You, As You Are (Changing Seasons #2)
Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
MAISIE
Of all the sights to see, Mister Roberts trying to shag a miniature potted tree leftover from Christmas on her grandma’s doorstep was a new one. Luckily, Maisie didn’t need to get too close to the rampant festivities to knock on the door. A blur of a figure moved behind the glass, and the red wood was slung wide before the iron gate she grasped could completely creak open.
“Is that my Moo Moo?” Arms wide and beaming a toothy smile, her grandma – affectionately known in Welsh as nain – swiftly covered the four steps across her modest, walled-off garden. Maisie was too slow to tell her to be careful of her broken wrist.
“Hello, Granny.” Warmth filled her so completely as they hugged, her nain’s arms squeezing around her body just like they had always done.
The whiff of white lily permeating from Vera’s clothes softened the smell of rain on the road behind them, where a pair of heavily-set removal men stomped about inside of the van that Maisie was more than pleased to have gotten out of.
It’d been a long drive – far longer than she remembered it feeling – from London to the Ceredigion coast, stuck in a loaded van going fifty on the motorway with two men she’d only met that morning. She’d felt excessively conscious at first, given that the transit van had only been a three-seater and both brothers had the burly build one might expect of removal men. They hadn’t left much room for Maisie to squeeze in the third seat, but at least they’d been chatty Kathys and eased her discomfort enough for the ride.
Vera pulled away first and cupped Maisie’s cheek with her good hand. Her freshly styled, white hair held more sass in its choppy layers and curls than Maisie had in her entire existence. “I’m so glad that you’ve come, Moo Moo,” she said in her bright, thick, mid-Wales accent, putting a smile on Maisie’s lips.
“Me too.” Her generically English voice sounded bland in return. “Your cat might need a trip to the vet with how hard he was going at that tree.” She watched Mister Roberts go, tail high and proud, as he walked off inside Vera’s three-story terrace like a runway model.
“Miss Moss?” The blonder and older of the two forty-something-year-old brothers, the one who’d driven the entire contents of her flat all the way here, shifted in his heavy coat and steel-capped boots in the gateway. They’d insisted on calling her Miss Moss for the six hours they’d been bundled into that van together, each of them sweltering in the musty output of the heating vents.
Maisie Moss , because her parents thought they were hilarious. Her brothers Miles, Morgan, and Maksen – the latter kindly named after their grandfather – had all suffered the same fate.
“We’re ready to unload if you are?”
“Yes!” her nain answered for her. “Please, do come in. Don’t worry about your shoes.”
Vera blustered back into her house, issuing orders kindly for where to begin unloading every possession Maisie owned into the living room.
This wasn’t how she thought she’d be starting the new year, moving in with her grandmother over two hundred miles from London and the rest of their family where Maisie had lived, studied, and worked for all her life thus far. But no matter how much Vera tried to defy it, her age was taking a toll. The bright purple cast on her wrist highlighted that point wordlessly.
So Maisie had sold most of her furniture and donated practically everything from her kitchen to the local charity shops – except for her favourite mugs and a very expensive casserole dish that’d been a gift. Vera’s spare bed was the same size as hers in London, but the mattress was ancient, almost the same twenty-nine years in age as she was, so wrapping her own mattress in rolls of cellophane and bringing it too had been a necessity.
Her friend, Bash, had offered to drive her with all the belongings that might’ve squeezed into his car at a push, but with Faye – their shared best friend of ten years and as of Christmas a week ago, his girlfriend – preparing her own move to Manchester, Bash’s full days with her were limited, and Maisie didn’t want to take a single one away from them.
Watching her entire life be carted around in boxes for the second time today was strange. Mister Roberts perched on the upright end of the staircase banister, looking down on the mere mortal peasants as they lugged about boxes before the grey clouds looming outside decided to open up.
It was the second of January, and the weather in Aberystwyth was as grey and gloomy outside of Vera’s windows as it was over the ocean a mile down the road. If Maisie listened hard enough over the removal men’s heaves and grunts, she could hear the crash of waves breaking on the rocks in Cardigan Bay, tasting the salt in the air, too.
Making easy conversation about how Vera’s New Year’s Eve party with her hiking friends had gone (heavily-poured gin and tonics, Tesco Finest party foods, and a rather explicit game of charades), Maisie tried to make herself useful and tied back her thick mass of tight red curls, ensuring that the fastenings on her floral overalls were secure in case bending over caused any chest spillage – god knows there was enough to spill – before pushing labelled boxes towards their corresponding boxes.
The brothers lugged her cling-film-wrapped mattress up the narrow staircase, their boots leaving a faint trail behind them that made Maisie wince. Reluctantly, she pulled her gaze away and looked over at Vera sitting on her plush floral sofa from the last millennium, digging a knife with her non-casted hand through tape that sealed a moving box.
“Where’s Ronnie?” she asked. Her grandma’s boyfriend wasn’t ever far away from wherever Vera was.
“He’s at his bungalow. He said he wanted to give us some time alone together before he came over to see you.”
Ronnie and Vera – their relationship was adorable. They’d been together for ten years but decided not to live together, both firm believers in ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. Especially as one of them was an incessant snorer and the other required trips to the loo three times a night.
Maisie had hoped that at this point, the next time she shifted boxes of her stuff would be when moving in with the love of her life, with her friends around her cheering her on. She was almost thirty, wasn’t she supposed to have found him by now?
“How are your brothers?” Vera asked, tossing the knife aside.
Maisie craned her neck to try and see which box her nain had ripped into exactly. “They’re doing okay,” she said distractedly. “They say hello.”
“They could have come and said hello themselves.”
“ Nain ,” she chided.
Vera pulled out two books from the box as if the covers with half-naked men on them were nothing she hadn’t seen before. “I’m just saying that I would like to see my grandchildren.”
Maisie’s insides tightened as Vera flicked through the highlighted pages. “Miles has just started back at university with exams this week, and Maks is in Berlin or somewhere right now for work.”
“And Morgan?”
Maisie paused her method of shoving boxes to the back of the room with her feet. Morgan in the middle was the least communicative in their family group chat. She didn’t entirely know where he was at any given moment. He’d once sprung up in Thailand without telling anybody until he was in the airport to come back, requesting a lift home when he landed.
“Morgan is … somewhere.” Her answer sounded enough like a question.
Vera smiled fondly, placing more books in her lap. Maisie wasn’t so sure if she smiled at their raunchy covers or the thought of her grandson. “He has your taid’s ? * spirit, that one.”
Right . And Maisie? Whose spirit did she have? Miles got their mother’s mind for business, Maks their father’s love of language. Morgan was the free spirit. So where did that leave her?
Moving in with a grandparent at just shy of thirty years old, that’s where it left her.
A heavy thud from upstairs made Maisie jolt, and the following silence brought on an itch. Either both brothers had perished under the weight of her mattress, or they’d broken something and didn’t know what to do about it.
“Should we be helping them?” she asked as Mister Roberts stalked up the stairs with a scowl. Nobody got to make noise in his house, apparently.
Vera leant back to peer up the stairs. “No one screamed. They’ll be fine.”
That she was so unconcerned with the possibility of something bad happening was disconcerting, and half explained the state of her broken wrist. The story of how that had happened involved Ronnie and a substantial volume of lubricant – weeks later, Maisie still didn’t want to know the details.
Sure enough, a second later the brothers came down the stairs with heavy feet, stomping one behind the other, deep in the midst of a hushed conversation with suspicious looking gesticulations. Behind them, Maisie raised a single brow when they waltzed off to the van, hoping they’d been discussing how to test the ripeness of melons.
She didn’t really mind a little heavy-handedness as they carried her possessions inside; clothes, toothpaste, that kind of thing; but when her craft supplies began to unload, that’s when the trembling chihuahua inside of her awoke.
“Please be careful with that one, it’s the?—”
“The mini oven. I know,” blonde number two assured her. “I’ll be gentle.”
Without the mini oven, stocking up her small business that she filled her evenings and weekends with would take four times as long.
“Oh—and that one’s the?—”
“The UV lamp. I’ll put it down over here.” Blonde number one settled the box on Vera’s sofa next to the hand-stitched ‘cwtch ? * ’ cushion that’d been there for twenty years.
Maisie didn’t say anything when the younger brother carried her very large and very expensive computer monitor in by himself and placed it near the kitchen door. She’d wrapped it up perfectly in its original box and packaging, hoping that she could jump straight into work as soon as she’d organised herself.
With her new bedroom on the third floor, Vera kindly let her take over the dining table at the back of the living room as her office space. The whole reason why she was the one in their family to be relocating was the fact that her job could be done from anywhere. Anywhere with Wi-Fi and a computer, that is. The set-up wasn’t ideal. In London, she’d turned half of her living room into an office, which was fine when she’d been living alone. But having Vera pottering around the house, sipping tea in front of the television, and spending hours on the phone to her friends, all whilst Maisie tried to work, was going to take some getting used to.
It took an hour, but the white van was eventually empty, and Vera loaded up the two brothers with sandwiches, biscuits, and hot tea in their travel mugs before letting them go. Maisie had saved some cash in her purse to tip them, promising to recommend them to Faye for when she moved out of London soon. She said goodbye and thank you for the hundredth time, then they were on their way.
The front door clicked shut, deadbolt latching itself, leaving Maisie to turn and examine the fortress of boxes built up around the living room. Mister Roberts had resumed his position on the stairs with a scowl, and Vera flicked through more pages of unboxed ‘literature’ with an unnervingly blank expression.
Maisie gave herself a second to stand and take it all in, sighing quietly.
This is me, then.
She loved her grandma, she really did, but her life wasn’t supposed to devolve this way. Mentally, she prepared for her social life to take a quick trip and be flushed down the drain. Apart from Vera and Ronnie, she knew absolutely no one in this coastal town at all. That hadn’t been a problem as a child, because her brothers had always been here too. They’d kept each other company. But things were different now.
Vera rose from the settee, taking her pick of her next box to plunder. “I’m very glad that you have moved up here to stay with me. It’s going to be so much fun having you around, Moo Moo.”
Her excitement hit Maisie with a stab of guilt. She hadn’t considered how much her nain , the busiest socialite in all of Aberystwyth, might have been wanting her company. “Thanks for letting me come.”
“Of course! You children used to come and stay here all the time when you were younger.”
Maisie remembered it well. She would sleep on a blow-up bed in her grandparents’ bedroom whilst her brothers all took the spare room. Her taid had died when she was fifteen, so any time she would come to stay after that she’d share Vera’s bed, burrowing under the electric blanket. For a few years, things stayed that way. But eventually she stopped coming at all. College became too hectic, then university, and then finally she was forced to accept the fact that she was an adult. Life in London got busy, and taking weekend trips to Wales hadn’t been feasible anymore, monetarily or otherwise.
“I am surprised that you asked to come though,” Vera said thoughtfully. “Are you sure that this isn’t a bother for your work?”
Maisie intended to delay this conversation for as long as possible, since the reason her grandma had been told regarding why she’d moved to Wales wasn’t exactly the whole truth.
“I just wanted a change of scenery.” The lie came so easily. “And I’ve been working from home for a while. Being here isn’t a problem unless a client wants to meet face to face, then I might have to take a trip back to London.”
The truth was that the entire Moss family were concerned for their matriarch. Vera was getting on in her advanced years, and an accident that had broken her wrist was completely out of character. As was her strange behaviour over the phone for the last couple of months, as though she had an itch she couldn’t scratch, or a secret she couldn’t tell.
Between worrying for Vera’s physical health and her mind, the whole family garnered a plan to keep her well, the first bullet point being that someone had to move closer to her.
Well, Maisie was as close now as close could be.
Living in her grandma’s house.
Sleeping right above her bedroom.
* ? Grandad’s
* ? Cuddle