‘You promised on Grandma’s grave that you wouldn’t buy another recipe book! You don’t cook! You don’t have a gluten allergy!’ Why did her voice tremble with rage when she never expected those melodramatic promises to be kept?
‘I made no such promise!’ said her mother, and she dropped the baby voice and had the audacity to respond to Erika’s rage with her own. ‘And as a matter of fact, I have been suffering quite dreadful bloating lately. I have gluten intolerance, thank you very much. Excuse me for worrying about my health.’
Do not engage. Remove yourself from the emotional minefield. This was why she was investing thousands of dollars in therapy, for exactly this situation.
‘All right then, well, Mum, it was nice talking to you,’ said Erika rapidly, without giving her mother a chance to speak, as if she were a telemarketer, ‘but I’m at work, so I have to go now. I’ll talk to you later.’ She hung up before her mother could speak and dropped the phone in her lap.
The cab driver’s shoulders were conspicuously still against his beaded seat cover, only his hands moving on the bottom of the steering wheel, pretending that he hadn’t been listening in. What sort of daughter refuses to go to her mother’s house? What sort of daughter speaks with such ferocity to her mother about buying a new recipe book?
She blinked hard.
Her phone rang again, and she jumped so violently it nearly slid off her lap. It would be her mother again, ringing to shout abuse.
But it wasn’t her mother. It was Oliver.
‘Hi,’ she said, and nearly cried with relief at the sound of his voice. ‘Just had a fun phone call with Mum. She wanted us to go over for lunch on Sunday.’
‘We’re not due there until next month, are we?’ said Oliver.
‘No,’ said Erika. ‘She was pushing her boundaries.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yep.’ She ran a fingertip under her eyes. ‘Fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Just put her straight out of your mind,’ said Oliver. ‘Hey, did you go to Clementine’s talk at that library out in wherever it was?’
Erika tipped back her head against the seat and closed her eyes. Dammit. Of course. That’s why he was calling. Clementine. The plan had been that she would chat to Clementine after her talk, while they had coffee. Oliver hadn’t been overly interested in Erika’s motivation for attending Clementine’s talk. He didn’t understand her obsessive desire to fill in the blank spots of her memory. He found it irrelevant, almost silly. ‘Believe me, you’ve remembered everything you’re ever going to remember,’ he’d said. (His lips went thin, his eyes hard on the words ‘Believe me’. Just a little flash of pain he could never quite repress, and that he would probably deny feeling.) ‘Blank spots are par for the course when you drink too much.’ They weren’t par for her course. But Oliver had seen this as the perfect opportunity to talk to Clementine, to finally pin her down.
She should have let him go to voicemail too.
‘I did,’ she said. ‘But I left halfway through. I didn’t feel well.’
‘So you didn’t get to talk to Clementine?’ said Oliver. She could hear him doing his best to conceal his frustration.
‘Not today,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m just finding the right time. The food court wouldn’t have been the best spot anyway.’
‘I’m just looking at my diary. It has been two months now since the barbeque. I don’t think it’s offensive or insensitive, or whatever, to just ask the question. Just ring her up. It doesn’t need to be face to face.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ said Oliver. ‘This is difficult. It’s not your fault.’
‘It was my fault we went to the barbeque in the first place,’ she said. Oliver wouldn’t absolve her of that. He was too accurate. They’d always had that in common: a passion for accuracy.
The cabbie slammed on the brake. ‘Ya bloody idiot driver! Ya bloody goose!’ Erika put her hand flat against the front seat to brace herself as Oliver said, ‘That’s not relevant.’
‘It’s relevant to me,’ she said. Her phone beeped to let her know another call was coming through. It would be her mother. The fact that it had taken her a couple of minutes to call back meant that she’d chosen tears over abuse. Tears took longer.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say about that, Erika,’ said Oliver worriedly. He thought there was an actual correct response. An answer at the back of the book. He thought there was a secret set of relationship rules that she must know, because she was the woman, and she was deliberately withholding them. ‘Just … will you talk to Clementine?’ he said.
‘I’ll talk to Clementine,’ said Erika. ‘See you tonight.’