Oh, right. Actually, that does ring a bit of a bell. Maybe I did say that.
“Well, I hereby retract it,” I say frantically. “You should always wear a jacket, in case I have a wardrobe malfunction.”
“Always wear a jacket.” Luke pretends to make a note on his phone. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Give me your napkin. Quick!”
Thankfully, the napkins are really big and made of posh red damask material. I knot three together to make a kind of bikini top, tie it tightly around myself, then look up breathlessly. On the plus side, I’m decent. On the minus side, what do I look like?
“Super hot,” says Luke, as though reading my mind.
“Shut up.” I glare at him.
“I’m serious. You do look hot.” He grins at me. “Bravo.”
“Darling!” Dad’s voice greets me, and I turn to see my parents coming through the restaurant. Dad’s wearing a linen jacket with a paisley handkerchief in his top pocket, and Mum is in a pink floral two-piece, which I recognize from the wardrobe of Janice, our neighbor.
Mum and Janice are always swapping clothes to “refresh” their wardrobes. Janice is about two sizes smaller than Mum, but it doesn’t put them off—Mum just leaves half the buttons undone, while Janice cinches everything in with a belt.
“Becky, love! How are you? How’s Minnie?” Mum hugs me tight, then peers down at me. “That’s an unusual outfit! Is that what they call a ‘handkerchief top’?”
“Er…kind of.” I avoid Luke’s gaze and add quickly, “Shall we have a drink?”
Already an elderly waiter is bringing over a sherry for Mum, plus a gin and tonic for Dad. They know my parents here. Mum and Dad have lived in Oxshott since before I was born, and they come to Luigi’s about twice a month. Mum always orders the special, while Dad always looks at the menu for ages, as though expecting to see something new, before ordering the veal marsala.
“Luke.” Dad shakes Luke’s hand before hugging me. “Good to see you.”
“We have so much to talk about!” says Mum. “What are you two having?”
We order our drinks and the waiter pours out water while Mum twitches impatiently. I can tell she’s got things she wants to discuss, but she never says anything in front of waiters, not even at Luigi’s. I don’t know what she thinks—that they’ll immediately go off and text the Oxshott Gazette the latest gossip? Bloomwoods intending to buy new lawnmower but can’t decide on brand.
“So!” says Mum as soon as the waiter moves away. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Christmas,” says Dad.
“Christmas.” I beam at him. “I can’t wait. I’ll bring the crackers. Shall we get the ones with the nail clippers and things or the ones with wind-up penguins?”
I’m expecting Dad to answer, “Wind-up penguins,” because last year he won the wind-up penguin race and was ridiculously pleased about it. But to my surprise he doesn’t answer immediately. He looks at Mum. In fact, he looks shiftily at Mum.
I have very acute parental radar. I know when something’s up. And almost at once I guess what it is: They’re going away for Christmas. A cruise. It’s got to be a cruise. I bet Janice and Martin talked them into it and they’ve already bought their pastel outfits.
“Are you going on a cruise?” I blurt out, and Mum looks surprised.
“No, love! What makes you think that?”
All right. So my parental radar isn’t quite as acute as I thought. But, then, why the shifty look?
“Something’s going on,” I assert.
“Yes,” says Dad, with another look at Mum.
“Something to do with Christmas,” I say, feeling Sherlock Holmes–like in my deduction abilities.
“Well, Christmas is one factor,” allows Mum.
One factor?
“Mum, what’s going on? Not something bad?” I add in sudden fear.
“Of course not!” Mum laughs. “It’s nothing, love. Just that we’ve agreed that Jess can move into our house. And Tom, of course,” she adds. “Both of them.”
Tom is Janice and Martin’s son, and he and Jess are married, so we’re all kind of related now.
“But they live in Chile,” I say stupidly.
“They’re coming back for a few months,” says Dad.
“Jess never told me!” I say indignantly.
“Oh, you know how cautious Jess is,” says Mum. “She’s the type to keep back news till it’s one hundred percent confirmed. Look, here are your drinks.”
As our drinks are deposited on the table, my mind can’t help racing ahead in speculation. Jess’s emails to me are quite short and curt, and Mum’s right: She’s the type to keep news back. Even brilliant, exciting news. (She once won a big geology prize and didn’t tell me and then said, “I thought you wouldn’t be interested.”)
So could this be because— Oh my God! As soon as the waiter has gone, I say excitedly, “Tell me! Have Jess and Tom adopted a child?”
At once I can see from Mum’s expression that I’ve misfired again.
“Not yet,” says Mum, and I see Dad wince slightly. “Not quite yet, love. The wheels are still turning out there. Bureaucracy and so forth. Poor Janice has given up asking.”
“Oh,” I say, deflated. “I thought maybe…Wow. It takes a long time, doesn’t it?”
When Jess showed me a photo of an adorable little boy, ages ago now, I thought we’d meet him really soon. But that adoption fell through and we were all a bit devastated. And since then, Jess and Tom have been pretty cagey about their prospects.
“They’ll get there,” says Dad with a determined brightness. “We have to keep the faith.”
As Luke pours tonic into his G&T, I’m picturing Jess and Tom, out in Chile, waiting and waiting for news of a child to adopt, and my heart squeezes. I really feel for Jess. She’d be a brilliant mother (in a strict, vegan, recycled-hemp-clothes kind of way), and it seems so unfair that adoption takes so long.
Then my thoughts turn to Suze, and my heart squeezes again. Just after we got back from the States, she had a miscarriage, which was a shock to all of us. And although all she ever says about it is, “I’m so lucky already….It wasn’t meant to be….” I know she was crushed.
As for me, we’d love another baby, but it just hasn’t happened.
By now my heart is feeling squeezy all over. Life’s weird. You can know you’re the luckiest human being in the world. You can know you don’t have anything to complain about. But you can still feel sad because you don’t have that one extra little person in your life.
“Cheers!” says Luke, lifting his glass to everyone, and I hastily smile. “And here’s to…what exactly?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” says Dad, after we’ve all sipped our drinks. “Jess and Tom are coming back to the UK for a while. Janice was fretting about giving them space…and the upshot is we’re offering them our house for a few months.”
“They’ll be next door to Janice, but not on top of her,” puts in Mum. “And Janice won’t have to cook chickpeas every night. Poor love, she was getting quite agitated about it! I mean, Janice is as vegan as anyone, but she does like a boiled egg for breakfast.”
“How long are they back for?” asks Luke, before I can ask Mum if she knows what “vegan” actually means.
“Well, this is the thing!” says Mum. “Till January at least. Which means we won’t be able to host Christmas. So we thought, Becky…” She pauses and turns to me with a flourish. “Now you’re in your lovely house, maybe it’s time for you to host Christmas!”
“Me host Christmas?” I stare at Mum. “But…”
I feel as though all this time someone has been gently playing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” on a vinyl record in the background—and now the needle’s been scraped off, into stark silence.
I don’t host Christmas; Mum hosts Christmas. She knows how to do it. She knows how to unwrap the chocolate roll and put it on a doily and sprinkle icing sugar on it.
“Right.” I swallow. “Wow. Host Christmas. That’s pretty scary!” I laugh to show I don’t really mean it. (Although I half-do.)
“You can do it, love.” Mum pats my hand confidently. “Get a good turkey and you’re halfway there. I’ve invited Janice and Martin,” she adds, “and Jess and Tom, of course. I mean, we’re all family now, aren’t we?”
“Right.” I take a gulp of G&T, trying to get my head round all this information. Jess and Tom are coming back, and we’re hosting Christmas, and—
“Wait a minute.” My head jerks up as my thoughts rewind. “So when you say you’re offering Jess and Tom the house, do you mean you’re having them to stay? Or…”
“We’re moving out for a bit,” says Dad, his eyes twinkling. “We’re having an adventure, Becky.”
“Another adventure?” I say, and exchange looks with Luke. After our trip to the States, I would have thought my parents had had enough adventures to last them forever.
“A change of scene.” Mum nods. “We got back from America, and it made us think, love. We’ve lived in the same house for all these years. We haven’t tried anything else. And Dad’s always wanted to keep bees.”
“It’s always been a little dream of mine,” says Dad, looking a bit embarrassed.
“If not now, then when?” chimes in Mum.
“Wow,” I say again, digesting this. I mean, it’s true: My parents haven’t really experimented much. Good for them, branching out. I can just see Dad pottering around in a little country cottage with a beehive and an orchard. We can come to visit and Minnie can pick apples and I can buy a drifty linen “apple-picking” skirt from the Toast catalog….