Page 66 of The Second Chance Bus Stop

Sweden

The next day I wake up to a crying puppy.

‘This is your home,’ I tell Cornflakes. ‘And I’m your company. It’s just me. It will always be me.’

I settle him on my lap and stay in bed with him. The shop can wait. In all these years it’s never opened up a minute after

eight o’clock, but what has that done for me? What has all my work given me?

At ten there’s a knock at my door.

Lina has a floury apron and a hairnet scrunched up in her hand. Cornflakes barks and nips at her trouser hems until she crouches

down and acknowledges him with large enthusiastic strokes.

‘The shop is closed,’ she states.

‘I’m having some time off.’

‘Two customers have been in asking for you.’

‘People miss me?’

‘You’re an institution, one of the monuments in this town. Yes, people will miss you if you don’t show up to work. I suggest

you don’t go missing again.’ She eyes me from top to toe. ‘Go pick a grey sweater and a pair of jeans. Socks and sneakers.’

‘Okay,’ I reply, happy to have been told what to do and for the element of choice to have been eliminated.

She’s still there when I reappear five minutes later dressed and with my hair pulled back into a ponytail.

‘Good. Let’s get you some breakfast.’

I sip my hot chocolate sitting on the chair outside her shop so I can see any incoming customers to my own. I’ve sifted through

the online orders and have a couple of deliveries to make this afternoon, but apart from that it’s a quiet first day back.

‘My dad has asked to meet me. He’s attending a conference in Malm o and suggested he’d drive over to see me,’ I say. ‘He should be here around six.’

‘Has he ever been here?’

‘A long time ago. He’s always very busy.’

She snorts.

My dad is outside at six sharp with a box of chocolates in his hands.

‘You don’t drink wine, and I couldn’t bring you flowers.’

I take the box from him. There are milk chocolates, white chocolates and only a few dark ones. I wonder if he remembers that

I don’t eat dark chocolate and whether he looked at the ingredient list before choosing this one, or if it’s by chance.

‘Right. This is lovely,’ he says as he sits down on my two-seat sofa after a tour of the shop downstairs.

‘Thank you.’ I don’t know what to say. Having my dad in my house feels rather like a stranger having asked to come in to use

the bathroom and I’m standing around waiting for him to leave so I can resume normal business.

‘Mum said you’ve been emailing,’ he says finally. ‘She waits for them every evening.’

She does? I thought she’d be in bed, seeing them in the morning. I hadn’t realised she’d wait up. That it was something she

wanted to read.

‘We have. I have things to say, things that I needed her to know. I... I didn’t have a great time in therapy.’

‘I used to complain about the cost. Five hundred bloody kroners an hour and another one hundred in petrol both ways.’ Dad

remarks. Did you think of the cost to me? I let the silence settle around us again.

‘The car,’ I hear myself saying, fortified by Cornflakes’s body lying heavy on my lap. ‘I hated being left in the car outside

the ice rink.’ I look at my puppy so I’m not sure if Dad looks at me or not. He replies with some delay.

‘I let you stay in the car because I wanted to keep you safe. Those boys in hockey class were bullying you, and if they saw

you carrying on—’

‘ Stimming . It’s called stimming .’

‘Right.’ He takes a moment. ‘ I know that. But if they saw it, things would have gotten worse.’

‘You could have talked to their parents.’

‘We thought they might turn on you even more if we brought it up. Made a big thing of it. We thought it would run its course.’

Well, it did, I think. A ten-year course.

‘So you locked me up. Away.’ I struggle to talk. As if it’s my turn to introduce myself in a new group, palms sweating, but

I know that I’m right. Before, I didn’t: everything felt wrong, but I assumed it was me.

‘We did it because we loved you. We thought it was the right thing to do,’ Dad says.

Then he is quiet.

‘Let me go and top up these drinks,’ I say because that’s something people say in quiet pockets of air. In the kitchen I message Lina to please come over and that she can bring Tim if he’s around. I need someone to talk about the weather, current politics or the national hockey teams.

The minute they arrive the atmosphere changes. Mutual relief.

‘You friends are very nice, Sophia,’ my dad tells me as they leave an hour later.

‘I should have visited before,’ Dad says. ‘You really have been running quite the business here—it’s successful, it’s working.

And I like what you’ve done with the inside.’ His hand sweeps in a half-circle motion, toward the shop.

‘Thank you, Dad.’

He doesn’t hug me when he leaves. He ruffles Cornflakes’s furry tummy for a long time at the doorstep then pats my shoulder.

I feel like we are closer—but we still have some way to go.

‘Righto, then. Bye.’