Faye, Faraway by Helen Fisher

Author:Helen Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

When I visit people, I’m accustomed to bringing a gift, a bottle of wine or something. But I couldn’t buy anything for my mother, obviously. Even if I’d brought some with me, my money was no good here—the future was as foreign as Mars when it came to currency—and I was finished with trying to steal. Anyway, my mother didn’t seem to mind. She loved having me around, and that was a wonderful feeling.

We spent the day hanging out at her house and in the garden. After we got back from town, I took my brown paper bag with the skates inside up to little Faye’s room and put it under the bed. When I came downstairs, my mother was standing in the kitchen, thumbing through her recipe book. She looked up and threw me an apron.

“Put this on, we’re making sticky toffee pudding. I don’t know why I’m looking at this,” she said, holding the little book aloft. “I should know the recipe off by heart by now.” She put it facedown on the kitchen table.

I picked it up and turned it over, smiling at this little book in which I’d found the photograph of myself under the Christmas tree; a book that linked me to my mother, and her to her mother, like a private joke.

“Come on, put it down—it might be full of magic, but I can do it without looking. The brown sugar is in that cupboard, can you find it for me?”

Of course I could find it, and we worked together, laughing and weighing out ingredients, getting flour all over the place. I chopped the dates, and when one of them shot across the counter and onto the floor like an escaped cockroach, we giggled like drunkards. While the pudding was in the oven, we sat in the back garden with cold lemonade, ice clinking in the glasses.

“It’s too hot for sticky toffee pudding,” she said, leaning back, her eyes closed to the sun. “I’ve got ice cream to go with it, though.”

“Sticky toffee pudding is perfect whatever the weather,” I said, copying my mother and shutting my eyes.

“It’s Faye’s favorite,” she said.

“Mine too,” I said.

“Well, it would be,” she murmured.

I stop breathing for a moment. I didn’t say anything, and the silence wasn’t uncomfortable, but for me it was full of the echo of her words. Why had she said that? What did she mean? I turned my head and opened one eye to look at her; hers were still closed, her lids soaking up the sunshine.

I suppose the best way to describe the feeling is like this: You know when you like a boy, or you like a girl, and you know they like you, and you want to ask them out, take it to the next level? But you know that if you read the signals wrong, when you ask them out you will ruin everything. They might not even want to be your friend anymore. So your friendship remains in limbo

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