sadie thought so. She was seventy-eight after all, so she could be forgiven for slowing down a little. Maybe she’d been slowing down for a while now but nobody had noticed. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to notice, or perhaps Gampy had hidden it well. Now that it was there in plain view, impossible to ignore, acceptance of that fact was more problematic, especially where April herself was concerned. Sadie was beginning to see that even though she’d already felt out of her depth simply opening the doors to customers today, things might be about to get a whole lot worse.

* * *

It was around twelve thirty. Sadie was chatting to a family with four young children about her brother’s dive school while they waited for their banana and hazelnut chocolate waffles and strawberry and cream waffles. They’d been asking for recommendations for fun things to do in the area – they didn’t want the usual sitting around on the beach or strolling the pier suggestions (though they had no objections to those things, they said they wanted a little more to make the holiday more memorable). And while they’d asked specifically for ideas a little out of the ordinary, the parents seemed doubtful about the prospect of diving, or of snorkelling. Sadie explained that Ewan always took children out to a little cove where the water was never above three feet deep, where it was clear and warm and there were no currents, a place that was teeming with underwater life and where, if you really wanted to believe you were diving in the Mediterranean, it wouldn’t take all that much effort. The longer she spoke about it, the more excited the older children (who looked to be perhaps ten and eight or thereabouts) got, while