Free Season to Taste by Natalie Young Page A

still looked pale. “What a fright,” she whispered, as her mother would have done, fingering the coins
     in her purse.
    â€œIt’s not busy,” he said. “For a Monday.”
    Lizzie gave him a five-pound note. Already this morning she had spoken more words than she’d usually done in a week. It wasn’t
     hard to find a few more.
    â€œWas it busy at the weekend?”
    â€œHad a guitarist here Saturday night. He was all right. Old Emmett from the farm got stuck at that table in the corner. Had
     to give him a fireman’s lift to the car and take him home.”
    Lizzie thought of the stick and the barrel chest and the wave of white hair. It would be hard to lift him onto a shoulder.
     Even a strong shoulder like Mike’s. A year ago there had been a MISSING poster on a tree in the lane with a photograph of Emmett. It had been up high on the trunk, but Jacob reckoned the old man
     had pinned the poster to the tree himself. “Has to be him. Who else?” he’d said. In the picture Emmett had been younger than
     he was by about a decade, smiling into the camera with eyes that had been whited out by Tipp-Ex.
    â€œYou all right with that lot? Need a tray?”
    Lizzie shook her head and grinned at Mike and then carried her wine and crisps out to the garden. There were ducks on the
     wet grass and the leaves from a weeping willow clogged up the surface of the stream. It was almost sunny. Lizzie sat on a
     bench at one of the wooden tables, using her mac to keep her bottom dry. She took little puffs on a cigarette. Emmett should
     have been put in a home by now. He wasn’t a danger to others, or to himself; he wasn’t someone who should be isolated from
     the community, but he wasn’t right. He was old and his mind had gone. They should have taken him in, she reflected. She took
     a deep puff and tried to lift her shoulders. She hadn’t smoked much in the last twenty years, but she always enjoyed it when
     she did. She and Jacob had tried to give up, as a couple, a number of times. Whoever had given in first had been bashful,
     relieved, defiant out in the garden.
    He’d smoked with his left hand, holding the tip right up close to his palm like a good-looking actor he’d seen in a film.
     She’d barbecued that left hand on Sunday evening in a treacle marinade, wrapped it in foil and let it cook for twenty-five
     minutes only. She’d broken it up while it was still in the foil with the carving knife, and she’d been able to suck the meat,
     which was wet around the wrist and the fatty bit above the thumb. Jacob had told her that a quarter of the brain’s motor cortex
     was devoted to working the muscles of the hand. At the kitchen table, with a glass of wine, and the radio on, she’d tasted
     blood and skin and winced into a forkful of fluffy mashed potato, and she’d crunched the ice-cool slices of cucumber carefully,
     and spooned on a little minted yogurt. She’d started flossing again now, too.
    Now she teased her hair a bit with her smoking hand. She looked at her nails. It was possible that she’d been offered a job.
     Determination. As if she were missing a piece, he’d said. “Ego, Lizzie, and determination, to do things for yourself.” Two
     fat ducks scrambled out of the water and waddled towards where she was sitting hunched on the edge of the bench. They stopped
     a few feet away, and then put their beaks to the ground. But she could do things for herself. Good or bad, she’d always, in
     a sense, been doing things for herself.
    Emmett had come to the barbecue they’d had once—the only social occasion—and he’d done nothing but sit forward on one of the
     chairs, staring into the trees. He was mad and old and decrepit, and he did nothing, and that gave him time to smell the air
     and notice things. Of all the people around here, he was the one she feared most.
    She took the glass