He switches on the kitchen light even though it’s the middle of the day. A striplight. It hums to life. ‘Did Morris vs Morris settle?’ he asks, a raise of his eyebrows. He pronounces the vs as and, the way all lawyers do.
‘I …’ She hesitates. She can’t remember at all, obviously.
‘Jen! You said it would!’
She tilts her head, looking up at him. This. She’d forgotten. Don’t all familial irritations get subsumed by grief, in the end? This sort of exchange would have annoyed her then, but it doesn’t today. She’s just pleased to be here, in the arena, not cast out by death.
‘Sorry – I’m tired.’
‘You’ve got four days before they take it off the table,’ he says. Suddenly, with the benefit of hindsight, she can see precisely where some of her insecurities have come from: here. In adulthood, she gravitated away from people like her father, made friends with misanthropic types like Rakesh, like Pauline. Married Kelly. They allow her to be the real, true her.
‘I know – it’ll be fine. We’ll settle it on Monday,’ she says.
‘What does the client think about the offer?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember.’ She waves a hand, wanting the conversation to be over. It wasn’t an idyll, was it, working together? It was hard sometimes, like this. Her father, driven, devoted, a stickler for detail. Jen, driven too, but more to help people than anything else.
She vividly recalls attending an important joint-settlement meeting with her father, who huffed when she didn’t have one form or other and she’d texted, My dad is a twat, over and over to Pauline, who sent back emojis. She almost laughs, now, it’s so bittersweet. The children we are with our parents.
‘Sorry – not sleeping well,’ she says, meeting his eyes. ‘I’ll be better on Monday. I promise.’
‘You look like – I don’t know. Yes – you look like when Todd was tiny and you never rested.’
Jen smiles a half-smile. ‘Remember those days.’
‘You can sleep anywhere when you have a baby, you’re so tired,’ he says wistfully. Just like that, a prism held to the light, he shows another facet of himself. He had always been competitive, repressed, but in the years leading up to his death he had mellowed somewhat, began to allow himself to feel, to reveal an oozing, doughy version of himself; a better grandfather than he was a parent. They got so little time together.
‘When I had you, I fell asleep at some traffic lights, once.’
‘I never knew that,’ she says.
An eerie sensation settles across Jen’s back, like a window’s open somewhere letting in cold air. What is she doing here? She shouldn’t be doing this. Finding out things she can never forget.
‘I’ve never said,’ he explains. ‘You never want your child to feel like they were a burden.’ He says this second sentence with evident difficulty, biting his lip as he finishes and looks at her. They’re standing in his dining room, in between his living room and kitchen. The light outside is beautiful, illuminating a shaft of dust in front of his patio doors.
‘No, I’m the same with Todd.’
‘It’s hard to have a baby. Nobody says.’ Her father shrugs, seemingly pleased to be passing what he regards as a normal day with his daughter.
‘Was I in the car with you?’
‘No. No!’ he says with a laugh. ‘I was on the way to work. God, it was – something else, those newborn days. Sometimes I wanted to call the authorities up and say, Do you know how hard it is to have a newborn?’
‘I thought Mum did it all.’
He turns his mouth down and shakes his head. ‘I’m afraid to say that Little Jen took over the house with those screams.’
She blinks as she watches him walk into the kitchen, where he painstakingly boils his stovetop kettle in that way that he always has. Full to the brim – damn the planet – the lid replaced carefully with a shaking hand. She hasn’t seen that kettle for so long. They sold this house a year ago. She hardly kept anything from it.
The kitchen smells antiquated. Of tannin and musk, a caravan sort of smell.
‘Why the lack of sleep?’ he asks.
‘A fight with Kelly,’ she says, which she supposes is true. She waves a hand as tears come to her eyes. She’s still thinking about the traffic lights. God, the things we do for our kids.
Her father doesn’t say anything, just allows Jen to speak, there, standing on the worn tiles. She meets his eyes, exactly like hers. Todd doesn’t even have these eyes, these brown eyes. Todd has Kelly’s. That’s the deal you make when you have children with someone.
‘What happened?’ her father says. Not a sentence he would’ve uttered twenty years ago. The kettle begins to bubble, rocking gently on the hob. Her father keeps his eyes on hers, ignoring it, like it is a distant tremor.
‘Oh, just the usual marital fight,’ she says thickly. What else could she say? Tell the whole vast story, from Day Zero to here, Day Minus Five Hundred – or thereabouts?
He leans against the counter opposite her. It’s the same kitchen it always was. Eighties-style, off-white Formica, fake oak. There’s a comfort in the tired quality. Cabinets containing crystal glasses he no longer uses. A floral plastic tea tray that will house a ready meal each night.
‘Kelly has been lying to me,’ she says.
‘About what?’
‘He’s involved in something dark. Maybe always has been.’
Her father waits a beat, then makes more of a noise than utters a word. ‘Huh.’ He brings a hand to his mouth. Age spots. Jen’s relieved to see them, to still be here, in the relative present. ‘What kind of thing?’
‘I don’t know. He’s meeting a criminal, I think,’ she says.
Her father’s eyes darken. ‘Kelly is a good person,’ he says firmly.
‘I know. But you’re never – you know.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t feel like you – you really ever liked each other?’
‘He is good to you,’ her father says, sidestepping her question.
Jen laughs sadly. ‘I know.’
She thinks of the house and the photograph again. She can’t figure it out, and neither can she figure out how to figure it out. It’s a locked mystery to her.
‘Remember that first day he came into the firm?’
‘For sure,’ Jen says immediately, but that’s all she wants to say. March belongs to her and Kelly, even if the memory has been eroded now. It means so much to them he inked it on his skin only a few months later. He hadn’t told her he was going to get the tattoo done. Had disappeared in the middle of the day, come home without saying anything. It was only when she undressed him that she discovered it; their shared legacy.
‘Remember all the scrappy work we did back then?’ she says.
It had been the early days of the firm when her father had taken Jen on as their trainee – a recipe for dysfunction if ever there was one. He had trained at a Magic Circle firm in the City but wanted to run his own firm, so moved home to Liverpool, head full of mergers, acquisitions and ambition. After her mother died – cancer, in the nineties – he had set up Eagles. Why he hadn’t called it Legal Eagles, Jen had never understood.