Every single time.
For eleven years. Four times a year. Forty-four separate occasions.
He told me that outside by the bins at about ten past eleven at night, and it is the only part of the whole thing that actually went through me.
Not does she ever ask. She asks first. Before she sits down. Every time, for eleven years, forty-four times: how is Mum.
And that man has had to answer that question forty-four times.
In a café. Across a small table. With a woman of thirty-four watching his face while he does it, knowing there is nothing coming back and asking anyway.
I asked him what he says to her.
He said: I tell her you’re well.
Four words. Forty-four times. And both of them have always known exactly what those four words mean.
She has sent four things in eleven years.
A card when his father died. A photograph in 2019. Two letters, in 2017 and in 2021.
All four of them came to him. None of them came to the house.
He kept all four of them.
In the car. In the glovebox, under the service manual, in a plastic wallet.
Because after forty-one years of marriage, a glovebox under a manual is the only square foot of our entire life that is his.
I have been in that glovebox about a hundred times. For sweets, for a pen, for the parking disc.
I have never once in eleven years lifted that manual.
There is a child.
I want a line to itself for that because it got one in the car park, and because it took me about four seconds to understand what he had just said to me.
A boy. He is six years old.
His name is a family name on her husband’s side and I had to be told it twice because I did not take it in the first time.
He has been to that hotel four times. Which is the reason there is a small yellow bag that lives in the back of our car — which I have moved about eleven times over four years, to get at the shopping, and which I was once told belonged to a neighbour’s grandson.
I believed that. It took him about four seconds to say and I have never thought about it again until the night by the bins.
Hollis has met him four times. For about two hours each. In a café.
He has about eight hours of that child’s life.
Taken in two-hour pieces, in a café across a road, four times a year, with a two-hundred-mile drive on either side of each one and a story to have ready when he got home.
And then he drove home, and came in through his own front door at about eight, and ate his dinner.
And asked me about my day. Every single time. Forty-four times.
It has been eleven weeks since that lobby.
We came home.
We did not finish the four nights. We left on the second morning, before breakfast, and neither of us suggested doing anything else.
He settled the bill at that desk with that woman standing there, and the two of them did not look at each other once, and I stood about four feet away and let them not do it.
That drive is about five hours.
