Crumbs and Errands

"Cold toast and maternal guilt—the two constants of family kitchens everywhere."

The kitchen smelled of toast that had gone cold and tea that had been sitting too long. Mum was at the breakfast bar when I came in, her hands wrapped around a cup she wasn't drinking from, her gaze fixed on something in the middle distance that probably wasn't actually there. I knew that look. I'd been seeing it more and more lately — the thousand-yard stare of a woman with too many things on her mind and not enough hours to sort through them.

She didn't look up immediately when I entered, which gave me a moment to study her. The tension in her shoulders. The slight furrow between her brows that had become almost permanent over the past few months. The way her phone sat face-up on the counter beside her, positioned so she could see the screen without picking it up, waiting for a message or call that apparently wasn't coming.

Something was wrong. Not just this morning's awkwardness — something deeper, something that had been building for a while now. I'd noticed it in the way she moved through the house lately, always slightly distracted, always listening for something. Dad's behaviour had been getting worse, his paranoia leaking into every conversation, every family dinner, every decision about the estate. And now whatever was happening with Uncle Jamie had added another weight to a load that was already too heavy.

"Brianne's having a lie-down," I said, announcing my presence. "She's tired."

Mum's eyes focused, found me in the doorway. Something flickered across her face — residual embarrassment, maybe, or the effort of not making a comment she'd regret.

"I imagine she is."

Right. We were doing this, then. I crossed to the breakfast bar, noted the plate of toast sitting there — four slices, two of which had clearly been waiting since before Mum had come upstairs. The butter had congealed into that unappetising solid state that cold toast produced. I grabbed a slice anyway, bit into it. The crunch was loud enough to make me grin.

Mum watched me eat with an expression I couldn't quite read. "There's fresh bread if you want. I can make more."

"This is fine." It wasn't, really — cold toast was nobody's idea of a good breakfast — but making her get up and fuss over the toaster felt wrong somehow. She looked tired. Not just morning-tired, but the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who hadn't been sleeping properly for longer than she'd admit.

I took another bite, chewed, swallowed. The silence stretched between us, filled with all the things neither of us particularly wanted to address. I wasn't going to bring up what she'd walked in on. She, apparently, had other ideas.

"She's six months pregnant, Kain."

I nearly choked on the toast. "I'm aware."

"Is that... safe? At this stage?"

The heat that flooded my face was instantaneous and absolute. There were conversations a man expected to have with his mother over the course of a lifetime, and this was emphatically not one of them. I forced myself to keep chewing, to swallow, to formulate a response that wouldn't make things worse.

"It's fine. We asked the midwife. It's actually..." I stopped, reaching the absolute limit of what I was willing to discuss. "Can we please talk about literally anything else?"

Something shifted in Mum's expression — amusement, maybe, or satisfaction at having made me squirm. She took a sip of her tea, grimaced slightly at whatever temperature it had reached, and set the cup aside.

"There's more toast if you want it. Probably cold by now."

I grabbed another slice, grateful for the change in subject. The food was genuinely terrible — cold, slightly stale, the butter forming an unpleasant film against my teeth — but I ate it with enthusiasm anyway. The morning's activities had left me hungrier than I'd realised, and there was something grounding about the simple act of eating, the mechanical process of chewing and swallowing that didn't require emotional navigation.

Mum watched me demolish the toast with the particular expression she'd been giving me since I was old enough to feed myself — that mixture of mild disgust and resigned affection that mothers of sons seemed to develop as a survival mechanism. I'd seen her give the same look to Dad, back when things between them had been easier. Back before the paranoia had started building walls between him and everyone else in the house.

"I need you to do something for me," she said.

I looked up, wary. "Is this going to be punishment for what you just walked in on? Because I feel like I've suffered enough."

"It's not punishment." She turned her teacup in her hands, a nervous habit I'd watched her develop over years of difficult conversations. Her fingers were slim, capable, the nails trimmed short and practical. No polish — Mum had never been the type for polish. "I need you to go and check on Uncle Jamie."

The request landed strangely, heavier than it should have been. I stopped chewing, studied her face. "Check on him how?"

"Just... go over there. Make sure he's all right." The worry in her voice was undisguised now, that edge I'd learned to recognise as genuine rather than performative. Mum worried about everything — it was practically her job description — but there were levels to her concern, gradations I'd learned to read over twenty-three years of being her son. This was the real thing. "I haven't been able to reach him for a couple of days. He's not answering his phone, not responding to messages. It's not like him."

I thought about Uncle Jamie — Mum's younger brother, quiet and gentle in a way that had always seemed slightly at odds with the Greyson family's more forceful personalities. He'd moved back to Tasmania a decade ago, worked in aged care, lived with his partner Luke in a house in Berriedale that I'd visited maybe half a dozen times. He and Mum were close, as close as siblings with a twelve-year age gap and complicated family history could be. She rang him at least twice a week, sometimes more. For him to go silent for days would feel wrong to her, would trigger all those protective instincts that had been part of her character since before I was born.

"Maybe he's just busy," I offered, though even as I said it, I knew it wouldn't land.

"Maybe." She met my eyes, and I saw the fear she was trying to contain. Not panic, not yet, but the low-grade dread of someone whose mind had started running through worst-case scenarios and couldn't quite stop. "But I'd feel better if someone actually saw him. Talked to him face to face."

I took another bite of toast, using the time to think. Berriedale was a twenty-minute drive, maybe twenty-five with traffic. I'd planned to spend the morning with Brianne, trying to smooth over whatever damage the interrupted morning had done to her mood. There was also the matter of my own frustration with Mum — the intrusion, the embarrassment, the way Brianne's words kept echoing in my head: She calls, you go. She asks, you do.

But looking at Mum now, at the tension in her shoulders and the shadows under her eyes, I couldn't bring myself to refuse. This was what I did. What I'd always done. When Dad retreated into his study and his paranoid calculations, when the girls were absorbed in their own lives and dramas, I was the one who stayed. The one who noticed when Mum was struggling. The one who could still make her laugh on the bad days, who knew how she took her tea, who understood that her fussing was love in disguise even when it drove me mental.

Being the only son meant something in this family. I'd never been able to articulate exactly what, but I felt it in moments like this — the weight of her gaze, the unspoken expectation that I would be the one to help. Not because the girls couldn't or wouldn't, but because this was the shape our relationship had taken over the years, the grooves we'd worn into each other through proximity and shared temperament.

"It's probably fine," I said, but there was a question mark hovering at the end.

"Probably," she agreed. "But I'd like to know for certain."

I finished the last of the toast, brushed the crumbs from my fingers. The kitchen clock showed just past nine — still early, despite everything that had already happened this morning. If I left now, I could be at Uncle Jamie's by half past, have a quick chat, confirm he was alive and well and simply ignoring his phone for whatever reason, and be back before lunch. Brianne would understand. Or she wouldn't, but we'd work through it. We always did.

"All right," I said. "I'll swing by. Check in, make sure he's not dead in a ditch somewhere."

The words were meant as a joke — the kind of dark humour that sometimes helped defuse tension — but Mum's expression made me regret them immediately. Her face went pale, her lips pressing together in a thin line, and I realised with a sick lurch that I'd voiced something she'd been trying very hard not to think about.

"That was a joke. Bad joke. Sorry."

"Thank you." Her voice was steady, but I could hear the effort it took to keep it that way. "Just... let me know what you find. Even if it's nothing. Even if he's perfectly fine and I've been worrying for no reason."

"I will."

I moved towards the door, then paused, remembering Brianne's frustration, the conversation we still needed to have about boundaries and privacy and what it meant to be adults living under his parents' roof.

"And Mum? Maybe next time, wait for an answer before you come in?"

She looked at me, and something shifted in her expression — a flicker of the dry humour I'd grown up with, the wit that could cut through tension when she let it. "Maybe next time, lock your door."

I grinned at that, couldn't help it. The same grin I'd had since I was a kid, the one that showed my dimples and made it impossible for her to stay annoyed at me. "Fair point."

On my way past, I bent to kiss her cheek — a brief thing, automatic, the kind of gesture I'd been making since I was tall enough to reach her without stretching. She smelled of the lavender hand cream she'd used for as long as I could remember, and beneath that, something tired and worried that had no scent but was present nonetheless.

"He's probably fine," I said again, more for her benefit than mine. "You know Uncle Jamie. He probably just lost his phone, or the charger broke, or Luke dragged him off on one of those camping trips he's always talking about."

"Probably," Mum agreed, but the word sounded hollow.

I grabbed my keys from the hook by the door, the familiar weight of them settling into my palm. My car keys, the house keys I rarely used because someone was always home to let me in, the key to the shed where I kept my tools. Ordinary things, objects I handled every day without thinking. They felt heavier this morning, somehow. Weighted with the errand ahead, with Mum's worry, with the lingering sense that something was off in a way I couldn't quite name.

The hallway stretched out before me, lined with portraits of Jeffries ancestors whose names I'd learned as a kid and mostly forgotten since. Great-great-something William, who'd built this place with convict labour and suspicious fortune. His son, and his son's son, and all the generations between then and now, their painted eyes watching as I walked past on my way to check on an uncle who probably just needed a new phone charger.

At the front door, I paused with my hand on the latch. The manor was quiet around me — that particular quality of silence that old houses developed, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. Through the window beside the door, I could see the gardens, the winter-bare trees, the grey sky that promised rain later. An ordinary Thursday morning in July. Nothing remarkable about it.

Except Mum was worried, really worried, in a way that I'd learned to take seriously over the years. And Dad was getting worse, retreating further into whatever dark calculations occupied his mind. And Brianne was upstairs, pregnant with my child, frustrated with our living situation and probably with me. And somewhere in Berriedale, Uncle Jamie wasn't answering his phone.

I opened the door and stepped out into the cold morning air.

The drive to Berriedale wouldn't take long. I'd check on Jamie, put Mum's mind at ease, and be back in time to make things right with Brianne. Simple. Straightforward. The kind of practical problem I knew how to solve.