Ember by Catherine Yardley

Author:Catherine Yardley [Yardley, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

Then

I waver before I put the crisps in the lunchbox. He bought the wrong ones again. Now Amanda would be upset. I try to ignore the resentment for my father that bubbles up but it is no use. Every moment of every day. I resented him when I was cooking dinner and when I was making breakfast. When I was making up the lunchboxes as I was doing now, and when I would take my younger siblings to school, sometimes even stepping over him in the hall where he had been all night. Passed out and drunk.

I did the housework, put the kids to bed. I did almost everything. My father, meanwhile, drank. Occasionally he would be lucid. At those times he would make a meal or take us to do something fun. Or Amanda’s idea of fun.

He still had his job working in construction, but I could not figure out how. He didn’t need to work of course: my mother’s life insurance, and family money, made sure of that. And then there was her. The woman he had never let go. He thought no one knew about her, and the other two probably didn’t, but I knew. I had seen them together. But worse of all, sometimes I would smell her perfume. In the kitchen, in the living room. In my mother’s bed. It enraged me. That they should live and my mother should die.

Sometimes the only thing that got me through the day was that one day I would be a grown-up. Then I would be free and my life would be my own. I finish making the sandwiches and cut them in half. I put them in the lunchbox with an apple, the crisps and some juice. I shut the boxes and then go to get my siblings.

‘Paul, Amanda. It is time to go. We will be late.’

I hear them both coming down the stairs. Paul gave me a big hug.

Then just as I predicted it came:

‘This is the wrong kind of crisps,’ Amanda said, irritation dripping from her.

I sigh. It took her two minutes to complain.

‘Take it up with Dad. He is the one who bought the wrong ones.’

‘You should tell him which ones to get.’

‘I don’t do the shopping, Amanda. It is not my fault if Dad doesn’t know you or care what you like.’

Amanda shot me a look but didn’t say anything. A first. I was sick of her and her moods.

‘We need to leave now or we will be late,’ I said. Signalling them to the door. Amanda rolled her eyes and went first. Then we followed. As we all walked down the street, something caught my eye. I turned towards my father’s bedroom and noticed that the curtains were twitching. I stopped for a moment, trying to see who it was but it stopped.

The person knew they had been rumbled. I wondered if it was my father, too drunk to get out of bed, or his whore hiding away in my mother’s bedroom, lacking the guts to face the children of the women whose life she had ruined.

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