Sadie woke up the morning after her almost break-in with a feeling of joie de vie that surprised her; but then, she thought, Well, doesn’t it make sense, in a way? I had a close brush with death, or at least serious misfortune, and now I feel more alive. Her morning walk along the shoreline turned into a morning jog, complete with ratty old sneakers (trainers, they called them in England) and an utterly unnecessary windbreaker (a… waterproof?) and when she came back to her house, she was filled with delight to see the skinny orange cat waiting on the patio, as if expecting to be let in. Sadie didn’t disappoint.
“Come on in, girl,” she said happily (a supposition that turned out to be wrong—thankfully, she’d named the cat “Tango” and thus there was no need to alter his name when his sex was discovered) as she opened a tin of tuna and split it between Lucky, and named-on-the-spot Tango. (Tango was named after a brand of orange soda, popular in the UK, despite it’s disgusting flavour and unbearable sweetness. Sadie wouldn’t have named the cat thusly, but his coat really was an incredible shade of pale orange. It had to be done.)
By the end of the week, both cats were microchipped, dewormed, and up to date with all their injections. The officer who she’d agreed to meet for coffee—Officer Johnstone, or “Call me Becca,” had rung twice to keep her apprised of how her case was progressing, and she seemed so interested in how Sadie was settling in, she got treated to a rundown of how each cat was now officially adopted, and wearing a collar complete with his/her name and Sadie’s landline number (grape purple for Lucky, lime green for Tango). Glad to have the beginnings of a real friend in the UK, Sadie also told Becca how she had begun the business of transferring all her assets to a UK bank account. As her grandmother had set up a child’s savings account for her when she was about 12, and it had automatically been upgraded to a standard current account when she’d turned 18, this was much simpler than she’d expected.
On Friday morning, she got a solicitor—not to be confused with a barrister, but more on that later—and put her tiny Atlanta apartment on the market. She was unlikely to make much of a profit on it, as she’d only had her mortgage for a couple of years, but you never knew, and house prices had risen significantly since she’d moved in… it was better to make a clean break with her old home anyway, if you asked her, and so she would. Then, feeling a wonderful sense of accomplishment and mulling over the barest germ of an idea in her mind, she went to the local JobCentre, to register for temp work. Specifying part-time work only (she had things to do—again, more on that later) Sadie then took the opportunity of the unusually warm day to go inside a building that had air conditioning (a rare and precious commodity, in England, as she had already learned).
This was how, on the hottest day of the year, when the entire population of the UK seemed to be outside and half-naked, enjoying the sun and/or frying themselves to a crisp, Sadie found herself overdressed in a summer cardigan, ankle-length sundress, and a floppy hat, arguing with a middle-aged librarian about whether or not she could listen to music on her phone while she browsed the Internet and got a library card. Just as she was beginning to explain—for the third time—that the earbuds in her pocket meant that no one else would hear her phone, at all, a knight in shining armour rode to her rescue.
“Sadie? Florence’s granddaughter?” Turning around, Sadie came face-to-face with the most unlikely-looking police officer she’d ever seen. There was no mistaking that West Country twang, and the timbre of her voice was pretty distinctive as well, but the WPC’s appearance meant that Sadie’s, “Officer Johnstone? Rebecca?” was so questioning as to almost insulting… but really.
Dressed in a white halter-neck top and denim shorts that were little more than hot pants, no more than 5’ 2”, this officer of the law came up to Sadie’s shoulder or thereabouts, and her pale blonde hair was pulled back into a stubby ponytail, aside from a longish, side-swept fringe that nearly covered her light brown, delicately-arched eyebrows. Her eyes, so bright a blue they were nearly turquoise, were fringed with surprisingly dark lashes, and her button nose perched atop a full, candy-pink smile. Her face was small enough to be a child’s face, and despite her mature, slightly throaty voice marking her as either at least 30, or a 4-pack-a-day smoker, she looked young enough to have trouble buying alcohol without I.D. Or even buying Tylenol (paracetamol, here).
“Please do call me Becca,” she twanged cheerfully towards Sadie, before turning to the librarian, “Now then Mrs. Chenoweth, is this American adventurer causin’ a ruckus in your lovely quiet library? I’m sure she can read the rules, even if she *is* from across the Pond. Shall I have a go on her little phone, and see how noisy it is?”
Bemused, Sadie handed over her phone—a very new purchase, and one that would have been impossible to get so swiftly, minus her late grandmother’s forethought in setting her up with a UK identity—and couldn’t help choking on a laugh as Becca plugged in her own set of earbuds, produced from a pocket that didn’t look large enough to hold a two-pence piece (or a quarter would be about that size, if they were using American money) and snapped Sadie a quick, unmistakable wink as the librarian turned away slightly to mutter to herself. The muttering intensified when Becca loaded up Sadie’s YouTube playlist, hit shuffle, and then said, “Go on, Mrs. C. What am I listenin’ to?” and eventually, a truce was reached whereby Sadie could listen to her music, but only for the length of time it took her to set up an account and a library card. 10 minutes later, as Sadie smiled in the face of the woman’s sour promise that the library card would be printed off and ready to pick-up on Monday, “When the man who does the computers and all that is back in,” she realised Becca was still there. The WPC was frank with her, as she walked her out.
“I’m meant to be meeting my brother now,” she said, as they strolled along towards the largest of the ice cream parlours along the seafront, “But it’s my day off, and I’ve had a text from a… mate, of mine.” Her raised eyebrows left Sadie in no doubt that what she meant was, she had a booty call lined up. “Terry’s on nightshift tonight, so I’ve got about 3 hours to take advantage of the situation, if you catch my drift,” she grinned up at Sadie. “I thought, seein’ as you’re stunningly gorgeous and my brother’s not a total knob-head, you might have an ice cream with him, while he’s over from Bath. You might have something to talk about, I thought. He’s a genealogist specializing in 19th-century British authors, and during your 999 call, didn’t you say your degree was in…” Here, she shrugged helplessly and grinned again. “Some bollocks to do with art, or history, or somethin’ like that?”
Laughing out loud, Sadie agreed to be walked to the ice cream parlour and introduced, and to try her best to be civil/entertaining towards Becca’s brother. The women chatted easily for the remainder of the walk, and Sadie was almost giddy when they exchanged mobile numbers and made firm plans to go and see her grandmother’s work at the church hall on Becca’s next day off. As they approached the telltale neon sign and it’s flashing banana split, however, Sadie remembered why she’d never really had a serious boyfriend—despite her obvious good looks, or maybe because of them, she had always felt awkward and unattractive when faced with the opposite sex. It’s just Becca’s brother, it’s just Becca’s brother, it’s just Becca’s brother, she chanted silently to herself, willing herself not to clam up, fastening and unfastening the top button of her bright yellow cardigan (it matched the paint-splatter pattern of blues, greens, yellows, and oranges on her abstract-print maxi dress) and somehow managing not to chew on her nails, as Becca pushed open the door of the ice cream shop, looked over at the studious-looking profile of a man bent over a menu, and fairly shouted, “Hello, my ‘andsome!”
When he turned around, Sadie’s heart nearly stopped. “Are you…?”
“Twins?” Becca finished, nodding before she’d really gotten the words out properly. “Yeah, we were double trouble in school, or we would’ve been, if this one wasn’t such a swot,” she said, smiling as her brother came over. After listening to Becca for the past half hour, Sadie was unprepared for the rich, rounded tones that emanated from the tall, slender man next to her.
“Yes, and we might have been twin chess champions, if you’d agreed to join chess club with me—sadly, it was not to be,” he said, before turning his full attention on Sadie. “I’m Robert, due to our parents’ charming sense of alliteration. How sad for them, that Rebecca always goes by the diminutive form of her name,” he said, extending a hand politely, but not without warmth.
“Sadie, I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said, still a little shy, but oddly put at ease by the suspicion—she wasn’t sure where it came from, but now that she’d realised it, she was sure it was spot-on, as they said here—that he felt shy as well. He wasn’t obviously trying to look at her cleavage (reasonable in America, but somehow less impressive in Great Britain, where most of the women seemed downright top-heavy) but his startlingly blue eyes had met her hazel ones only briefly… yes, she was sure of it. He was shy, too.
“Becca tells me you’re a genealogist,” Sadie said, and then, laughing in spite of herself, added, “And she also wants you to tell me about that after we’ve said our goodbyes to her. She has a… thing, she has to do,” she finished, somewhat uncertainly.
“A thing? I’ll bet I know exactly the sort of ‘thing’ that is,” Robert said, a suspiciously teasing light coming on in his eyes. “Is this a new thing, or the same one that you stood me up for in March, during Easter Break? My one long holiday of the semester, and my own twin sister can’t be bothered—”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m rubbish I am, you’re probably better off just spending the afternoon with Sadie anyway. Take her for a walk along the beach; I bet that hair looks smashin’, blowing in the breeze,” she said, nodding towards the messy brown, chocolately waves that reliably went a bit reddish in summer and a bit darker brown in winter, and never did anything else as expected. Almost without meaning to, or so it seemed, Becca added, “And yeah, it’s still Terry.”
This got a jocular, “My word, what does that make this? 4 months, or even 5? You’ll break some sort of record,” from her brother, who laughed quietly and hugged her with surprisingly fierceness before murmuring something into her hair. Sadie couldn’t quite make out what it was—probably just some variation on, “look after yourself” or “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do”—but it was said with such genuine sincerity that for a moment, Sadie keenly felt the lack of a sibling, in her life.
A bit like the lack of pets—which had never bothered her before, yet now, was of the ultimate importance to remedy—the lack of family was just one of the many things that Sadie was, unbeknownst to her, preparing to change, during that short British summer.
Submitted January 21, 2019 at 03:23AM by AmandaQuirky http://bit.ly/2CBrDbW
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