A Season for Second Chances

Chapter 1

Annie was almost home when she realized she'd left her phone at the restaurant. The September evening air was nipping at her jacket collar, letting her know that summer was on the wane. The gentle rhythm of her rubber-soled boots on the pavement was as soothing as the tick of the old carriage clock that used to sit on her parents' mantelpiece.

The high street was quiet. The pubs had long since expelled their patrons, and the lights in the flats above the shops were all but extinguished. Even a town as busy as Leaming on the Lye had to sleep sometime. Annie wandered slowly back the way she had come. She was completely alone aside from the flash of a bushy red tail as a fox disappeared down an alleyway, no doubt hoping to find a loose bin bag or discarded kebab.

Annie liked this time of day. After the heat and rush of the kitchen during service and then the laborious cleardown, when the last customers departed, full bellied and ruddy cheeked from the house wine, came the quiet. The front-of-house staff left first, carpets hoovered and tables laid ready for lunch service the next day, leaving just the kitchen staff, tired yet strangely elated at having got through another crazy night. When the last pan was dried and the floor mopped, Annie would let them go, listening as their animated conversations drifted out of the courtyard and into the sleeping streets beyond. Since the twins had left home, her chefs had become like her surrogate children. And then she was alone. The calm after another hard-won day washed over her. She was too tired to dwell, which was just the way she liked it.

Up ahead, toward the mall, a man in a leather jacket staggered under the weight of his companion, who leaned listlessly against him, drunkenly singing "Hit me baby one more time." Annie walked on and soon she was standing back outside the Pomegranate Seed, the restaurant she and her husband, Max-Leaming on the Lye's answer to Don Juan-had run for the last fifteen years.

Annie unhooked the latch on a tall gate to the side of the building. A steep path led down toward a small courtyard and kitchen garden, with raised beds and cold frames to the right, and to the left, a crooked flight of stone steps down to the kitchen door.

The security light was on the blink again so the graveled passage was in almost complete darkness, save for the dim phosphorescence of the harvest moon. But it didn't trouble Annie; she knew every dip in the path, every leaning nuance of the ancient steps-this was her domain.

She fumbled for her keys, then let herself in. The kitchen hummed with electrical appliances, the green lights atop the industrial fridges and freezers punctuating the blackness of the still-warm kitchen. Annie located her phone quickly on the vast stainless-steel worktop by way of the red message light. The cold light from the screen spilled out into the sleeping kitchen.

The message was from Max: Sorry love, going to be late. Jude's fallen out with Petra again, so I'm going to sink a few pints with him. xx. M

Annie rolled her eyes. Petra seemed to throw Jude out of their flat above the pub on an almost weekly basis. She shoved the phone into her pocket and was about to leave when she heard a noise coming from the restaurant. She froze. Shit! She cocked her head in the direction of the restaurant and strained to listen.

She couldn't make out voices, but somebody was definitely moving about in there. She opened her phone to see what time Max had sent his message-with luck she could catch him somewhere between sober and useless. As Annie's finger hovered over Max's name, the last bar of her phone battery blipped out and snapped her back into darkness.

"Bugger, bugger, bollocks!" Annie hissed. The dull thud of a glass dropping onto the rush matting of the restaurant floor thrilled her to attention. Her heart thrummed, eyes wide against the dark, as her breath came hard and fast. And then she did the thing that always made her shout at the actresses in horror movies: She crept toward the noise.

She planned to sneak behind the bar and use the restaurant phone to call the police. The sticking noise her rubber soles made against the vinyl flooring sounded like Velcro strips being ripped apart. Annie pulled herself up onto her tiptoes and teetered on.

As the dim outline of the doorway to the lounge area came into view, Annie got down on all fours and crawled the last few feet.

The lounge area consisted of two long velvet banquettes and low tables-also known as tables eight and nine to the staff-where diners could enjoy drinks and canapŽs before being escorted to their tables in the restaurant beyond. Annie was squeezed between the open dishwasher and two metal barrels with plastic pipes that led up to the drink pumps. At this level, there was a pervading smell of stale beer and drain.

Over the drone of the drink's fridge and the wine chiller, Annie could make out heavy breathing. It was closer than she would have liked. Now what was she going to do? She couldn't very well call the police with the robbers on the other side of the bar.

She had to do something! She was not about to let some thieving arseholes make off with her hard-earned cash. If they wanted what was hers, they'd have to work twelve-hour shifts, like she did.

Annie had heard somewhere that if a predator in the wild approaches you, you can scare it off by running at it full pelt and yelling at the top of your voice. Spurred on by outrage and an increasing need for the toilet, Annie decided to test the theory. She slipped the electric flyswatter from a nearby shelf and set it to "zap." After several abortive counts of three, she took a good lug of air and leaped out from behind the bar, shouting and screaming. She slapped her palm against the bank of light switches on the wall, and light flooded the lounge. Still fully embodying the banshee spirit, Annie swiped the swatter wildly in the direction of the intruders.

A lot of frightened screaming and the sudden change from dark to light had left Annie temporarily dazzled, so it took her a moment to register what she was seeing. Sprawled across the banquette at table nine, desperately and inadequately trying to cover her nakedness with cushions, one of which had the words Keep Calm and Carry On embroidered across its front, was Ellie, the newest waitress. And before her, with a fast-drooping erection and a blue bar towel held up against his nipples, was Annie's husband, Max.



Later, as Annie lay back against the crisp white pillows in her hotel room, she would think of all the clever, cutting things she could have said to her husband in that moment.

"It's not what it looks like!" Max had said.

Behind him, Ellie sat very still, eyes wide like Bambi, as if she thought by not moving, Annie might not be able to see her. In an ideal world, Annie would have whipped back smartly with something like:

"Ah, I see you're training young Ellie in the finer arts of customer service."

Or:

"Don't tell me; there was a blackout and all your clothes fell off and Ellie was so frightened you had to put your penis into her vagina to calm her down?"

But what Annie actually said, when faced with her naked husband, clearly screwing the waitress half his age, while she, his long-suffering wife of twenty-six years, stood before him, deflated with crow's-feet around her eyes and an electric flyswatter hanging loosely by her side was: "Gup . . . Gup . . . Ubber . . . Affphoof."

Then she'd stumbled backward, zapped her own thigh with the swatter, and let out a tiny bit of wee.

Chapter 2

Annie slept surprisingly well, considering she had just entirely changed the course of her life, and woke before dawn on a strange sort of high. She called Marianne, her head chef at the Pomegranate Seed, filled her in on the situation, and handed over the responsibility of the kitchen.

"What a shit-bag!" said Marianne. "Don't worry about a thing. I've got this. How long do you think you'll be gone?"

"I haven't really thought that far ahead yet," said Annie. Her heart began to pound as she realized she had no plan beyond the next two days she had booked at the hotel. "Can you remind Max to feed Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle?" Annie asked. Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was her cat.

"Are you sure you're okay?" asked Marianne.

"Don't I sound okay?" said Annie.

"Well, yes," said Marianne. "You sound a bit too okay. A bit manic. Like you've taken speed or something."

Annie laughed. The sound was high-pitched. "I'm fine!" Annie said, a little too brightly. "Really! Absolutely fine!"

She looked around her hotel room, knowing that every room in the building would be identical; generic "modern art" canvas above the bed, satin silver bed runner to break the expanse of white linen, a brown faux leather chair in one corner, and walls painted in a pale gray, which would no doubt be called something ridiculous like Husky Shimmer. There was a desk along one wall with a hair dryer, a travel kettle, and two cups on a plastic tray, and above it a flat-screen TV. It was the traveling salesman's home away from home, the hen-party haven, and now, a wronged wife's bolt-hole.

"Do you want me to come over?" asked Marianne.

"No, no. Don't be silly. Somebody's got to run the kitchen."

And then, almost as if her voice were speaking without her brain's permission, she found herself saying: "They were on table nine, you see. I chose that sofa. I picked the color out of a book of swatches. And the weird thing is, when I caught them, I kept thinking, What about the velvet? Semen is a hell of stain to get out. That's mad, isn't it? What kind of a woman worries about stains when she walks in on her husband screwing another woman?"

There was a silence on the line for a moment.

"Your silence suggests you think I'm bonkers," said Annie.

"Sorry," said Marianne. "I got sidetracked there. I was trying to remember which supermarket sells a product that claims to remove semen."

"From velvet?" asked Annie.

"From anything, I think," said Marianne.

"Good lord!" said Annie.

"And if it doesn't work, we can always get it reupholstered."

"I'll don't think I'll ever be able to look at table nine without feeling completely humiliated," said Annie.

"Then we'll skip reupholstering and go straight to burning!" said Marianne. "We'll have a ceremonial burning of table nine in the courtyard."

"I'm not sure burning sofas is very environmentally friendly," said Annie.

"We could build effigies of Max and Ellie and burn them along with it. Like the ultimate closure!"

"You've got a dark side, Marianne," said Annie. "My kitchen is in good hands. The staff will never dare to cross you."

As she ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Annie complimented herself on how well she was handling everything. She felt fine, she really did. And then she got back to the hotel room and found ten missed calls, seven texts, a dozen messages on Facebook Messenger, and an e-mail-all from Max. Annie didn't read them. She was suddenly very tired. She didn't want to think about all the things she was supposed to be thinking about: the business, finances, the twins, Max, Ellie, the end of her life as she knew it. Annie turned the volume on her phone down low and got back into bed, where she stayed for the next three days.



Her phone buzzed on the bedside table. She let it buzz until it stopped. And then it buzzed again immediately. Annie sighed, reached languidly over, and looked at the screen. It was Peter. She answered it.

"Hello, love," she said.

"Hey, Mum," said Peter. "Alex is here with me. We've got you on speaker."

"Hi, Mum," said Alex.

"Hello, darling. Where are you?"

"At mine," said Peter.

"I came down after work," said Alex. "I can work from here tomorrow."

"Oh, that's nice," said Annie.

"Well, we heard we'd become the product of a broken home, so . . ." His sentence was cut short by a scuffling sound followed by an aggrieved "Ouch!"

"We're calling to tell you we support your decision," said Peter.

"Should have done it years ago!" said Alex.

"Oh!" said Annie. "Well. This is unexpected. Who told you?"

"Grandma," said Peter.

"Of course she did," said Annie.

Max's mother would have been champing at the bit to tell the boys before Annie got the chance. She imagined her mother-in-law as an aging racehorse in a twinset, leaping over her mahogany nest of tables and upsetting the faux Tiffany lamp to get to the phone. It was no wonder Max was such a prima donna; whatever his faults were, as far as her mother-in-law was concerned, they were down to somebody else.

"I'm sorry you had to hear it from someone else," Annie continued. "I was going to call you, I was just . . ." Sleeping mostly, she thought. "I was just getting my head together a bit and then I was going to tell you."

"We know about Dad's affairs, Mum," said Alex.

"Oh God!" said Annie. "Really? How?"

"Er, we're not stupid," said Peter. "We've known for years."

"Years? Oh God!" Annie groaned. "I am so sorry."

"What are you sorry about?" asked Alex.

"I'm sorry that you found out," said Annie. "You were children. Children shouldn't have to deal with their parents' shit."

"Like I said," said Peter. "We weren't stupid."

"Of course you weren't," said Annie. "I was the stupid one."

"Shit happens," said Alex.

"What a fabulous way to sum up your childhood," said Annie. Her head was pounding like someone was trying to remove the top of her skull with a melon baller. "You'd better start making a parental snag list, and I'll pay for your counseling."

"Already started," said Alex.

"It wasn't all bad," said Peter in a way that was meant to sound reassuring.

"Urrhg," said Annie. "This is a nightmare. I'm stuck in a nightmare!"

"Sooner or later everybody's parents drop off their pedestal," said Alex. "It's the natural order of things. Helps to make you grow up. Dad just fell off his a little earlier than most."

"When did I fall off mine?" asked Annie.

"You haven't yet," said Peter.

"But we remain hopeful," added Alex.

"We’re hoping for something spectacular!" said Peter. "A drug-fuelled sex orgy with a priest or something."
           
"Blimey!" said Annie.
           
"Let loose, Mum!" said Alex. "Get pissed. Get a tattoo! Do something just for you."
           
"The world won’t stop spinning if you get off the ride and walk for a while," said Peter.
           
"What did I do to deserve you boys?" said Annie.
           
"You just got lucky, I guess," said Peter.
           
"We just want you to know that we support your decision one hundred percent," said Alex.
           
"And you can go easy on yourself, you don’t need to worry about us," said Peter.
          
 "What we’re saying is,’ said Alex. ‘Don’t go back. If it’s permission you need, then you’ve got it."
           
The call ended, and Annie promised to keep them posted on her movements, although at the moment she couldn’t envisage herself moving very far. She wondered what it was about this affair that had finally forced her out of impotence. The scene flashed before her in all its fleshy glory, and she winced; that was why: there was a difference between knowing and seeing. Actually bearing witness to your husband cheating in full technicolour was like a sucker punch to the eyeballs; Ellie’s perfect pointy nipples were going to haunt her for the rest of her days. Annie pulled the duvet back over her head and went to sleep.