Toast

"I did not let him finish the question. I have spent years telling myself that I did it for his sake."

There was one more call.

I stood at that bench with the tea going cold in my hands and looked at the phone lying face down on the wood, and I did not want to make it. Four calls, four dead ends, and the whole of that grey kitchen filling up with light behind me — and the only person left in the world I had not rung was the one I had been putting off since before the sun came over the mountain.

I bit down on the inside of my lip until I got the taste of it, and it steadied me, the way the coffee had steadied me at that same bench on Saturday, in a life I no longer had any access to.

"It's for Sammy," I said.

Out loud. To nobody. And I picked the phone up and rang my mother.

It went three times and then she had it, and she was already speaking before the line had properly opened, at concert pitch, at an hour when most of Hobart was still in bed.

"Good morning, dear."

And then, without one second in between — before I had drawn a breath, before I had made any sound at all:

"Is Nial home yet?"

And I could not answer her.

I stood in my kitchen with the phone against my ear and my mouth open and I could not get one word out. Because if I said no, then it was a second day. Saturday had been a mistake, a misunderstanding, a man who was late. Sunday was a fact. Sunday was a man who had not come home, and there was no version of that which could be tidied away and put in a drawer — and my mother was standing in her own kitchen in Battery Point with the whole of it hanging on my answer.

The silence went on and on and on.

And I could hear her thinking. Down a telephone line, thirty kilometres away, I could hear the small precise machinery of my mother going over the possibilities and laying them out and turning them over and filing them, and arriving at a conclusion about my marriage before I had said a single word.

"Jenny? Are you there?"

"Umm… yeah." It came out broken in the middle, and I cleared my throat and got it back. "I'm here, Rowena."

"Well?"

And I could see her exactly. Upright in that armchair by the window with the light coming in off the river behind her, one eyebrow up, her mouth doing the thing it did — waiting. My mother had never in her life been given an answer that was good enough, and she had never once stopped asking for one.

I took a breath the way I would have taken one in the wings.

"I wondered if you could look after Sammy for me," I said. "Just for a short while."

And there was a pause.

It went on long enough for me to hear the kettle ticking as it cooled behind me. Long enough for me to be certain that she was about to ask, and that I was going to have to say it — and that if I said it out loud into a telephone I was going to come apart on my own kitchen floor.

And then she spoke, and everything in her voice had changed.

"Of course, dear."

Nothing in it. No edge, no barb, no hook set in the middle of it. Just that.

"You know I'm happy to have the little darling anytime."

And it went through me like a hand round the throat.

Because she meant it. She had always meant it, and in three years there had not been one moment when she did not mean it — and my mother could take the skin off me at forty paces and had done exactly that on my own verandah the night before, and she loved my son without a single reservation, and she was not going to make me ask her twice.

My eyes went. I had to put a hand flat down on the bench.

"I know," I said.

And that was everything I had. Two words. I could not have managed a third.

"I'll be there within the hour," I said, and I hung up on my own mother before she could get her mouth open.

I put the phone down on the bench and stood there.

And then it came up out of me, the whole of it, and I let it. I stood in my own kitchen in a hideous pink dressing gown with the light coming up over the mountain and put both hands across my mouth and cried the way I had not cried since the day my father died.

For about forty seconds.

I gave myself forty seconds and I took every one of them, and then I straightened up and wiped my face with the heels of both hands and pushed my glasses back up my nose.

"Mummy."

He was in the doorway.

Bare feet on the cold boards. Dinosaur pyjamas with the hems dragging. His hair standing straight up on one side of his head and flat as a paddock on the other, his cheeks pink from the bed, one fist up rubbing at his eye.

"Where's—"

And I did not let him finish it.

"Come here, love."

I said it fast, and I said it brightly, and I said it right across the top of him — and he stopped, with his mouth still open on the beginning of his father's name, and he closed it.

I did not do that for him. I have had a very long time to sit with it and I have never once managed to dress it up as anything else. My son stood barefoot in the doorway of my kitchen and asked a question he had every right in the world to ask, and I talked straight over the top of him, and I did it because I could not stand to hear the word.

He came across the kitchen and put his arms up.

And I got down and picked him up, and he weighed nothing at all, and he put his head straight into the side of my neck and left it there — and I stood in my kitchen with my son on my hip and rocked from one foot to the other, the way I had been doing since he was nine days old.

"I've got an exciting day planned for you," I said.

And his head came up off my shoulder so fast that it very nearly caught my jaw.

"Really?"

And that was the whole cost of it. That was the entire price. One sentence — warm, easy, landed on the front foot, the lift on exciting and nothing at all underneath it — and the whole weight of my son changed in my arms.

"Yep."

"What is it? What are we doing?"

He had both hands in my collar and he was practically climbing me.

"You get to spend the morning with Grandma Rowena," I said. "She's so excited to see you."

"Yay! Grandma Rowena is funny!"

And he was off — kicking and squirming and shouting it — and he went down the front of me and hit the floor running and did a whole lap of the kitchen table, and I stood there and let it wash over me.

She was not funny. My mother had never in her life been funny on purpose. But she got down on that Persian carpet in her good trousers and played hide-and-seek with a three-year-old and a Burmese cat, and she pretended not to know where he was when he was standing directly in front of her, and she put her reading glasses on the end of her nose and looked straight past him and said now where has that boy got to — and Mr Darcy sat up on the arm of the chair and watched the pair of them with total contempt. To my son that was the funniest thing that had ever happened to anybody.

"Let's get some breakfast in you first," I said.

He went up onto the chair backwards, the way he always did, on his elbows, and got himself round and sat down and put both elbows on my table and his chin in his hands and looked at me with his eyebrows up, waiting.

"Toast?"

"Yes!"

"Vegemite?"

And I drew it out. I put a doubt into it. I raised one eyebrow at him as though there existed anywhere on this earth the smallest possibility that my son might want something else on his toast.

"Yay!"

He clapped. Both hands, up over his head.

And I made it.

That is all. I made a piece of toast. I got the bread out of the bin and put it in and pushed the lever down, and I got the butter out and the Vegemite and the little knife with the blue handle that was his, and I stood at my own bench and listened to my son swinging his legs against the chair behind me. The toaster ticked. The light came through the window over the sink and laid a long yellow stripe down the middle of my kitchen floor.

And for a minute and a half I was completely all right.

It frightened me afterwards, when I had time to think about it properly. My husband had been gone since the morning before, and my dog was gone, and I had lied to four separate people before breakfast — and I stood at that bench spreading Vegemite right out to the very edges, the way he would only accept it, and I was absolutely fine.

The scrape of the knife. The smell of it coming up. The toast going soft under the butter.

I could have got through very nearly anything that morning as long as there was a piece of toast to be made.

I put the plate down in front of him.

"Thank you, Mummy!"

And he went at it with both hands, and his legs went, and he got the whole of it over his chin.

I sat down opposite him with my tea and watched him eat, and I did the thing I had been doing for two days and could not stop doing.

I looked for his father in him.

The nose. The way it scrunched up when he was concentrating — that was Nial, that was Nial exactly, that was a man standing at the bottom of a paddock measuring a run of fence line with his eyes. The way his whole face crinkled up when he was enjoying something too much to hide it. The shape of his hands. And the way he held a piece of toast with all four fingers underneath it and his thumb laid flat across the top, which was precisely the way his father held a beer, and I had never once told either of them.

My son sat at my kitchen table eating Vegemite toast, and he was made out of a man who was not in the house.

"Mummy, why are you looking at me like that?"

He had stopped chewing. He had the toast up in front of his mouth in both hands, looking straight at me over the top of it, with Vegemite on both cheeks.

And I had been staring. God knows for how long. I had been sitting at my own table staring at my three-year-old with my whole face open and every single thing on it.

I put my hand out and got hold of his curls.

"Just thinking about how much I love you, sweetheart."

Which was true, and was entirely true, and was not one hundredth of what was on my face — and he took it, and put it away, and went back to his toast.

"I love you too, Mummy."

He said it with his mouth full. He said it the way he would have told me it was raining. It was a fact about the world, as ordinary and as unremarkable as the floor, and he did not have the faintest idea what he had just done to me, and he went on eating.

I got up and started packing his bag.

And I did it beautifully. That was what came back to me afterwards — that I did it beautifully. The little red backpack off the hook by the door, and into it went a change of clothes, and the spare jumper because that house was always cold, and his water bottle, and the apple slices in the container with the lid he could get off by himself, and the red car — not any of the other cars — and Teddy, who had been to hospital twice and had one ear and was not to be mentioned at daycare.

Every last thing in its place. Every last thing thought of. My hands went round that kitchen and packed a bag for a child while the rest of me stood off to one side and watched them do it, and there was never a bag packed with more attention in the whole history of the world.

Because it was the only thing left that I could still do properly.

"Are you ready for your adventure with Grandma?" I said.

And I heard it.

I heard it coming out of my own mouth in my own hallway and I stopped dead with my hands on his zip, because I had said that on Saturday. I had said it twice on Saturday — in the doorway with a car seat in front of me and again on my own kerb with a black-windowed car sitting three houses down.

Ready for our big adventure.

Two days. Two days, and I was already repeating myself. I had spent ten years telling girls that the moment they start reaching for a line that worked last time, the audience can smell it — and I was standing in my own hallway doing it to a three-year-old, and he could not smell it, and he never would, and that was the whole trouble.

I got down on my heels in front of him with his coat, and did up the zip, and my hands slowed right down.

The freckles across the bridge of his nose. The dimple that turned up in his left cheek. The little chapped patch at the corner of his mouth that I had been meaning to put something on for a fortnight and had not. I went over the whole of my son's face in that hallway, in a way I had not looked at him in three years, and I did not once stop and ask myself why I was doing it.

"I love you, Sammy."

And I pulled him in.

Hard. Too hard, harder than I meant to, both arms right round him and my face down in his hair — and I held on to my son for a great deal longer than a woman dropping her child at his grandmother's for the morning has any business holding on for.

He did not complain. He put both arms round my neck and hung on.

"I love you too, Mummy."

I got my face up out of his hair and put my forehead against his and made myself smile at him from four inches away.

"You're my brave little adventurer," I said.

And he beamed at me. The whole face, the dimple, the lot of it. And then he was gone, off down the hall at a dead run, shouting something about his shoes.

I stayed where I was for a moment. Then I got up off my knees and went back into the kitchen.

His plate was on the table where he had left it. And there on the edge of it, stacked up in a neat little pile the way he always left them, were the crusts.

Nial ate them. Every single day for two years. He would come through that kitchen doing eight things at once and put his hand down onto that plate without breaking his stride and take the crusts off it and eat them on his way out the door — and Sammy thought it was the height of comedy, and it had become a thing between the two of them, and my son had started stacking them up in a pile on purpose.

He had stacked them that morning. He had done it without thinking about it at all, and then he had gone off down the hall to find his shoes.

I stood at my own kitchen table and picked them up and ate my son's crusts standing over the plate, and my face was going and I did not care, and I got every one of them down.

And then I washed the plate and put it in the rack, and went upstairs to get dressed.