“You have never told me that before,” said Ellen. She was aware that her heart rate was up. Just slightly. “Never.”
“I’m sorry, I thought I had,” said Patrick. “Anyway, doesn’t matter—”
“You’ve never mentioned it,” said Ellen. There was no way in the world that she would forget something like that. She was a woman. She was Ellen. She might have forgotten what model car he drove, or what football team he followed, but she would not have forgotten that he visited his dead wife’s grave and family every month.
“It doesn’t matter,” began Patrick again.
“It does matter,” said Ellen. “You’ve never mentioned this before. I know. I would have remembered.”
“I didn’t say I had mentioned it. I thought I had mentioned it,” said Patrick. “Obviously I didn’t. But it really—”
“When?” said Ellen. “When did you think you had mentioned it?”
The crumpets popped up. Patrick went to lift them from the toaster and burned the tips of his fingers.
“Ow. Look, I don’t know. I genuinely thought I had!”
“You didn’t.” Ellen knew she was being horrible.
“Fine! I forgot to mention it. I’m sorry. Can we let it go now?”
“I can’t stand it when you say that!” said Ellen, and it immediately struck her that he’d never said it before. It was Edward who used to say that. “Can we just let it go?” he’d say, in that exact same exhausted tone. It was amazing how that long-lost memory had somehow floated to the surface of her consciousness after all this time.
“You can’t stand it when I say what?” Patrick looked taken aback.
“Nothing,” said Ellen. “Sorry.”
She wondered if he’d deliberately, or subconsciously, avoided mentioning Colleen too much before they were engaged. She’d noticed that ever since she’d accepted his proposal, her name had been cropping up more often. Just the other day, he’d walked by the laundry when she was putting in the laundry power and commented that Colleen had always said it was a good idea to put the laundry powder into the machine before the clothes so that it was fully dissolved or something. She’d felt a tremor of irritation. It seemed that Colleen had been something of a domestic goddess. She also sewed. One of the boxes in the hallway said “Sewing Machine.” “Colleen made her own wedding dress on that machine,” Patrick had said when Ellen asked him about it. “Well, I won’t be making my own dress,” Ellen had said lightly, “I can’t even thread a needle,” and Patrick had said, “Oh, no, I wouldn’t expect you to.” Which had somehow made Ellen feel he was really saying, “Of course I wouldn’t expect you to ever be as extraordinary as Colleen.”
Bloody beautiful blond-haired laundry-powder-dissolving Colleen.
“So, anyway, I thought now that we’re engaged and with the baby and everything.” Patrick cleared his throat and didn’t quite look at her. “I thought maybe you could come along and meet them this Sunday?”
Ellen took a deep, soothing breath. This was important to him. He was nervous about asking her.
“Well, that would be nice, but I can’t this Sunday,” she said. “I’m having lunch with Mum and with—my father. I’m meeting him for the first time, remember?”
Patrick had been excited about the sudden appearance in Ellen’s life of a father. They’d talked about it at length, wondering together what he would be like (would there be a resemblance to Ellen?), wondering how he must be feeling, the strangeness of it, the awkwardness of it, the weirdness of Anne’s behavior.
“Oh, of course,” said Patrick now, frowning, as he buttered the crumpets with far too much butter. “I’d forgotten. Could you change that, do you think? Meet him for dinner instead?”
She didn’t want to change it to dinner. Dinner was more intimate, more formal, more momentous. Lunch was just right. Light and breezy. “Hi, Dad, nice to meet you!” And she didn’t want to go through all the bother of changing it anyway. Her mother would have a fit. Ellen had never seen her so tightly wound up about anything (and that was saying something, because her mother’s natural state was uptight), as if everything depended on this one event going right. There had been a lot of uncharacteristic dithering about the choice of venue. A restaurant had been booked and then canceled. Another restaurant had been chosen and then discarded because she couldn’t get a table with a view. When she’d finally settled on a Malaysian restaurant, she’d confirmed and reconfirmed the time and place with Ellen. Pip and Mel were on tenterhooks. Ellen’s friends were demanding immediate updates as soon as she got home. She couldn’t just casually change it.
“This lunch is a really big deal for me,” said Ellen.
“I know it is,” said Patrick. He came and sat down next to her, placing the plate of crumpets on the table. He gave her a pleading look. “But your dad wouldn’t mind if you changed the time, would he? What about Saturday instead?”
“Your dad.” His very choice of words showed that he didn’t understand the enormity of this meeting. She wasn’t just having lunch with “her dad” in the same casual way that he would have lunch at the local shopping center with his own sweet father.
“Well, why can’t you change your lunch with Colleen’s family?” Ellen kept her voice neutral and pleasant. This should be easy. This was just negotiating timing. This was the sort of thing that might lead to conflict with other couples but not with someone as emotionally evolved as her.
Patrick winced and scratched the side of his jaw. “It’s just that this is when we always meet. The last Sunday of the month. Even when Colleen was alive. It’s a tradition. It’s never changed. Her parents are quite old and conservative—they like things done a certain way. Also, I sort of—”
He looked shamefaced and put down his crumpet.
“I sort of told them you were coming. This is huge for them. It’s huge for me. I’ve never introduced another woman to them. It will be hard for them—they’ll feel like you’re replacing Colleen. They’re still grieving, of course. You never get over the loss of a child. But they’re really keen to meet you! Millie said, ‘Ellen is going to be a part of Jack’s life, so we want her to be a part of our life too.’”