Chapter 21 #2
“You lived there too,” Rachel pointed out.
“But not in the same way. We were never really part of the village, as you remarked yourself.”
“And you think I am?”
“Aren’t you?”
Rachel gazed out at the drizzling rain, turning everything to gray, and shrugged. “I suppose. But there’s a downside to everyone knowing you too. You can’t start over.”
“Have you wanted to?”
Andrew sounded so interested and intent; it made Rachel feel both gratified and embarrassed.
“Sometimes. When . . . when I was growing up, I was the kid whose father was sometimes on the dole and whose mother cleaned half of the class’s houses before she broke her back.
No one turned their noses up at me, not exactly.
Hartley-by-the-Sea has never really been like that.
But they knew, and sometimes that’s enough. ”
She’d said way too much. Rachel dug her hands into the pockets of her coat and nodded towards the rainy park. “How about lunch?”
Andrew thankfully had the sensitivity to follow her lead. “I’ll call a taxi, and we can go into the city center to eat.”
Twenty minutes later they were seated at a bistro on Booth Street, menus open in front of them.
“You’re soaked,” Rachel remarked. His button-down shirt didn’t look quite so boring stuck to his chest. Andrew plucked at it ineffectually.
“I’ll dry.”
Rachel was more than a little damp herself, and she could feel her hair starting to frizz. In a few minutes she’d look like a six-foot-tall Orphan Annie.
“You know,” she said after they’d both ordered, “I didn’t think you actually liked me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because of that huge chip on my shoulder you mentioned I have?” She tried to speak lightly, but an edge broke through anyway. “And because I was kind of bitchy to you. And to Claire.”
Andrew glanced down, realigning his knife and fork with precise movements. “I wasn’t at my best, either. I was worried about Claire. Too worried, most likely.”
“She told me a little bit about why,” Rachel offered. “The stuff with her ear, all the illnesses when she was a child . . .”
“Yes. Well. Old habits die hard and all that.”
“So that’s why you’ve been so protective of her? Because of her ear?”
“Not just her ear. Everything. My parents, my mother especially, have always been obsessive about Claire’s health.
I don’t really remember when she had the tumor all that well, only that it was an emergency.
Her face was partially paralyzed, and she had to be rushed to the hospital. They thought she might die.”
“Goodness.” Anything she said felt inadequate. “That must have been scary.”
“I suppose it was. From a nine-year-old boy’s perspective, though, I was more annoyed at my father missing my football tournament.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I realized how serious it all was until later.”
“So Claire’s health issues affected you,” Rachel said slowly; it seemed obvious now.
They would have affected everyone in a family.
She’d seen the same kind of thing happening in her own.
Yet she hadn’t expected to feel such a point of sympathy with Andrew West. “You always had to watch out for her.”
“That was my brief. That’s every big brother’s brief, like you said.
But with my mother and Claire . . . it was a lot more intense.
If Claire so much as grazed her knee at school, my mother thought it was my fault.
I should have been watching her better, been more careful.
” He shrugged. “Not to moan about it, but it has an effect on you over time.”
“Yes, I can understand that.”
He nodded, his gaze training uncomfortably on her. “You’ve been looking out for your sisters for a long time.”
“Since I was eleven.”
“Is that when your mother got injured?”
Rachel nodded. “Broke her back falling down some stairs while cleaning a house in Egremont. Lily was six weeks old.”
“That must have been tough.”
“It wasn’t much fun.”
“And your dad,” Andrew said quietly. “He left . . . ?”
“When I was eighteen.” She paused and then confessed quietly, the words drawn from her reluctantly, “I’d just started at Durham.
Two weeks in and my sister Meghan called me, asking me to come home.
” She shook her head, trying to stem the tide of emotion that threatened to overwhelm her.
The last thing she wanted to do was cry in front of Andrew West, and especially on their first date. If this really was a date.
“Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry.” Andrew reached over and covered her hand with his own, the simple touch of another person adding to her emotional overload.
“It was a long time ago,” she managed to choke out, and then had to suffer the humiliation of dabbing her eyes with her napkin. “Seriously. I’m over it.”
Andrew removed his hand and sat back, and Rachel let out a tiny sigh of relief. This was getting way too intense. “And you’ve been cleaning houses ever since?”
“I took over my mother’s business, Campbell Cleaners. She’d had to stop it when she got hurt, and for a while we survived with whatever work my dad could get.”
“Which was?”
“Carpentry, shift work. The dole.” More than once she’d had to collect one of the orange vouchers and go to the food bank in Whitehaven for the emergency supply of milk, bread, and tinned tuna and rice pudding.
Growing up she’d been entitled to free school meals, a badge of shame that everyone had known about it even though it was never spoken of.
Somehow you just knew which kids were so poor they had to get free meals.
“None of that could have been easy,” Andrew said.
“No, but we managed. When Meghan turned sixteen, a year after my dad left, she quit school and started pulling pints at the pub.” She shrugged. “It worked out.”
“But that was ten years ago, and Lily’s almost finished school. What are you going to do then?”
“My mother has just had a stroke and my sister has a three-year-old I suspect she is going to off-load on me,” Rachel answered. “What do you think I’m going to do?”
Their meals came then, thankfully curtailing any more conversation, and they both kept to light topics after that. There was only so much emotional heavy lifting you could do in a single afternoon.
By the time they left the bistro it was the middle of the afternoon and the rain had cleared to a pale blue sky with wispy clouds.
They walked through the city center, and Andrew pointed out every architectural and engineering feature, which, after about an hour, he finally realized was far more interesting to him than to her.
“Sorry. I’m boring you rigid, aren’t I?”
“Not rigid, no,” Rachel answered. “The rigor mortis won’t set in for another hour.”
“You have a high tolerance, then,” he said with a laugh, and steered her towards the river. “But there’s one more feat of engineering I want to show you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You’ll like this one, I promise.” He’d taken her hand, loosely threading his fingers through hers, and Rachel felt a jumping sensation of awareness in her belly, something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Flirting with Rob Telford at the Hangman’s Noose had never made her feel like this.
They walked down Bridge Street, turning down the narrow St. Mary’s Passage, before emerging in front of the River Irwell a narrow white footbridge with steel cables like gossamer strands stretching high above.
“The Trinity Footbridge,” Andrew announced. “It joins Manchester to Salford. I worked on it back in 2010. Just some repair work, but I’ve always liked it.”
“It’s striking,” Rachel said. She liked the way the bridge seemed suspended over the river, its arch deceptively simple.
“Come on,” Andrew said, and tugged her up onto its narrow walkway. The sun was still high in the sky, but the wind was dying down so the surface of the river was placid and still, the sun’s rays touching it with gold.
They walked to the middle of the bridge, stopping to gaze out at the city. Rachel let out a long rush of breath.
“It’s beautiful. I’ve enjoyed today.” She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her, his gaze on the cityscape spread around them. “I think I needed a day out of reality. To recharge.”
“It doesn’t need to be just a day,” Andrew said, and Rachel tensed, her insides doing a weird flip-flop.
“What do you mean?”
He turned to face her, his expression intent. “You’ve given ten years of your life to your family, Rachel. Lily’s going to university and Meghan can manage her own child—”
“And my mother?” she interjected sharply. She wasn’t sure she liked where this was going.
“I don’t know how her rehabilitation will go, but there might be solutions. Why shouldn’t you go back to university, have at least some of the life you wanted? You’ve deferred your dreams for long enough.”
She turned back to face the river, hating that he’d made it sound so easy. It was easy, for someone who had money and ambition and time, with no commitments, no strings. She had strings dangling all over the place, tripping her up at every step. “It’s not that simple, Andrew.”
“It could be.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Yes, it is easy for me. I’m not pretending it would be easy for you. But why won’t you even think about it? You complain about being stuck in a rut, but you won’t actually do anything about it.”
“Wow, you’re ending this day on such a terrific note,” she drawled, sarcasm the cheapest defense. “Thanks so much for a lovely day out.” She turned and started walking, blindly, filled with a fury she couldn’t articulate.
“You’re heading towards Salford,” Andrew called to her, and muttering a curse, Rachel turned around. “And you know why I think you won’t even think about what I said?”
“Oh, you’re a psychologist now too, are you?” Rachel snapped. Her comebacks sucked, but she couldn’t think of anything better. She felt too raw to be clever.
Andrew had folded his arms and stood in the middle of the footbridge so she couldn’t pass.
A couple of pedestrians were coming behind him at a brisk clip, and in a few seconds he was either going to be pushed out of the way or cursed at, yet still he stood in the middle of the bridge, seeming to straddle the world.
“You’re scared,” he stated. Rachel jerked back.
“Scared?”
“Of trying and failing. Everyone is to some degree, but you’ve let it paralyze you.”
“Hey,” a man behind him called as he came striding forward, briefcase swinging at his side. “How about getting out of my way?”
“My thoughts exactly,” Rachel snapped, and pushing past Andrew, she started walking back towards the city center.