Chapter 57 It’s three hours

Chapter 57 It’s three hours
Bruno drove and I sat with my feet up and the window down two inches and the city giving way to open road.
An hour in he stopped at a petrol station and came back with two coffees and a paper bag and handed me both without speaking.
Two pastries. The kind with almond paste in the middle that I had mentioned once, three weeks ago, in passing, while describing a bakery near my mother's house.
I looked at him.
He pulled back onto the road.
"You remembered," I said.
"You said it like it mattered," he said.
I held the bag in my lap and looked at the road and thought about twelve years of birthdays where Richard gave me things that demonstrated what he thought I should want. Jewellery I never wore. Restaurants chosen for how they looked. A life dressed in the preferences of a woman he had decided I was.
Bruno had remembered a pastry from a sentence I hadn't finished.
"You listen," I said. "Not to respond. Actually listen."
He glanced at me and back at the road.
"You are interesting," he said.
"That is not what I mean," I said.
"I know what you mean," he said. "I am also saying you are interesting. Both things are true."
I broke the second pastry in half and handed half to him and he took it and the road opened up wide and straight ahead of us.
"Tell me about her," Bruno said.
"She taught history for thirty years," I said. "Retired two years ago and immediately took up three hobbies she had been postponing. She gardens badly and with great enthusiasm. Joined a book club that does not read the books." I paused. "And she started learning Portuguese."
Bruno looked at me.
"She said she always wanted to go to Lisbon," I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"We will take her," he said. "When she has enough Portuguese to order lunch herself. We sit there and let her do it."
I looked at the road ahead and felt something that had no clean name but had everything to do with a man who thought of taking my mother to Lisbon so she could order lunch in Portuguese.
"She will love you," I said.
"I know," he said.
I shook my head and he glanced at me and the corner of his mouth moved.
We came off the motorway and the roads narrowed and I started recognising things. A church on a hill. A farm shop with the same handwritten sign. A turn that meant twenty minutes and then my mother's gate.
Bruno drove without asking for directions.
"How do you know the way?" I said.
"I looked it up at the petrol station," he said. "While I was getting the coffee."
"You looked up my mother's address, bought pastries I mentioned three weeks ago, and memorised the route," I said. "In five minutes."
"The pastries took the longest," he said. "They only had one left."
"There was one left and you tore it in half," I said.
"You would have given me half anyway," he said.
I leaned across and kissed his cheek and his hand found mine on the seat and covered it and we drove the last stretch like that.
My mother was already at the door when we pulled in.
She looked at Bruno the way she had looked at every student who walked into her classroom for thirty years. Directly and without performance and with the full intention of forming an accurate opinion.
She held me properly when I reached her, both arms, no rush, and then stepped back and looked at Bruno.
"You drove three hours on a Tuesday morning," she said.
"Yes," Bruno said.
"That tells me something," she said.
"What does it tell you?" he said.
"That you do not wait for the right moment," she said. "You make the moment right." She turned from the door. "Come in. Lunch is ready."
Inside the house Bruno stopped at the photographs in the hall. My father at forty, laughing at something off-camera, one hand raised mid-gesture, completely unaware of being photographed.
Bruno looked at it for a long moment.
"He looks like someone worth knowing," he said quietly.
My mother appeared in the kitchen doorway.
"He was," she said. "Come and sit down."
Lunch was the kind my mother made when she wanted to show someone something without saying it directly. Three courses, the good plates, wine opened before we arrived. She sat across from Bruno and asked questions without apology and in an order that seemed random and was not.
She asked about his family first.
Bruno told her about his father and Daniel and she listened the way she listened to everything, completely, without storing her next question while he was still talking.
"That is a lot of absence for one person," she said when he finished.
"Yes," Bruno said. "It made me careful about what I let myself want."
She looked at me briefly and then back at him.
"And now?" she said.
"Now I am less careful," he said.
She picked up her fork.
"Good," she said.
After lunch she made coffee and we took it outside despite the cold because she always had, a habit my father started and she kept, and we sat in the three chairs around the iron table with our coats on.
My mother looked at the far wall.
"Your father planted those," she said, nodding at a row of bare rose canes. "The year you were born. One for every year he planned to watch you grow up."
Nineteen rose canes.
I had known this and not known it at the same time.
Bruno looked at them.
"We will plant more," he said. "In the spring, come back and plant as many as there should have been."
My mother looked at him.
Then she looked at me with the expression she reserved for things she had decided and did not need to say out loud.
She picked up her coffee.
"I will clear the space along the south wall," she said.
Bruno sat where my mother pointed and she brought food to the table without asking what anyone wanted because that was how she had always done it and Bruno accepted the plate she put in front of him the way he accepted most things, without comment and without performance.
She sat across from him and looked at him properly for the first time.
"How did you meet her?" she said.
"We rented the same apartment," Bruno said.
My mother looked at me.
"The listing Mara sent," I said.
She looked back at Bruno.
"And you stayed," she said. "Through all of it."
"Yes," Bruno said.
"Why?" she said.
Bruno picked up his fork and looked at her directly.
"Because leaving felt like the wrong thing to do," he said. "And I have learned to trust that feeling."
My mother held his gaze for a moment.
Then she looked at me with the expression she used when she had formed an opinion and found it satisfactory.
She picked up her own fork.
"Eat," she said. "Both of you. You look like you have not had a proper meal in weeks."
"We had eggs," Bruno said.
"That is not a proper meal," my mother said.