A heartwarming short story
Ilooked at our garden.The fence was wet with dew, patchily grey and brown in the sunshine. “I should have told them to get wood stain at the DIY place,” I murmured to myself.“It needs done.”
My husband and the girls would be back from the shops soon, ready to help with the meal that we were laying on for my mum and my stepfather,Tim.
I surveyed the garden again. I knew that when Tim saw our fence he would itch to get outside and “do a bit of work” on it.
Around their garden ran a slatted fence in tip-top condition. It had been that way all the time I’d lived at home.
On our kitchen window-sill sat the jam jar that we used for cleaning brushes. It was weirdly big for a jam jar, and I wondered what it had contained.
Every house, I pondered, owns these very particular, slightly mysterious items, indispensable for a certain job.The large brush that I’d use for the fence would be in the loft somewhere.
I remembered that the jam jar had been Tim’s once. It had worked its way here via some loan, long forgotten.
Looking at its stained glass took me back to my teenage years, and how angry I’d been at the way Tim went on and on about the fence.
I remembered boring childhood afternoons, standing beside
Tim at that fence, painting away with wood stain. I had inwardly fumed, standing there with Tim on wet grass.
Tim had married my mum when I was nine, after my dad walked out.
Back then, nobody criticised my dad in front of me. He came to fetch me every Wednesday for tea, and every other weekend to stay at his flat. He showered me with treats and I adored him.
Tim was quiet, shorter than my dad, and wore a flat cap. I couldn’t see why my mum liked him. He kept making me do the garden, too.
I turned 10, and then 11. I began to care about my clothes.
“Put on something tatty, Pippa,” Tim would say.“You don’t want to spoil those shoes.”
I’d give him a sarcastic glare.
As if someone like me would own anything tatty!
Tim and Mum were coming for afternoon tea. I took the cling film off the sandwiches. I recalled childhood meals where I’d suggested that Tim install a plastic fence or a brick wall.
“Less maintenance,” I’d told him in that superior way children have.
Through my teens I had seethed with resentment that this man stole an hour from me every fortnight for outside work, when I could have been with my friends.
“I think the wooden one’s fine,” he’d always say with his cheerful smile.
Later, when contact with my real dad fizzled out, there were fewer ways for me to avoid the work.
My dad married again, and his new wife had twins. He didn’t have time for me.
I listened for our car in the drive. It was good that our girls had gone shopping with Gary. He worked long hours and didn’t see them enough.
I knew that they’d be arguing about the choice of music as they drove back, and about who had been allowed to sit in the trolley.
Parenting, Gary and I had discovered, was more about fights than celebrations.We “kept on keeping on”, and the girls were doing OK, fingers crossed.
Clouds passed across the sky, and a splatter of rain made me turn again to the window. I could almost see Tim, my embarrassing stepfather, putting his hand out for a strip of heavy-duty plastic as he refitted a piece of fencing after a storm.
“I read,” he’d commented,“that wrapping one of these round the base of each new support can delay rot.”
What had we talked about back then,Tim and I? I’d been convinced as a teenager that we had nothing in common: he was interested in light opera, for goodness’ sake!
But we had talked. I’d told him how much I hated science because of Mrs Powell’s constant criticism.
Tim never said much, and annoyed me by not providing solutions.
Mum and Tim arrived, and my lot weren’t back yet.Tim stood at the window as my mum filled the kettle.
“It never ends, does it?”Tim said. “The garden?” I asked.
“You and I used to do fencing, Pippa.”
I was passing, and I stopped behind him, teapot in hand.
His balding head took me back to a hundred arguments, lifts back from parties and irritable hours with a smelly paintbrush.Tim had come into my life at the worst possible time – not the worst for me, but for him.
How to take on someone else’s angry child, on the brink of puberty and hankering after a romantic idea of a father who couldn’t be bothered? Tim had kept on keeping on.
He had worked out that the only method he had of dealing with me was to do something active, to oil the wheels of conversation while not face-to-face across a table.
Tim was no hero; he was just a husband hoping to become a father.
“Did I own this jar at some point?” he asked.
“It’s your jar.”
I was seeing past years – the slow changes wrought in our relationship; the hard work he’d put in.
He turned to me.
“It’s the perfect jar for the job.” “Perfect,” I agreed.
I put down the teapot and gave him a hug. I could feel the surprise in his body. His arms wrapped round me.
“Good girl,” he said.