Page 6 of Date Knight (Roll for Romance #2)

Phil

I walked up the driveway outside the house, squeezing between the cars parked out front.

My beat-up blue Ford Fiesta was parked dangerously close to Ethel’s vintage Healey; it was the only way for them both to fit.

She hadn’t driven in a couple of years, but she still smiled at it every time she walked past it, so it was worth having to squeeze myself like a tube of toothpaste every time I needed to drive somewhere.

Though, given how hard it was for her to get in and out of the Fiesta these days, I probably needed to think about getting something bigger, like Anil’s big van, which was parked on the street in front of the house.

It would almost certainly mean having to move the Healey, or even sell it.

I couldn’t think about that yet though. One thing at a time, one foot in front of the other.

I took my time walking up the front path, bracing myself to slip back into carer mode.

It was still weird, being anxious to go inside; I’d used to be so excited to come home when I was younger.

Ethel had always had something delicious for dinner and something for us to do together, whether it was watching a film or playing Texas Hold ’Em at the dining table. When had that changed?

Probably around the time she stopped being able to live independently , I thought.

She’d had her fall nearly three years ago, breaking her ankle, and whilst it had healed reasonably well, her memory seemed to have taken the real hit.

I learned later that it was normal for a physical injury to trigger neurological symptoms, but it had caught me off guard at the time.

What had just seemed like quirky forgetfulness before eventually grew worrying, and when she’d had a panic attack at Tesco because she didn’t know where she was, I’d finally caved and asked for a referral.

That was when they’d confirmed what we’d feared: Ethel had dementia.

Over the last year it had just gotten worse and worse, and the whip-smart woman who had kept me on my toes my whole life was melting away in front of me, and my life had completely changed because of it.

It was weird to think that just a year ago I’d been bored caring for Ethel.

I’d really only been there as a precaution, and because I didn’t need to work full-time as long as I lived with her.

But now my days were full of more and more hospital appointments, therapies, and trying to keep her busy so she didn’t decline further.

All whilst trying to keep us both alive, make enough money to cover our essentials, and try to have some semblance of a life.

I paused when I got to the front door, turning to the dwarf hawthorn planted on the right side of the path.

The white flowers were starting to drop, flowering having peaked in May, but they still smelled just as fragrant, the sweet almond scent greeting me at the door for a couple of months every year.

I cupped my hand around one, inhaling deeply.

“Hey, Mum,” I said quietly. I always associated spring’s flowers with Mum, whilst the autumn berries we harvested each year were Dad.

It made sense; their ashes had been feeding the tree for nineteen years now.

We’d chosen the hawthorn tree because, even at age eleven, I’d been able to tell how similar the fragrant blooms were to Mum’s perfume.

And whilst I had no memory of it myself, Ethel insisted that Dad’s favourite cocktail had used hawthorn cordial.

It had been our way of bringing Mum and Dad with us when we’d moved out of the home I’d grown up in, and even now it still felt like they were there every time I came or went.

I opened the front door to the familiar sound of the Masterchef intro; it had finished hours ago, but Ethel liked to watch the new episodes over and over.

She was sat in her rocker in front of the TV, dressed for bed, and whilst she looked up and smiled at me as I came in, she quickly turned back to watch someone pull a tart out of the oven.

“It’s going to be soggy on the bottom,” she said to me, pointing at the screen, as if she was predicting it instead of remembering it. These days, I genuinely wasn’t sure which it would be.

“Amateur,” I agreed, then pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

I passed a stack of mail on the hall table as I headed towards the kitchen, which reminded me of everything I needed to do the next day.

Ethel’s pension payment had been wrong last month for some reason, and I needed to see if her next appointment letter for the occupational therapist had come through; they were hoping to start more regular appointments at the hospital.

Then there were Anil’s account details to change since he’d moved banks.

Ethel was probably eligible for an NHS nurse, but I liked the flexibility of someone who could change their shifts around as needed, and the consistency of having the same person every time.

Even if it did cost me– I paid Anil well, but given that I refused to even touch Ethel’s bank accounts, I’d been slowly depleting what was left of my trust over the last few years.

Ethel had put my parents’ life insurance payout and the money from their house into the trust I’d gotten access to after uni, but because I’d lived with her since then, it had gone a long way.

I was technically my own trustee now that I had power of attorney for Ethel since her diagnosis.

I knew it would run out eventually. But again, I couldn’t think about that.

I didn’t have my head completely in the sand.

Most of our bills came out of Ethel’s account automatically, just as her pension went in.

I added up all the paper statements each month, and by my math, we were just about breaking even in that account.

So I didn’t even look at it; I didn’t want to even be tempted, if there did happen to be more money in there, to use it on things like craft supplies or groceries.

I could pay for those things myself, whether out of my trust or with the money I earned doing ad hoc data entry jobs through an online agency.

I only had a few hours for work most weeks, but that was enough for everything I needed (and most things I wanted), and it was flexible enough that I could scale it up or down as needed.

Though, of course, scaling it up so I could afford more would mean that I then had to let some things fall by the wayside, or find more support, which of course cost more money.

I’d become used to those kinds of trade-offs, but it didn’t make them easier, and I wasn’t about to put Ethel’s care on the chopping block for the sake of a little extra cash.

I walked into the kitchen to find Anil washing up from dinner.

“Slay any dragons tonight?” he asked when he saw me, his arms covered in suds up to the elbows.

“Not tonight,” I said with a laugh. “But Amy caused some drama.”

“In the game or in real life?”

“In the game,” I clarified, “though I wouldn’t put the real-life drama past her.”

“That’s my girl,” he said with a laugh. They’d only crossed paths a handful of times, but they’d gotten on like a house on fire. Everyone seemed to get on with Amy like that; she had a way of adapting herself to whoever was around.

“Get in line,” I muttered.

I stepped in to help Anil, drying once he’d washed; we really did need a dishwasher, didn’t we? We ran through the evening together, and I was relieved to hear that it had been uneventful, and Ethel had been mostly with it.

“It was a good day,” Anil said.

“And you remembered to up the beta blocker dosage?”

“Sure did,” Anil replied, knocking his knuckle against the white binder on the worktop next to the landline.

It was open to the medication schedule, which I’d updated just that morning.

I’d started the binder when I’d first hired Anil, wanting to make sure I had everything documented; it was the only way I felt comfortable leaving Ethel with him.

I doubted he referenced it much anymore, but it was still nice to have, especially when Amy had started staying with her, too.

“Just a thought, man,” Anil said, “we should think about adding a second bath per week for a while. I’ve noticed a few blemishes I think more baths could help. And she seems to enjoy them.”

I froze with a plate in my hand. The suggestion made perfect sense, of course, but it caught me off guard, too.

Ethel had made it very clear in her earlier stages that she didn’t want me bathing her or helping her use the toilet; she wanted me to hire people to help with that.

I only had Anil on Thursday and Friday nights though, and Saturdays when he wasn’t on his course. Although…

“Actually,” I said, “my friends wanna start doing a pub quiz on Tuesdays. Do you wanna add another night into the mix? At least for the summer?”

“Hell yeah,” Anil said, smiling at me. I got the sense that he really liked spending time with Ethel, which made it much easier to leave her with him.

“Perfect. I’ll send you the details over the weekend when I figure out what the plan is.”

As I sent Anil on his way and headed back into the lounge, I realised my pocket was heavier than usual, and I remembered the hunk of rhodonite Amy had given me. I pulled it out and examined it.

Here at home, I could let the smile crack across my face as I looked it over.

Our windowsill was littered with shiny rocks of various hues, all of which had different purported healing properties.

It was all a bunch of nonsense as far as I was concerned, but Ethel liked the way they looked, and I’d always been touched by how much Amy cared for her.

How much she cared about everything, actually.

I stepped out into the back garden, dragging the plastic dining table off the raised stone patio and into the middle of our small patch of grass so it would get as much moonlight as possible, then placed the crystal dead centre. I stepped back and snapped a photo, then sent it to Amy.

I watched as the message quickly went from delivered to read, and I was only a little disappointed when she didn’t respond.

* * *

The next evening, I sat across from Poppy talking about Ethel. She was an occupational therapist, and she was giving me a list of questions to ask when we had Ethel’s next appointment. They were mostly the same as what I’d found online, but I was grateful she was talking me through it anyway.

Poppy and I had been out dozens of times over the last few years, mostly as respite from the hell that was our local dating scene.

It was a small town, which meant that almost everyone I matched with was someone I knew or recognised, and there was really only one good place to go for drinks.

It was exhausting to have to ask the same four questions over and over again: What do you do?

Are you from around here? What do you do for fun?

And, of course, the old classic: how is someone like you single?

No, Poppy and I already knew all that about each other.

She was an OT, she’d lived here her whole life but had gone to the posh school Fatima now taught at, she loved old films, and like me she had no emotional bandwidth for a relationship.

She was a single mum whose kid spent weekends with her dad, which meant Poppy had one night a week where she wasn’t working or parenting.

It was perfectly symmetrical to my situation, so despite the fact that we had zero long-term interest in one another, we got dressed up every now and then and pretended like we did.

And if sometimes we ended up back at Poppy’s, well, that was fine too.

She was a beautiful woman, tall, with long blonde hair and a dusting of freckles across her pale cheeks.

In brief moments of uncharacteristic self-awareness, I could recognise the parallels to another leggy blonde I knew.

But most of the time, I was happy to ignore that particular coincidence.

It had been a while since I’d gone back to hers, though, or to anyone’s for that matter. About ten months, in fact.

As Poppy told me about a particularly chaotic shift she’d had during the week, my attention felt suddenly pulled towards the front window, as if my gaze were magnetised.

The sun was still out and wouldn’t set for a while still, and the lighting inside was low and moody, so I could see outside perfectly.

Standing just to the side of the door, her face frozen in surprise, was Amy.

It was a shock to see her, but I found myself smiling immediately.

She looked beautiful in a white knit top that tied together twice at the front, her chest and stomach bare beneath, her long tanned legs visible through the holes in her jeans.

The setting sun caused a sort of halo effect around her blonde hair, which was perfectly straight and hanging all the way to her hips instead of in its usual messy ponytail.

I stared at her for a long moment, wondering what she was doing there and waiting for her to look around and see me, but her gaze was fixed on something on the other side of the bar from where Poppy and I were sat.

I tried to follow her line of sight, but the best guess I had was a table at the back where a couple sat on one side of a four-top.

It was one of my biggest pet hates; save the PDA for home and actually look one another in the eye, for fuck’s sake.

And there was plenty of PDA: the clean-cut guy had his mouth all over the neck of the petite blonde next to him, her chin-length hair giving everyone full view of what was going on.

She had her hand on the side of her date’s face– or her fiancé’s, I supposed, given the giant rock on her left ring finger.

I looked back to Amy– could this be what had her so upset? Who were they?– and I saw a tear roll down her face.

Poppy was mid-sentence when I rose, abandoning my drink and walking across the bar without looking away from Amy.

Despite my D&D character, there had been very few times when I’d involved myself in real life drama.

But nothing in the world could have kept me in that seat when I saw Amy start to cry.