Money wasn’t the only reason, though. Danny had once worked with a joiner whose daughter had drowned on holiday. One minute she was playing near the shore and the next minute she was gone, dragged out to sea by a vicious current that only let her go when it was far too late. The man returned to his job just two days afterwards, something that Danny struggled to comprehend. He thought that work would be the very last thing on anybody’s mind in the wake of such an unspeakable tragedy, but when he lost Liz, he finally understood why the joiner had done what he did. In a time when nothing made sense anymore, a time when your mind stopped being your friend and became your worst enemy, sometimes work was the only thing that stood between you and insanity. Being on-site let him switch off his brain. He could hide his mental remote in his locker and leave it there for the better part of the day. Working allowed him to forget, if only for a little while and only until the night arrived and brought with it a darkness that he struggled to shake off even after the sun had risen. Just as Will had chosen silence, Danny had chosen work. They’d been coping, separately, in their own ways and in their own time, for the last fourteen months. That’s what Danny had assumed they’d been doing, at least, although whether that was because he genuinely believed it or because it simply allowed him to wallow in his own self-pity he really couldn’t say, but after talking to Will, he realized that his son hadn’t been coping at all. Silence wasn’t his way of dealing with things. If anything, his silence was something he chose in the absence of a coping strategy.
It was then that Danny understood how Liz’s death had left not one void in their lives but two. There was the gaping hole she’d left inside their family, but there was also the hole she’d left between them, a hole that Will had filled with silence and Danny had filled with work when they should have been filling it with each other. Liz had in many ways been the bridge that connected the two of them, and they’d been living on different sides of the same ravine since the day that bridge had collapsed, watching each other from a distance while the space between them grew ever wider. Soon it would be so wide that they’d lose each other forever if Danny didn’t find a way to close that gap, and quickly.
Gripped by a belated sense of urgency, Danny trawled through his notes and reread everything that Will had told him in the park. He’d already lost so much time that he didn’t want to wait another second to implement some type of positive change in their relationship, but while everything that Will talked about was doable, nothing was doable now, at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday evening. He couldn’t exactly drag Will out of bed and take him on a surprise visit to Stonehenge. Nor was it an ideal time to take an impromptu trip to the seaside.
Suddenly he had an idea. He went into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, took out the jar of peanut butter, and threw it in the bin.
“A journey of a thousand miles,” he said to himself. He couldn’t remember the rest of the saying but he was pretty sure it was relevant here.
Noticing that a bag of flour had also expired by a considerable margin, he threw that in the bin as well. As he did so, he remembered Will talking about the pancakes that Liz used to make. She’d always maintained that the recipe was a secret passed down by her grandma, which had been passed down by her grandma and so on and so forth, back to the very dawn of creation, but the recipe wasn’t really a secret and it hadn’t been given to her by her grandma. She’d soaked a piece of paper in a tray of tea overnight and dried it to look like parchment. On it she’d written a Jamie Oliver recipe she’d copied verbatim from his website and written Gran’s Top Secret Pancake Recipe across the top, along with several faux warnings akin to those on treasure maps informing the reader of all the curses and plagues they’d incur if they dared sneak a peek at the information within.
Danny studied the shelf above the microwave, where several cookbooks were gathering dust. He slowly leafed through them, pausing occasionally to read the funny little notes-to-self that Liz had left at the top of several pages (bean casserole: Hearty but farty; Bolognese: Save some wine for the dish next time; homemade pasta: Only for sadists; homemade ketchup: Why did I even bother?), until he found the recipe he was looking for.
Making a note of the ingredients—mostly just standard pancake ingredients, but Danny knew nothing about cooking so he copied them all word for word—he closed the book and returned it to the shelf. Then, sneaking out to the corner shop, he returned with as many eggs and as much flour and milk as he could carry.
Standing on a chair and immobilizing the smoke alarm in anticipation of the disaster he was sure was about to unfold, he pulled on Liz’s apron, tied it at the back, floured his hands, wiped off the flour when he realized he didn’t need to flour his hands, and started to cook.
Danny made a lot of pancakes that night. The first batch kept burning, the second batch refused to cook, and the third batch kept sticking to the pan. When he figured out how to stop that from happening (more butter), the next pancake stuck to the ceiling. He made close to twenty before he managed to get one onto a plate, but his satisfaction lasted only as long as it took him to taste it and realize he’d added too much salt. He tried again (and burned them again), and then he tried again (and undercooked them again), and then he flipped a couple more onto the floor, until finally, at around 2 a.m., Danny crawled into bed, burned, bruised, and quite literally battered, but confident he knew how to make a decent pancake.
* * *
When Will woke up the following morning and shuffled past the kitchen, he paused, frowned, and sniffed the air a couple of times. Shuffling backwards like a moonwalking zombie, he came to a halt in the doorway.
“Morning, mate,” said Danny over his shoulder, his body blocking the hob so Will couldn’t see what he was doing. “Sleep okay?”
Will didn’t respond, too overwhelmed by the sounds and smells that were emanating from the kitchen.
Danny smiled. “Take a seat,” he said. “Le petit déjeuner est prêt.”
Will stared blankly at Danny.
“It means breakfast is ready. It’s French.”
A single nod, but still no movement.
“Look, just go and sit down, okay?”
Will’s confusion only increased when he saw the maple syrup. He knew what it was, and he knew what it was for, but he couldn’t figure out what it was doing on their table. He was still staring at the bottle when Danny emerged from the kitchen with a teetering platter of pancakes. Will looked at the mountain of food, as speechless as a boy who didn’t speak could be.
“What?” said Danny as he put the pancakes down with a thud.
Will looked at the table and turned his palms up.
“I thought it was time for a change,” said Danny. “What do you think?”
Will nodded as if Danny had asked if he wanted a raise in his pocket money.
“Great,” said Danny, disappearing into the kitchen. “One second, let me get the plates.”
He grabbed Will’s Thomas the Tank Engine plate and mug from the drying rack and looked at them in turn. Then, holding them at arm’s length and opening his hands, he dropped them both and watched them shatter against the kitchen floor.
“It was an accident,” he said when Will ran in to see what the commotion was about. “My hands were wet and… they just slipped. I’m so sorry, mate.”