A Stranger In The Family – Diane Saxon (1)

And right here is my caring, lovely son, as he raises a hand to my hot cheek, cupping it for a moment before bending to place a kiss on my sweaty forehead. I offer up a weak smile and dump the towel on the draining board before turning to face the room.

I have to pull myself together, right now. This is ridiculous. I point at the empty, abandoned crockery. ‘Right, pass your plates for pudding. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.’ It’s a bit of an in-joke, a phrase we’ve always used to get the boys to clear the table. Harry races off to change his precious T-shirt, leaving behind the chaos that is his younger brothers.

Their chairs scrape as they surge to their feet together, cutlery rattling against their plates as they pass them to Ralph and he brings them to me, taking a moment to wrap his arm around my waist and give it a quick squeeze. ‘We’d better get off, love. We’ll see you in about an hour, then all hands to the pump.’ My hands have been on the pump for the past month, but I bite my tongue. ‘See you soon.’ Harry and Ralph disappear in a rush of masculine adrenaline, obviously believing they have the most important job of the day and slamming the door behind them while the twins charge upstairs as though their lives depended upon it.

I’d like to think they’ve decided to start bringing all the boxes downstairs in preparation for when their brother and dad return with the truck, but they are eighteen-year-old boys, they’ve more likely gone to have a last-minute mess around on their PlayStation which should have been packed a week ago, but at their insistence has been left out.

The house is suddenly silent, except for the hushed tones of the radio that someone must have turned down after the news ended. I finish up the dishes and then gaze around my kitchen. The last time I will ever wash up in this room. Tears spring to my eyes, not only with the sadness of leaving this place, but the knowledge that something is not right in my world, and I am desperately worried it is connected to that missing box.

Where is it now? Could it possibly have anything to do with that news report?

I know we’ve made the right decision. It’s time to move. This house is going to be too big for just the two of us, and we’ll rattle around like marbles in a tin can. Besides, it needs so much work to bring it back up to a good standard, and we simply don’t have that kind of cash. It’s the right time, now Mikey and Thomas, the twins, are off to university. It sounds old-fashioned, but they won’t come back.

I know they won’t. Not to live with us, in any case. They’ll do as their big brother has, find a nice girl, settle down in whatever town she lives in, because boys tend to do that. It’s natural. Loads of our friends’ children have done it.

My own husband Ralph did, left his hometown to come and live where I was brought up, although he was working there at the time. It’s the way of things. It’s boys. There’s a part of me that will always mourn that little girl I’d carried for five months. After Harry and the twins. Unplanned, yet a rather unexpected delight. Until I lost her.

I would have loved to have had a daughter. Not instead of my sons, because I adore each one of them and would never change them for anything. There are no regrets there, but daughters tend never to leave their mums. Or so my friends with girls tell me. Sadness overwhelms me. She would have been fourteen now and my nest would not have felt empty. Fourteen years since we lost her and still the pain is as strong. The squeeze of my heart brings tears to my eyes.

I can’t dwell on that now, though. Perhaps it’s the fact that the date is set for the move that has all this melancholy and nostalgia creeping in. We’ve less than two weeks to pack this place up and I never realised how much stuff we’ve accrued over the past thirty years. Rubbish, really. As I stare out of the kitchen window, hands dipped into hot soapy water, listening to a sad song playing low on the radio so as not to wake my three boys, I place one hand on a heart that is breaking, oblivious to the soapsuds dripping from my elbow, the wet soaking through my dressing gown.

My vision of the back garden blurs and I don’t even attempt to blink away the tears as they trickle down my cheeks just as soft rain drizzles down the window. My breath stutters in. Small hiccups really, as I try to stem the flow of my distress. This is stupid.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 41a460ca4cdb3936
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 5,092,158 bytes (4.856 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 271
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 388.92 minutes
• Total Words: 77,783
• Total Characters: 408,213
• Average Words per Page: 287.02
• Average Characters per Page: 1506.32

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