Chapter Seven Eliott
The thing about working freelance is that everyone tells you how good it’ll feel to be your own boss and to set your own working hours, but nobody tells you just how little the people in your life will respect those working hours.
I’ve taken her to the supermarket, the butchers, the dry cleaners, and was even forced into a moderately awkward lunch with a friend of hers from church.
A lunch that mostly consisted of the two of them nibbling at their sandwiches and tittering their disapproval about my current state of singlehood.
Even now, I’m currently seated on an uncomfortable plastic chair in the waiting room at the GP’s surgery, waiting for my grandmother to finish with her appointment. An appointment that was supposed to only take ten minutes.
I glance at the old clock on the wall opposite and scowl as I realise that I’ve been here for at least half an hour now and Nan shows no sign of emerging from the room she disappeared into.
The elderly gentleman sitting beneath the clock shoots me a look of alarm and I try to school my expression into something a little friendlier in apology. It doesn’t seem to land.
To be fair, when Nan called this morning to ask if I could take her to the supermarket because Mum had cancelled on her (again), I hadn’t imagined it would devolve into a whole day of errands.
Which – yeah. Admittedly, that’s my fault.
Because it always ends up like this, and I should definitely know better by now.
Mum promises to help Nan with something.
Mum flakes.
Nan, understandably, turns to her grandchildren for help.
Or to be more accurate, Nan turns to me . Because Leanne won’t answer the phone unless there’s something in it for her, and Josh is about as reliable as Mum is in situations like this.
When I was younger, I used to like the fact that I was the one everyone turned to in a crisis. I liked being reliable. Being constant. Being called the lifesaver .
Now? Not so much.
Everyone just expects me to be there, ready to drop everything and help as soon as they so much as glance in my direction. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing or what I’ve got planned.
Everyone’s needs trump mine.
The anger that’s been slowly brewing inside me while I sit on what has to be the most uncomfortable seat in existence suddenly morphs into guilt as the door finally reopens and Nan comes shuffling out.
It’s a strange feeling watching your grandmother age before your very eyes.
When you’re young, it’s not really something you think about and my memories are filled with echoes of my childhood.
Nan hoisting me up onto her kitchen counter so I could help her roll dumpling dough into imperfect little balls.
Nan shrieking as she chased me and Josh around the garden with a broom because we spilt juice on her nice new white sofa.
Nan teaching me how to swim in that tiny patch of sea behind her cottage in Grenada, back when she could still make the flights back home.
It’s hard to imagine Nan doing any hoisting or chasing or swimming now.
She’s small – smaller than she’s ever been – with a slight limp thanks to a nasty fall down the stairs a few months ago that’s still yet to heal properly.
Her hair – thick, black and healthy in my memories – is thin and almost entirely white now, and there’s a tiredness in her eyes that seems to come from more than just a bad night’s sleep.
Guilt threatens to drown me from the inside and I suddenly hate myself for feeling even the tiniest bit of irritation towards her.
‘All right, Gloria,’ Nan’s doctor says as he helps guide her back towards the waiting room. I immediately hop out of my seat and meet them halfway. ‘You make sure you keep off that leg as much as possible. Understood?’
Nan nods over to me. ‘That’s what my granddaughter’s here for.’
I give the doctor a weak smile as Nan swaps over from his arm to mine, wobbling slightly at the brief lack of balance. ‘Is it not healing well?’
‘It’s healing fine,’ Nan sighs.
‘Not as well as I’d like,’ says the doctor at the exact same time. ‘If you’re still having trouble with it by our next appointment, we may have to look into surgery.’
Nan sighs again, her face twisting into an expression of obvious displeasure. ‘I’ll be fine ,’ she says, a little firmly this time. ‘Thank you, Doctor Patel. I’ll see you in six weeks.’ She doesn’t wait for him to respond before she starts pointedly guiding me towards the exit.
Honestly, she’s surprisingly strong when she wants to be.
‘That man treats me like a child,’ she grumbles as soon as we step through the doors.
I brace myself for the regular barrage of complaints that always seem to follow a visit to her doctor.
‘You know, he kept trying to pass me a brochure about an assisted living facility. Assisted living!’ Nan barks out a humourless laugh as I walk her over to my car and pull the door open for her.
‘I said, “ Doctor Patel, I spent thirty years paying off the mortgage on that house and I shall happily die in it if I very well please .”?’
I wince, as I always do when Nan so casually mentions dying. ‘Don’t stay things like that.’
‘It’s the truth,’ Nan sniffs. ‘He didn’t listen to me anyhow.
Slipped the brochure into my purse when he thought I wasn’t looking.
’ She fumbles around in her comically large bag and pulls out a slim brochure with a cheerful-looking elderly couple on the front cover.
Nan glares at it like it’s the source of all her problems in the world and then immediately tosses the brochure out the window.
‘Nan!’
She blinks over at me, her face a picture of innocence. ‘An accident. My finger slipped.’
‘You wound down your window .’
Nan shrugs. ‘I won’t need it, anyway. If I ever did need help to that degree – which I won’t, thank you very much – then you’d just move back in.’
She says it so simply, so casually, like it’s something she’s already considered a hundred times before and this is the only logical conclusion she’s been able to come to.
‘Excuse me?’ I ask.
Nan shakes her head at me like I’m being incredibly dim.
‘If there ever comes a time where I do need some further assistance with my day-to-day life, I wouldn’t move into an assisted living facility .
’ She says the last three words like they’re poison on her tongue.
‘I’d just move you back into the spare room.
We’d have to clear it out, of course, but—’
‘And when did you decide this?’
Nan waves a nonchalant hand in front of her. ‘Your mother and I have already discussed it.’
‘ Excuse me?’ I ask again.
‘I’m not sure how many times you want me to repeat myself.’
‘I heard what you said,’ I snap and then immediately regret it when Nan narrows her eyes at me. I clear my throat and I try again, my voice a little more measured and composed this time around. ‘I just— Don’t you think I should’ve been included in those discussions?’
‘Perhaps,’ Nan concedes with a somewhat apologetic shrug. I take it. It’s the best I’m going to get. ‘Well, I’ve told you now, so no harm, no foul.’
‘Nan—’
‘It’s not going to happen anytime soon anyway,’ Nan says, cutting across me like she didn’t hear the interruption. ‘Aside from this damn leg, I’m in tip-top shape. Nothing to worry about. I’m not quite ready to become a burden just yet.’
And there’s the guilt again.
‘You’re not a burden, Nan,’ I mumble. Nan might be several inches shorter than me now but, for some reason, I suddenly feel very small. ‘You could never be.’
Nan looks at me for a long moment, then, seemingly satisfied, gives me a nod. ‘Right. Next on the agenda – I need to go to the bank.’
‘You know you can do pretty much everything online these days?’
‘I prefer a human touch.’
I glance at the clock on the dashboard in front of us.
Nearly four o’clock. Between this and my upcoming evening plans with my sister, my day of catching up with my edits has well and truly been stolen from me.
‘Fine,’ I say as I start the car up. ‘We’ll go to the bank, but then I’m taking you home. No other detours.’
Nan purses her lips and looks for a moment like she wants to argue. ‘Fine.’ There’s a beat or two of silence as I start up my car, but then Nan clears her throat and says quietly, ‘Thank you, Eliott.’
My lips lift into a reluctant smile. ‘You don’t have to thank me.’
But I’m glad she does.
Leanne’s late.
The only confirmation I have that she’s actually going to show up and not leave me sitting alone in a bar all evening is the message she sent me thirty minutes ago, promising she was only five minutes away.
Though, to be fair, when it comes to Leanne, thirty minutes isn’t actually all that bad.
She once left me waiting for three hours at the airport because she missed her flight back home and didn’t think to message to let me know.
I can’t take it personally. She’s always been like this.
So wrapped up in her own little world that sometimes she forgets the rest of us live here too.
My phone buzzes in my purse suddenly and I pull it out, expecting to see another semi-apologetic message from Leanne. Instead, it’s an Instagram message request notification sent to my photography account.
Ever since Bailey found me and reshared practically my entire feed to her legion of followers, my Instagram inbox has been swamped with brides eager to book me.
I’ve never had any trouble getting clients – word-of-mouth spreads quickly within the wedding community and I can usually book up months in advance from referrals alone – but this is the first time I’ve been so in demand from social media.
It’s new territory for me, but I can’t say I mind it.
My calendar is filling up almost three years in advance, and I owe that all to Bailey.
Which makes the fact I’m going to have to decline her booking even worse.