Songs For Your Mother Gordon MacMillan (good books for 7th graders .txt) 📖

to have passed. Although I cannot help wondering if it is only temporary and I worry what rough seas lie ahead. The only time I’ve struggled with Luke previously and hardly known what to say is when he’d asked me about his mother the other week. I was reading to him, and I was mid-sentence when he said it.

‘I want to hear a story about Mommy,’ he said.

At first, I had no idea what to say, my mind was a blank. I’ve made sure we talk about Lauren often. It is one of the things that the school counsellor recommended from Luke’s sessions when he first arrived.

I’ve had the only picture I have of her blown up and put it a frame, and we still have her crayon form on the wall next to the steps going down to the kitchen.

Mostly, however, it is me asking Luke, as I have little of my own to share with him about his mother.

I started to do what I’d done before. I added up the time that Lauren and I had spent together. I knew that it didn’t add up to a great deal and that it didn’t add up to enough. It was our time, and it was all we had. It was what fate had given us, that and no more. As I thought about it, thought about that evening as a whole, and later into the night, there was more than a story to tell. Plenty of people had made movies out of it.

I broke it down, piece by piece, each moment a separate parcel, from the second I saw her in the bar, and looked back at her as I played from the stage. When I thought of it like that, our story was much bigger than I’d first imagined.

Even the short time that elapsed when I’d played Lauren Fahrenheit and then that Rolling Stones’ song, ‘Wild Horses’, was a story in itself. That had led Lauren to tell me that she’d had horses as a child. I told Luke about that, about his mother and the horse, about how she had always ridden them, like her father and mother had before her, and then I played him the song, which brought a huge smile to his face.

‘Can we go and see horses?’ Luke asked.

‘Of course we can.’

‘Can Georgia come too?’ he asked.

‘We’ll have to ask TSP, but I’m sure she can. They have little ponies. You’ll be able to sit on them and ride.’

‘Like Mommy?’ Luke had said.

‘Yeah, like her,’ I said.

‘That’s what I want to be like,’ he said.

Chapter 17

TSP’s misgivings notwithstanding, I go ahead with my school-gate date. Despite, on some level, appreciating she might right. I press my doubts aside and remind myself that I’ve thought this through. I’ve done my due diligence. I don’t know how the evening will go. I do think Jane and I might be good for each other. Besides, she’s keen and, if we take it slow, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work.

While I can sidestep the misgivings without too much self-examination, what I cannot do is shake a slightly uncomfortable feeling I’m having while I wait for Susan to arrive for babysitting duties.

Luke is watching cartoons in the sitting room as I get ready, and I am off-kilter. I can’t quite put my finger on it. All I know is that I feel, I don’t know, odd. You know that feeling when something’s not right? You can sense it, and yet can’t quite say what it is? Maybe, I tell myself, it’s because this is the first date I’ve been on since Luke arrived. With Rachel long out of the picture, I’ve been thinking a lot about Lauren.

In her notes she’s written about dating, and how she found it hard to adjust with a small child in her life. That isn’t quite it. My feeling is more one of guilt or at least an echo of sin. I feel guilty, and I can’t quite work out why. I haven’t seen Lauren since that morning now more than six years ago. As I search my feelings, I’m sure that guilt is what I am currently experiencing. It is what’s off-balance inside me. I feel guilty about going out on a date. It’s as if I’m committing an act of betrayal, that I am cheating on a girl who might well be gone, who I barely knew and haven’t seen in a long time. I don’t know what to make of it.

You shouldn’t feel guilty, Lauren says. I felt the same thing. At least, in the beginning. It’s something else you have to work your way through.

‘I wasn’t expecting it. To feel quite this way, I mean. It’s the strangest thing. It’s taken me by surprise. I haven’t seen you for a long time, apart from in my head,’ I say.

It’s Luke. It is the connection we have. I hadn’t seen or heard from you for nine months when Luke was born. I still found myself thinking about you almost every day.

‘What kinds of things did you think?’ I ask.

My daydreams would run away with me, and I would wonder what it would be like if you walked in through the door and what we would say to each other. I had these whole imaginary conversations, Lauren says.

I nod, smiling in recognition at Lauren’s words, and I think of my own daydreams.

‘You’re definitely inside my head,’ I say.

Lauren wrote that having me inside her head slowed things down when it came to the time to get back out there and, while she met guys, no one ever went the distance.

I would have been happy to settle. It didn’t happen, he didn’t walk through the door, and neither did you. I don’t know if that was Luke, if it was you, if it was me or if it was all three of us, Lauren says.

That’s precisely what it might be, that it is all of us. It is Luke and