have what it took to be good at it. The mother thing.
Loud hellos from Alan and goodnights from the girls to their dad, the two ships nearly passing in the night. And then a knock on my door, his door. Alan stuck his head into the room. He crinkled a grey monobrow at me. (Has it been that long since I last saw him? That mono is new, I’m sure. Had Di been waxing it before?)
“Can I come in?” he asked. I guessed he meant Just quickly, before Di comes.
Somehow LSDoK were off limits to Alan after he and Di’s thing, after his fling, and so I hadn’t seen him in a while. Two nights I’d spent in his home and we hadn’t even been allowed to bump into each other. On my nod, his stripy shirtsleeves and then the rest of his body crept quickly around the door into the room. The collar of his shirt was loose around his neck; the past year must have taken some weight.
“Di told me what happened, Kari. I’m really very sorry. And about your gran, obviously.” He shoved his hands halfway into his pockets, hairy bits poking out the top. (Jeez, did Di used to wax the man everywhere?) He looked like a big pregnant woman trying to hold up her belly, standing there, except there was no baby, just the bulge of his too-big shirt. Looking at his feet, he worked one toe against the skirting, leaving a little black mark. Di would notice tomorrow.
“Men and women. We can be so stupid, sometimes we don’t think. We don’t know what we have. We take it for granted.” He said this into his moustache. (No, but seriously, how have I not noticed before how hairy Alan is?) “Maybe Di will kill me for saying it . . . but give Dirk a small chance? See what he does with it? Mistakes, even big ones, can happen to anyone. Even to you. None of us are perfect.” His eyes were red and shiny when he did look up, but he didn’t say anything more. He just smiled a straight-line smile that dimpled his cheeks but didn’t crinkle his eyes. And then he was gone. I didn’t have a chance to answer him. I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway.
I could never have done what Dirk did was all that sat in my head.
I didn’t answer Dirk either.
10:30 PM: Di says I should give you some space, that you will ring when you are ready. I will try. Love you x
Ready. Today I couldn’t leave Di’s guest bed. I was about as far from ready as it got.
11
06:30 AM Dirk: Hi, just saying Good Morning, hope your day is all right. Love you x
Hell.
Yesterday was Cry On Di Monday. Today had to be Move My Ass Tuesday. I tried my best impersonation of a reasonably functioning human being. It didn’t get off to a good start: the morning alone was an absolutely unbelievable shocker. A slow-moving slug of a shocker. Anyone who saw me get dressed, eat breakfast and drag my heels at every opportunity would’ve put money on me never getting into my car and making it to the other side.
I felt sorry for Di. There she was with the already triple whammy of getting me and Sarah and Kate out the door, which made cheering a snail race along look fast paced. That by itself would’ve been hard for anyone. But Alan! Alan was the revelation. He seemed to have stepped off Love Boat, happy and singing and trying to touch Di – ever so casually – at every chance the shared deck space of the kitchen would allow. The girls and I were so entranced that it took a while to register that Di didn’t once roll her eyes at her captain. She didn’t once lean away from his accidental-on-purpose touches. She seemed to be liking it!
This curiosity only made the girls and me even slower snails as we spied on the strangeness.
“Alan! Please, you’re in my way!” Mock outrage in Di’s voice didn’t match her eyes and didn’t have any impact on Alan. Other times I’d seen him actually run from the room when Di so much as waved him away. Would Dirk and I be like that, like Di and Alan – sort of all right but not really? Would we be able to forget Eva?
“Mom, can we have pizza after school?” asked Kate, coming out of the fog and guessing that the moment for milking was upon her, what with Di clearly dazed and disorientated.
“Okay. At the mall?” said Di, in the middle of another fake side-step with Alan.
Di’s eldest had bright teenage years ahead.
It dawned on me that my guest appearance in the Bartlett Barney show had helped Alan motivate for an upgrade from guest room to master suite. Like his daughter, he had known when to seize the moment. Silver linings and all that, as Ouma used to remind me.
Di says I should try to stay positive.
“At least you don’t have to sit in any traffic. Watch people pick their noses in the car next to you,” she said. “That would make anyone depressed.”
I grunted into my bowl of cream soda Oatees. She was right, though. If I’d had to watch others also deal with workday blues today I would have died. Well, okay, I probably would have just kept sitting and then screamed I don’t want to go! a little more in my head every time my car was forced to move a metre. But no traffic.
“And Owen will be there,” Di said, finally throwing Owen under the bus. She knew that was the silver lining that would get me out of her house. Owen would be there.
Owen is the main thing that’s great about my job. At first LSD thought it weird that I became tight with a guy who is not my husband or my boyfriend. Maybe they were right, but now they all know him and it’s LSDoK, so no one says anything about it any more. It’s not like I love him or anything, not in that way. It’s just so easy to be friends with Owen. Maybe it’s ’cause he is a man but he’s so low maintenance. We don’t have to WhatsApp a million times a day to stay friends. There’s no drama like with Lily. Much as I love Lily, we can wind each other up sometimes. With him, there’s No PMS Ever. I can’t imagine working with Lily or Shelley or even Di, but Owen and I never get on each other’s nerves. And that’s saying something, since it’s mostly just the two of us in the office all day, unless Julia comes to help out. Steve and the Joburg boys stay in Joburg where they like it, and where we like them.
My job isn’t my passion, like the magazines say work should be, but I don’t think I have a passion in any case. Doesn’t bother me though. I like work enough; there’s plenty that I can do, Owen to talk to, time left over to do UNISA assignments if I ever bring myself to register for those gazillion courses I still need. But even if I’d wanted to bail on work today, I couldn’t. Apart from all the effort Di would’ve wasted in getting me to look normal, there was a developer deadline that had suffered from my Valentine’s apocalypse. Owen would be knee deep.
“Yes, you’re right. I have to go.”
Crossing the road from Beach View Estate to Beach View Development took a minor miracle but I did it.
“Morning, Kari, glad to see you,” Owen said with the same everyday grin, handing over the files in the same everyday way. He made being at work simple. He was exactly as I knew he would be. There was no drama, no sympathy, no offer of coffee or a chat or a sandwich or an afternoon off. All normal. Not even fake normal. He expected me to get on with it. And I did. Just slower. Much, much slower.
By the afternoon I had finished only half of the developer sales paperwork Owen needed. He is the best salesman I’ve come across. He talks, but he lets the clients talk more. They talk about their lives and their wives and their children and their cars. They love him for listening. And when he says ridiculous sales stuff in a way that they know he is making fun of it, they laugh
