A Little Normal

“She said we could order anything we wanted, but the words felt like a paper crane—beautiful, delicate, and not made for flying.”

It was nearly sunset when Mum finally said the words I hadn’t realised I’d been waiting to hear: “Let’s go out for dinner.”

The light in the flat had shifted by then—no longer the stark fluorescence of early afternoon, but the golden hush of late day, that fleeting moment when everything is touched by grace. Even the chipped laminate on the benchtop seemed to soften under it, as though the fading sun was trying to make something kinder of the place we’d found ourselves in.

It wasn’t drive-thru this time, or servo pies wrapped in foil that peeled away with the greasy stubbornness of regret. Not the sandwiches we’d eaten out of plastic triangles, half-wilted and curling at the edges, their fillings tasting of fatigue and preservatives. This was going to be real food. At a real table. With menus that you didn’t have to unfold like a map of compromises. With other people around us doing ordinary things like choosing between mains or deciding whether to share a dessert.

It felt like a reward, or a test, or both. Like someone had spun the roulette wheel of our new life and landed, just for once, on something that resembled normal.

We walked. Not far. Two blocks that felt longer than they should have, simply because they were walked without tension, without the usual undercurrent of suspicion or caution. The streets pulsed with Friday evening rhythm—cars idling at lights, the hiss of bus doors, the occasional shout or burst of laughter from clusters of teenagers hanging around like they had no place better to be.

Couples walked hand in hand. Office workers in loosened ties and rumpled skirts spilled out of buildings with takeaway coffees in one hand and phones in the other. The world seemed too large to hold all of it, and yet it did—effortlessly. That was what struck me most: how easy everything looked for everyone else.

The diner Mum led us to was tucked between a bakery that had already closed for the day and a pet shop whose window rabbits were curled into sleepy balls of fluff. The restaurant looked like it had been waiting for us, or people like us, for a long time. Its sign was sun-faded and a little crooked, the fairy lights in the window blinking without urgency. Inside, everything was warm and slightly worn—vinyl booths with the shine rubbed off at the edges, menus laminated so many times the corners were thick and soft like frayed cards.

A man in a flour-dusted apron greeted us like he knew us, though of course he didn’t. There was a weariness to him too, but the kind that comes from long days rather than long fears. He waved us toward a booth near the window, where the view of the street offered something close to magic.

I slid into the seat and pressed my palm flat against the cool glass, half expecting it to fog beneath my touch. Outside, a girl laughed and clutched the handlebars of her bike while her brother, maybe, balanced a chip on his tongue. A man with a soft-looking dog stopped to tie his shoe. A musician strummed half-heartedly near the bus shelter, his guitar case open to the world, coins twinkling like fallen stars.

It was a window into a world where nothing terrible had just happened.

Mum sat opposite me, her coat still on, like mine. Mack took the outside edge of the bench, angling himself slightly so he could keep an eye on the door, on the kitchen, on everything. His posture was casual enough to pass for relaxed, but I could see the tightness in his shoulders.

The smells inside the diner wrapped around us like a heavy blanket—bread and heat and the sweet burn of frying onions. The air conditioning unit let out a shuddering clunk, but nobody looked up. It was part of the place, the way everything was. Flawed, functional, familiar.

I kept my coat zipped up to my chin, even though I was warm now. Too warm, really. But taking it off would mean admitting I felt safe. That I believed we might be staying. And I didn’t. Not yet.

Mum opened a menu but didn’t read it. She stared at the pages like they might spell out a better version of our lives, one where she didn’t have to lie or run or fold tea towels just to keep her hands busy. Her lips moved slightly as if rehearsing a sentence she hadn’t found the courage to speak aloud.

And for the first time in days, I let myself believe—just a little—that we might make it through the evening without something falling apart. That maybe, for one meal, we could be like the families in the booth behind us, arguing softly over sauces and drink refills. Maybe, just for now, the world would hold still.

Mum slid into the booth across from me, taking the seat beside Mack with a kind of controlled ease that might have passed for casual if you weren’t paying attention. But I was. I noticed the way her shoulders remained slightly lifted, as though she couldn’t quite let them drop. I noticed how her eyes kept drifting toward the window—quick, flickering glances that scanned the street beyond as if she were expecting someone to appear out of the dusk. Or maybe hoping no one would.

When she smiled and told us we could order whatever we wanted, the words landed like a strange kind of kindness—too soft around the edges, too polished. “Anything you want,” she said, and I heard the plea inside it. Not a bribe exactly, but something close. Like she was trying to buy back something she'd lost and couldn’t name.

“Anything?” I asked, not because I didn’t understand, but because lately words had started to mean less than they used to. 'Anything' had been gradually hollowed out, replaced with compromises and detours and meals that came in paper bags.

“Anything you want, sweetheart,” she repeated, and her smile stretched wider than it should have, like she’d borrowed it from someone more certain.

So I ordered pancakes—proper pancakes this time, the thick kind that hold their warmth and taste like mornings that start late and come with cartoons and pyjamas. I asked for them with sliced banana and golden syrup and a mountain of whipped cream, because I needed this version of pancakes to be different from the others, needed them to live up to their name and not taste like disappointment.

Mack asked for chips with gravy, said it like it was the most sensible decision in the world. He barely glanced at the menu, like he knew what he wanted before he even sat down. There was something comforting about that—a kind of small certainty that I hadn’t seen in him for days. He leaned his elbows on the table and folded his hands together in front of him like someone bracing for an answer, even though no one had asked a question.

Mum didn’t order right away. The waiter—barely older than a teenager, with a kind face that looked like he’d learned to be gentle around fragile things—hovered beside her with his pen poised. The silence stretched, and still she didn’t look up from the menu. I watched her hands instead. One finger tapped against the plastic laminate in a tiny, repetitive rhythm, while the other hand clutched the edge of the table like she was holding herself in place.

Eventually, when it became clear he wasn’t going to walk away without something to write down, she said, “Just tea, thanks,” in a voice that sounded like it was made of tissue paper. Soft and thin and easily torn.

I don’t think she even registered what kind of tea. She just needed something warm to hold.

The table was sticky with years of other people’s dinners, and I could feel the faint tack of it against my sleeves every time I moved. But I didn’t mind. I drew faces in the condensation from my water glass, letting my finger trail through the moisture and curve smiles onto circles. I named each one, quietly in my head—Gregory, Pip, Bananahead. The third looked vaguely like Charlie if I squinted. That made something ache beneath my ribs, but it was the kind of ache I didn’t mind. It reminded me I still had room to miss her.

Mum wasn’t watching me. She was staring out the window again, eyes turned not to the street but to something further away, something I couldn’t see. Her lips were parted slightly like she might speak, but nothing came. Just that blank, searching expression I’d seen more and more lately—like she was reading invisible signs, trying to decode some secret message written across the evening light.

Then her gaze shifted. Locked on something.

A shop across the road—a little clothing boutique with a red SALE sign slapped across the glass and a jumble of mismatched jumpers hanging on a metal rack outside. They flapped in the breeze like someone’s laundry left out too long. Colours clashed: teal, mustard, something violently coral. Hideous and hopeful in equal measure.

Whatever it was about them, something in that sight snapped her attention back into her body. She straightened. Her movements became decisive again, like a switch had been flipped.

“Back in a second,” she said, already pushing herself out of the booth. She left her handbag behind but took her phone, and I wasn’t sure if that was a sign of trust or habit. The bell over the diner door jingled faintly as she exited, swallowed almost immediately by the steady noise of traffic and voices and the low hum of the city settling in for night.

I watched her go, and for just a moment, I wished she would turn around and catch my eye through the window. Just to let me know that she hadn’t forgotten we were here, that this was still about us, not just whatever burden she kept shouldering alone.

But she didn’t.

She crossed the street with her head slightly bowed, as if trying to look like someone who belonged, someone who could blend in among the ordinary people doing ordinary things on an ordinary evening.

And I wondered—if she went into that shop and didn’t come back, would I go in after her?

Or would I just sit here, staring at the rack of jumpers that waved in the dusk like bright, woolly flags, waiting for a signal that might never come?

She was gone for perhaps five minutes—just long enough for me to finish decorating the table with a fresh gallery of watery faces, each one more abstract than the last.

When the bell above the door jingled again and Mum reappeared, I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t realised had tightened in her absence. She was carrying a small plastic shopping bag with handles stretched slightly from the weight of something soft inside. It made that distinct rustling sound of brand new plastic—thin and bright and oddly hopeful, like the sound of birthday presents before the paper is torn.

“For you,” she said, placing the bag in front of me like it was a ceremonial offering, her hands lingering a second too long on the edge of the table. Her voice was gentle, but there was something behind it—some deeper undercurrent of feeling she hadn’t decided whether to show or hide.

I pulled the bag towards me and opened it with slow fingers, not because I didn’t want what was inside, but because I wanted to make the moment last. Inside was a jumper—soft purple cotton, still holding the faint scent of the shop it came from, folded as neatly as a display item. Across the front, in sparkly silver letters, it said DREAMER, the letters slightly raised and glittering in the diner's low light like stars on fabric.

It was the kind of jumper I would’ve picked out for myself if we’d been shopping on a normal day, in a normal life, where we browsed for things because they were pretty and not because we needed them or because someone felt guilty or afraid.

I touched the letters. The glitter didn’t come off on my fingers, which seemed like a small but significant miracle.

“Why?” I asked quietly, tracing the curve of the ‘D’ with my nail. The question came out without me meaning it to, shaped by more than just curiosity. I wasn’t asking about the jumper, not really. I was asking about the moment, the gesture, the sudden softness.

“Because you’ve been brave,” she said, her voice low and even. She looked straight at me when she said it, and her eyes were tired, but not cloudy—not hiding, for once. The words didn’t feel like praise or comfort exactly; they felt like recognition. Like she’d seen something in me that she couldn’t name but wanted to honour anyway.

My throat tightened. Not in a crying way—more like something warm had caught me by surprise. The jumper was lovely, yes, but it was also proof that she still saw me. That in all the running and hiding and worrying, I hadn’t disappeared completely from her view.

I glanced over at Mack, expecting some comment. Maybe something teasing but kind, the way he used to do when we got birthday presents or good report cards. But he didn’t say anything. His eyes stayed on the table.

And yet, even in his silence, there was a kind of understanding between us—an unspoken awareness that this wasn’t just about a jumper. Mum wasn’t just giving me something to wear. She was saying something without saying it. About love. About guilt. About what she could give us now when everything else was slipping out of her hands.

Mack didn’t need to explain his silence, and I didn’t need to ask. I pulled the jumper from the bag and slipped it over my head right there in the booth, letting the soft fabric settle around me like armour made of care.

It fit perfectly.

When my pancakes arrived, they were everything I’d hoped for and something more besides—like they’d been made not just by someone who knew how to cook, but by someone who understood what it meant to need comfort. They came stacked three high, golden and gently steaming, the edges just crisp enough to catch the syrup in small, crunchy ridges. The banana slices had been arranged in neat concentric circles, their pale centres glossy with glaze, and the whipped cream—fluffed like a cloud—was already beginning to collapse into the warm pool of amber syrup that spread slowly across the plate like a sunrise.

I took my time. I used the side of my fork to cut delicate bites and let each one sit on my tongue for a moment before chewing, drawing the flavours out like they were secrets I needed to learn by heart. They tasted like the breakfasts we used to have when everything was still okay. When Sunday mornings meant cartoons and Mum in her dressing gown making pancakes while the kettle boiled and the dog barked at birds in the garden.

These tasted like memory and make-believe in equal measure. Like how I imagined joy might feel if it came in edible form.

Mack didn’t rush his food either. He worked through his chips like someone doing a task that required focus—quiet and thorough, dipping each one into the pool of gravy with slow precision, then eating it like it was his last. I could tell he was still watching Mum, even though he hadn’t said much since she gave me the jumper. Watching the way her fingers curled around her mug, the way her eyes flicked up to the window, then down to her phone, then back again, like she was scanning through three versions of reality and couldn’t decide which one was safe.

The mug she drank from had a chip in the rim, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe she liked it that way—imperfect, usable, real. She cradled it in both hands like the heat from the tea was the only warmth she could trust, and even then, her phone never left her palm. She kept it face-down on the table but touched it every so often, as if to remind herself that it was still there. Still charged. Still connected. Still capable of delivering news—good or bad—at any moment.

It sat between us like a loaded weapon no one was acknowledging.

After we’d eaten—after I’d scraped every last sticky trace of syrup from the plate, and Mack had finished his final chip, and Mum had drained her mug to the dregs without noticing—the three of us stood slowly, like people not quite ready to go back to where they’d come from.

We walked home through a city that seemed to shimmer under its own artificial stars—streetlights and signage and headlights playing off windshields and shopfronts, giving everything a kind of silvery halo. It was the kind of urban night that didn’t belong to anyone in particular. Anonymous and alive, it wrapped around us like a thin blanket—just warm enough to pretend it offered comfort, just thin enough that we all felt the cold anyway.

Mum held my hand the whole way back. Not loose, not casual, not like before when it was just about safety from traffic. This grip was tight, possessive almost, like she needed to feel the pulse of me beneath her fingers to remind herself I was still real. Still here.

Her fingers were cold and tense, and I could feel the tiny tremors in them—the flutter of muscles that didn’t know how to unclench anymore. I didn’t pull away, even when it hurt a little. I let her hold on. Because I understood that she wasn’t holding my hand for me. She was doing it so she didn’t fall apart.

Back at the flat, the hallway smelled exactly the same—bleach and floor polish trying and failing to mask the mildew. But it didn’t matter. The warmth from dinner still lingered somewhere in my chest, and the new jumper felt soft and snug against my skin. I imagined its glittery letters glowing in the dark: DREAMER.

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow we’ll go to Aunty Amelia’s. Tomorrow the running will stop and the questions will have answers. Tomorrow we’ll be able to breathe like people who belong somewhere again.

I wanted to believe it.

But somewhere deep inside—somewhere below the syrup and softness and small borrowed hope—I felt the truth shifting like a shadow I couldn’t outrun.

This didn’t feel like the beginning of something.

It felt like a goodbye disguised as an ordinary night.