“She might prefer a bit of meat,” I say. “Don’t you have some chicken breast or something in the fridge?”
“If she’s really hungry, she’ll eat it,” Dad says, a horribly familiar refrain from my youth.
“Shall I at least slice it up?”
He looks at me. “And tuck a napkin in her collar too?”
Gag
I sit cross-legged beside Hazelnut, who is sprawled in front of the oven, and ruffle her fur.
“So, the dog.”
“What about it?”
“Come on, Dad.”
He nods in defeat, swallows the end of a mug of tea. “It was in the garden. I went out to investigate and it got into the house.”
I look at Hazelnut lying on her side. She doesn’t look capable of swift action.
“Have you told the thingies yet — the Thompsons?”
He tuts, lowers his voice. “Odd people. What’s the one worse than vegetarian?”
“Vegan?”
“Precisely. She’s all right, but he’s a bit…odd. Calls himself a poet. Came round selling copies of a book he published, wrote our names in the cover without asking. Mum thinks it’s so we can’t take it to the thrift shop.”
“Are they any good, the poems?” I ask.
He wrinkles his nose. “I looked at one or two, but couldn’t make them out at all.”
“I think you should phone and let them know you have their dog.”
Dad slides a hand into the apron pocket, frowns, pulls out a tiny strip of paper, squints at it, feels in his shirt pocket for his glasses, which aren’t there, so holds it at arm’s length. “ ‘It looks like…’ ” he reads. His frown deepens. “ ‘Rain dear’?” He stares at me. “What does that mean?”
“Turn it over? I think it must be from a Christmas cracker.”
Presumably the last Christmas we celebrated together, pre-rift, pre-cruise, just the three of us and a turkey we called, for reasons I can’t remember now, Roy: so enormous he made our little gathering seem even smaller by contrast. Roy was still cropping up in soups and stir-fries when I visited well into April, thanks to Dad’s thrifty freezing.
He turns the paper over and reads, “ ‘What does Mrs. Claus say to Santa when she looks up at the sky?’ ” He shakes his head. “ ‘It looks like rain, dear.’ I’ve heard that one before.”
“She’s old, Dad,” I persist.
“Mrs. Claus?” He roots around again in the apron pocket, and produces a folded square of gold tissue paper.
“You know who I mean. Hazelnut. They might think she’s been run over. They’ll be worried.”
He opens the paper out into a crown, dandles it over me, as though distracting a cranky infant. I grab it.
“Well, she hasn’t,” he says. “So they needn’t be. Your grandma told me a good one.” He chuckles. “Did you hear it?”
I hold up a hand. “I don’t really share Grandma’s sense of humor.”
“You haven’t heard it yet.”
“I speak from experience.”
“Why don’t you let me tell you and then you can judge?”
“I will if you tell me en route to the Thompsons’ with the dog.”
“Claire, it’s under control.” His palms press the air for emphasis. “Please. Let me handle this. I’m waiting until your mother gets home.” At the mention of my mother, everything falls into place: the dog, the cake, the mess. In the midst of all this orchestrated chaos, he’s hoping the job thing might seem like just another crazy detail. It makes a kind of desperate sense.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll let it go.”
“Well. I think I’ll have a beer! Will you join me?”
My hangover has receded to the point where a drink seems to be not just the best but the only course of action.
“I wouldn’t say no to some wine,” I say, sliding on the paper crown.
Overdone
“Buggeration,” says Dad, waving an oven-mitted arm through the smoke and slamming the cake pan on the counter. We stand over it. The top is very dark brown, the raisins blistered and burst.
“Oh no!”
“Don’t worry! It’s fine. We’ll just”—he puts his mitts on his hips—“isolate and eradicate the locally affected areas.”
“Cut off the burnt bits.”
“It isn’t burnt.”
Delayed reaction
While Dad removes the top layer, I mix up some water icing. I keep getting the consistency wrong — too thick, too thin, too thick, too thin — and end up with way too much.
“Did you wash your hands?”
“I’ve been cooking for myself for over a decade. You don’t need to ask that sort of question anymore.”
“We don’t know where that animal’s been.” He sets a bowl of burnt cake pieces down next to the tomato.
“Hey, remember when we used to frost cookies on Sundays?” It was our weekend “baking” tradition: cookies coated with messy white goo and decorated with sprinkles and colored icing. I’d present them proudly on a tray with a cup of tea to my mum when she returned from wherever the short reprieve from mothering took her.
“Did we?” Dad says.
“Yes! Every Sunday.”
“I don’t think every Sunday. Maybe once or twice.”
“No, it was every Sunday!” I don’t know why this is so important. “Mum would go out and you and I would put icing on the cookies.”
“Oh yes, Sunday cookies; now I remember,” he says in the robotic tone he uses when my mother corrects him about something.
I drain my glass; fill it back up again.
—
“Looks…nice?” The surface is lumpy owing to Dad’s limited carving skills. Because I was too impatient to wait for it to cool, the icing has melted and run into ghoulish drips. “Considering.”
“I’ve had an idea,” Dad proclaims, grabbing a tub of glacé cherries from the baking Tupperware. He places one in the middle. It looks a bit lonely.
“What about a face?” I suggest. We add two eyes and a smiling mouth.
“That’s better,” says Dad.
“Much,” I say. Hazelnut pads over to Dad’s side. There are charred bits caught in her fur. “Wow, she really went for that crust.”
“Told you it wasn’t burnt.” The smoke alarm starts to shriek. “GOOD TO KNOW IT WORKS,” Dad booms.
“If you’d call that working,” I say.
Body language
“Do you think you should talk to an employment lawyer, find out what your rights are?”
“I don’t know.” Dad clasps his hands behind his head. I once read in a magazine that soccer players do this when they miss a goal because it mimics the support of their mothers’ hands cradling them as babies.
“Maybe I’ll get someone to recommend one. I have a few friends who are lawyers.”
“I always said you’d make a good lawyer.” Hazelnut stirs at his feet, places her chin on his knees and looks up at him.
“Never once heard you say that.”
“To your mother I have. Very fond of a loophole,” says Dad, scruffling under the dog’s ears.
I think about it. “It involves too much information for me. I’d probably get distracted by all the incidental stuff.”
He nods. “Maybe.” Takes another swig of beer. “You made a good decision, Claire.”
“I did?”
“Getting out of that job if you weren’t happy. Took guts.”
“I thought you thought I was a bit of a dropout.”
“Well.” He jiggles his head, seeing my point. “In my day, if you went into a job, that’s where you stayed for forty years. If you didn’t like it? Too bad.”