Fox straightens. “Right, let’s give you a hand.” He pulls a spoon from the drawer beneath the counter and starts scooping up perfect ovals of butter. Fox knows every inch of this hotel. From knowing the exact amount of butter needed to fill one dish in one drag of a spoon, to knowing the time Sol, the chef, prefers the mint to be added to the home-churned ice cream, to how to operate the ancient, round-the-houses reception system on Rosie’s computer. I long to be as at home, somewhere, as Fox is at the Clarice. To feel like yes, this is exactly where I belong.
“Thanks, Fox,” I say.
He looks up at me and smiles. “So, are you still needing to leave at five today?”
“Yeah,” I say, “if that’s okay.”
“Sure.” Fox nods. “Off anywhere nice?”
“Meeting a friend. She travels a lot and she’s local.”
“Ah. Sounds grand.”
It’s easier to lie, I’ve found. If I’d said that I was going to visit my mum, someone I have barely mentioned the entire time I’ve worked here, in the many coffee and lunch breaks I’ve spent with Fox, questions would have come, and I’m never comfortable answering them. Plus, the dread I feel before seeing her, that breaks out of my stomach now, like weighted butterflies, as I stand here, hours from it, can usually be read on my face. I’m not sure what I dread exactly, but I always make my way to see Mum with a churning stomach and stiff shoulders. “What happened, love? World that terrible and ugly, is it?” a passing man had chuckled the last time I stood at the bus stop on my way to meet her, and when I’d texted Lucas and told him, he’d said, “You should have said, ‘It is with you in it, mate, yeah.’ ”
“You seem all right, you know, about this wedding business,” Fox says now. “Considering.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I wish I could say I was, but I’m not.”
Fox nods wordlessly, hands all the time spooning and pressing. “Anyone would find something like this tough, Emmie. And everything else aside: your best friend is getting married. It’s hard enough when there are no feelings like yours, believe me.”
“Really?”
Fox’s eyes widen and he nods rapidly. “God, yes. Nobody says it, of course, it’s all ‘I’m so excited; I’m so happy for you!’ But deep down, every friend is thinking ‘Shit. Everything’s changing. I’m going to lose my mate to this person who could absolutely be a total and utter bastard. And I’ve got to smile throughout it while I let them go into the arms of a potential monster. And what does that mean for us?’ Poke writing a speech, I would actually like to spend my time having an existential crisis in peace, thank you very much.”
I look up at him and laugh. And it feels nice to smile; really smile. “Thank you, Fox. That helps. It really does.”
“I’m glad,” he says.
“And you’re right,” I tell him, my voice rising to be heard over the loud clatter of plates being removed from the dishwasher on the other side of the kitchen. “It’s just that it feels… wrong. Like, this isn’t how it was meant to be. That something somewhere missed the boat. Forgot.”
“What, like fate? The universe?”
Heat creeps up my neck at those words, but still I shrug, give a weak nod. “I guess. I don’t know. Because at the same time, I feel like I’ve been delusional. Stupid. For even thinking for a moment that he could see me like that.” I stop. A lump has gathered in my throat. I can’t bring myself to voice another word. I don’t want to cry at work. The last time someone did, it was gossiped about so much that it may as well have been added to the staff newsletter, along with the bulletin about the misuse of sanitary waste bins and Chef Sam’s Custard Bathtub Charity Fund-Raiser.
“Look,” says Fox simply, his hands stopping to rest on the counter. “You both met in such a grandiose, serendipitous way. You let go of a balloon and he found it, an ocean away. It’s exceptional. And I defy anyone to meet someone in that way and not attach meaning to it.”
I nod, eyes on the counter.
“So do not feel stupid for a second.” There’s a pause as Fox pushes the lid on the giant pot of margarine. “Emmie? Are you okay?”
I look up to meet his eyes. Soft, the color of chestnuts. “Not really,” I tell him. “But I will be. Plus,” I say, “Rosie feels sorry for me, which means I’ll probably get cake from her mum for at least a week. There’s always a silver lining.”
Fox gives a chuckle, stands tall. “One day I’ll get honey cake.”
I smile at him. “You know she loves you.”
“Yes,” says Fox, folding his arms across his chest. “In a way you love that grumpy grandfather you only wish would ask you to euthanize him.”
“Oh, Fox, don’t be daft,” I say. “An uncle. I see you as more of an uncle.”
The last time I went inside Mum’s camper van was over fourteen years ago. It was the September after the Summer Ball, and the day after it broke out that it was me—that I was the girl that got Mr. Morgan suspended. Mum was due to leave for Edinburgh for a festival, then to Skye to meet a friend, and after school I’d walked in on her packing in the tiny lounge of our flat, and collapsed in the doorway, hysterically whimpering and shuddering in a heap, too far gone for a single tear to come. She hadn’t moved, told me coldly to pack a bag, and the next day I’d gone to Edinburgh with her, in her van, where I spent the whole time feeling like an inconvenience—like an old relative who had nowhere else to go. Three weeks later, Lucas’s first email finally found me, like a searchlight in a storm. I found your balloon on a beach near Boulogne-sur-Mer yesterday, it said. It made it one ocean and over 100 miles!
Tonight, I find the van parked up at the far end of the Maypole Folk Festival, beside a small white gazebo, shrouded in the thick, warm smell of hot dogs and incense. There is rust around the wheel arches now, and the seal around the window dangles loosely, unstuck with age, but like seventies wedding presents, like elderly neighbors, the van is one of those things that just keeps going. I’m not sure Mum would ever get rid of it unless it conked out altogether. She’s like that. Not so much a hoarder, but someone who frowns upon buying new things where it isn’t warranted (cigarettes being an exception, of course). Even the ex-pub chalkboard is the same one she has always had, cloudy with how many times it’s been written on and erased. Today there are fresh looping letters scrawled upon it in yellow chalk: Katherine Blue at the The Maypole Festival. Tarot Card Reading: £15.00.
“Mum?” I tap on the van’s window. A strip of yellow light seeps through a tiny crack in the drawn curtains—beige, covered in painted pink roses.
I knock again, twice, when the rusty door clicks and slides across. Mum sits there, tea in her lap, book over her knee, marking her place, and her arm stretched across the seat, fingers on the door handle. “Oh,” she says, the smile on her pale lips there, but only just. “Emmeline.”
“Hi,” I say. She is the only person who calls me Emmeline now, but it no longer makes me wince. “Taking a tea break?”