But Aldous had kept his own copy. Of course he had. He was that sort of man.
And the reason he had borrowed it at all —
Two months before he died, my husband lost his job.
He never told me.
He borrowed from Gus to cover the mortgage while he looked for something else. And for eight weeks, every single morning, he put on a shirt and a tie and kissed me at the door and went out.
Gus told me he used to sit in the back of that diner with a coffee and a newspaper open at the job pages from about nine until about three.
Eight weeks. And I asked him how work was every evening, and he told me.
Two men in my house.
Both of them hiding money trouble from me. Both of them doing it in exactly the same way — quietly, on their own, telling me it was fine.
And both of them doing it for exactly the same reason.
To keep it off me.
I looked across that office at my son on his crate, with a plaster on his face and his hands red from the water, and I understood that he had not learnt it from anybody.
Nobody taught him. He had just watched.
And now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
After the funeral, I sat on the end of Finn’s bed. He was ten years old.
And I said: it’s just us now. I need you to be the man of the house.
Every grieving parent says it. I did not think about it once. I would not have remembered saying it if he had not said it back to me, in that office, very quietly, when Gus asked him why.
He said: Mum said I had to be the man of the house.
He took it literally. Of course he did. He was ten.
He found a debt in his father’s desk and he decided that the man of the house pays his debts.
And here is the part I have had to sit with longest.
For six months — the hidden cash, the lies, the mud, the torn sleeve, the graze — every single time, my imagination went to the worst thing.
Drugs. Stealing. Older boys. Something at the creek.
Not once — not one single time in six months — did it go to my son doing something good.
