Chapter 24
Jaz settled in over the following week. Unfortunately, what she settled into was an unshakeable belief that Oliver was an arsehole and I was a loser.
Which, all in all, made for a few tense days on Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson.
Next Door’s Kid’s Mum and Next Door’s Kid’s Dad had at least accepted Jaz’s apology letter at face value—more than face value in some ways because Oliver had explained a bit of the context to them and, being nice middle-class people, they’d bent over backwards to explain how Extremely Sympathetic they were about Jasmine’s Special Circumstances.
Although they made sure to explain it in a way that also made clear that if Jasmine’s Special Circumstances so much as mildly inconvenienced them or their son again, they’d be calling out a SWAT team.
Still, apology duly written and duly accepted, Oliver seemed to consider the matter closed, which I actually found a bit upsetting because as far as I was concerned, the matter was sort of ajar.
Because it was becoming increasingly clear that me and Oliver had quite different parenting styles, and I would have quite liked to have a sensible, mature conversation about our different parenting styles.
Except it was incredibly hard to find the time to have a sensible, mature conversation about our different parenting styles because we were both too busy parenting.
It was sort of like we were in a boat, and we were both bailing water out of the boat, which meant the boat was sinking, but also neither of us were steering and we were probably overdue an iceberg.
So I did what I usually did in scary, complex, icebergy situations—I pretended it wasn’t happening. Which was pretty easy because my job, for however long it lasted, was an endless source of displacement activity.
“What do you call cheese that doesn’t belong to you?” I asked Alex.
Alex didn’t think about this one for as long as he usually did. “Casei, I suppose.”
I looked blankly into my camera. “What?”
“Well, ‘That doesn’t belong to you’ is sort of a relationship descriptor, so I suppose that implies you’re looking for the genitive, although in that case the grammar’s all mixed up.
You’d more be describing the not-belonging-to-you-ness of the cheese.
If you were just saying ‘cheese that isn’t yours’ or something like that, it’d take the nominative, whether it belonged to you or not. ”
This was very much the wrong conversation to be having on a Friday. Or any day. “I was going to say, ‘Nat-cho cheese.’”
Alex blinked. “Pardon.”
“Nat-cho cheese. Nat, like not. Then cho, like…now I come to think of it, like a slightly culturally appropriative way of saying your but also together like the word nacho. Like the food.”
It looked as though Alex understood. Which scared me.
“Excellent example, Luc. So yes, in nacho cheese, it’s actually the nacho that would take the genitive while cheese would take the nominative.
Although I suppose thinking about it, that might also depend on whether nacho cheese is cheese of a nacho or cheese for a nacho. ”
My phone rang, and I had never in my life been so glad to be distracted from something I was already using as a distraction. “Hang on,” I told Alex, “I’ve got to get this.”
Slipping my headphones off, I answered the phone.
“Mr. O’Donnell?” I was pretty proud of myself for recognising Miss Collins’s voice. “Please don’t worry too much, but I wanted to bring this up early. Jasmine’s teachers are telling me that she hasn’t done any homework this week.”
Fuck. We’d fucked it up again. “Sorry,” I said reflexively. Then added, “We’ll get on that right away.”
“Otherwise,” Miss Collins continued, “she’s made a very positive start.”
I should have felt good about that but, selfishly, I didn’t. It was like she was saying that everything was fine, apart from the bit that Oliver and I were most responsible for. “Thanks,” I said anyway. “That’s good to hear.”
The nanosecond Miss Collins had gone, I was texting Oliver. Jaz hasn’t done any homework we suck as parents.
The reply took a while to come through because Oliver’s day involved some pretty big chunks of can’t-look-at-a-phone time.
When it finally came, it was: We don’t suck as parents.
Which was reassuring. Except it was swiftly followed up with: We should however be a little more proactive in our monitoring.
We don’t want to be helicopter parents, I replied. It was the gentlest way I could think of to broach the whole we-are-coming-at-this-in-extremely-different-ways issue.
Oliver three-dotsed me for quite a while, suggesting he was composing his thoughts. Thoughts that finally landed on my screen as: It isn’t helicopter parenting for us to make sure she’s doing her schoolwork. It’s doing her a disservice not to.
He was right about that. I just wasn’t quite sure Oliver’s style of monitoring would be well received. Your right, I sent back—followed by *your followed by *you’re because fuck predictive text. Then I added, I’ll talk to her when she gets home.
If you want to wait, we can do it together was the reply. And I tried really hard not to read mistrust into it, or to take We can do it together to mean I can do it my way and you can watch.
But I didn’t want to get into that right then, especially not by text. So I sent back a casual Its cool followed by No sense dragging it out.
That got nothing back for a while. Then, just as I was turning my attention begrudgingly back to work, I got an Okay and then about eighty seconds later a Let me know if you change your mind and then, two minutes after that, By the way, Brian and Amanda can’t make next weekend, Jennifer and Peter can’t make the weekend after, and Bridget and Tom are busy for the rest of the month so we might have to postpone dinner until February.
Ah yes. Because as well as looking after a homework-averse teenager, we were also trying—and had been trying since before Christmas—to host a dinner party with the friends we hadn’t seen in what had started as months and was now becoming months and months.
Post-pandemic, when we were all really excited we could see each other again, we’d started a regular dinner party thing which had swiftly become an irregular dinner party thing which had then become an ad hoc dinner party thing and had finally become a Hey, remember when we used to have dinner parties?
thing. Were going to run into valentines at this rate, I sent back.
It’s all couples, Oliver replied, so maybe we should steer into it. Either way I’ll keep you posted.
I sent a quick okay and he went quiet after that. But just as I was slipping my phone back into my impractically tight jeans, it buzzed again. Looking down, I saw a picture of a whale.
Moby Dick? I asked.
A little obvious, I admit.
I love you I sent back in a moment of intense dick-related sentimentality.
Because I felt weirdly reassured that, even after five years, Oliver was still sending me dick pics.
The fact he was still managing to source new dicks to send me was a very Oliver-specific reminder that whatever arguments we had, whatever the differences might be between us, deep down we were solid.
That we were, in our own silly, idiosyncratic way, as inexplicably enduring as a classic knob joke.
* * *
If she hadn’t been grounded, I probably wouldn’t still have been driving Jaz to and from school.
Fourteen was young, but it wasn’t needs-constant-handholding young.
Hell, it was only two years off from is-it-really-okay-that-you-can-join-the-army young or maybe-we-should-think-about-letting-you-vote young.
But she was currently being punished, and since in practice she lived in her room anyway, about the only part of her punishment that actually felt punish-y was the part where she had to get picked up from school by some wanker in a secondhand EV.
Even then, I never met her at the gates because I remembered my own school days well enough to know that she’d have had the shit bullied out of her if I had.
“Good day?” I asked as she threw her bag carelessly onto the back seat and herself carelessly onto the front.
Not-a-shrug.
“I got a call this afternoon,” I continued, as if it was this super-casual thing that I’d just happened to remember, instead of the start of a conversation I’d been rehearsing for more than two hours.
Oh really, that’s interesting. Who was the call from and what was it concerning? is what a completely different child might have said to a completely different parent in a completely different situation. I got nothing.
“Apparently you haven’t done any homework yet?” I didn’t like to pat myself on the back, but I was proud of yet. Like I was saying, I’m sure you’ll get around to it, and don’t forget that Oliver and I, your supportive foster parents, are with you every step of the way!
Even with the yet, she still said nothing.
“Is there…is there a reason for that?”
Perhaps I’d just got foster-parent Stockholm syndrome, but I took her continued silence here as an actual win. Only a few days ago, I was pretty sure, she’d have assumed I was attacking her and said something self-destructive about how it was because she was a fuckup who couldn’t be trusted.
Then again, maybe I was just projecting.
“I don’t want to push,” I went on.
That got a reaction. She stared at me with a don’t-shit-on-my-head-and-call-it-a-beret expression. “Yes, you do.”
“I…” Figuring I couldn’t sink much lower in her estimation, I chose honesty. “I don’t want to. I just sort of have to.”
“Or what?”
“Or they’ll take you away.”
And that, it turned out, was too honest. She kicked hard into the footwell. “You don’t get to say that.”
“Sorry, I just—”
“I was taken away. I am taken away. This is away. You’re away.”