Free The Find by Kathy Page Page A

the dashboard. ‘I’m not sure. Now don’t get bossy on me, Vik.’ He picked up the card and gave it to her again.
    â€˜You don’t have to act on her advice, just hear it.’
    â€˜I do have to act on yours?’
    â€˜You could try that out, for once.’
    â€˜I am grateful, Vik, really.’
    Frankie ripped the exquisite Japanese wrapping paper from her gifts, and then helped Sam. They tossed aside the t-shirts featuring gorgeous, incomprehensible writing, yelled their delight as they came to the heart of the matter: robotic pets that walked stiffly across the room, communicated in a series of electronic warbles, beeps, whirs and squeaks and had to be cared for by pressing buttons in order to feed or soothe them.
    Frankie slotted batteries into their bellies and remotes.
    â€˜Point!’ she yelled at her brother. Lights flashed; the creatures’ plastic feet clacked across the wooden floor.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ Anna told Lesley, ‘but they asked. They’ll soon get bored with them and then you can use them as an example next time they want something dreadful.’ Lesley handed her some glasses for the table.
    â€˜You better be right,’ she said, ‘or I’ll send them to stay with you.’
    â€˜Please! But after I’ve done this application—’
    Lesley forgave Anna for the robots when her own gift slipped from the tissue paper it was wrapped in: a length of blue-grey slubbed silk that felt smooth and rough at the same time. The fabric, she said, was perfect. It would make a duvet cover and then a Roman blind... Anna did not care much about decorations, but she recognised the passion. Lesley had some similarities with Mama, and it was easy to see how Vik enjoyed providing for her: her pleasure in the physical surfaces of her life, in the tastes and smells and kinds of things was intense, and so, presumably, was her pleasure in him.
    Vik grilled the fish. The low light streamed through the open doors, caught in the polished glasses and the coloured and colourless liquids they contained; it bounced around the table, lightly touching the knives and forks, the edges of plates, and burnishing the grain of the wood. Everything had a great depth and richness, and peoples’ skin and clothes looked somehow more than themselves, as if it all were part of a painting, and Mama herself, her cheeks flushed, her white hair electrified, her upper body wrapped in an intricately crocheted purple cardigan, was likewise crying out to be made into a picture. They passed the camera around the table until Vik carried in the salmon, perfectly charred, and used the last scrap of memory for a picture of that. Sam settled on Anna’s lap and soon her shirt was damp with sweat, his or hers or both, she had no idea. His head knocked periodically into her chin as she ate, using her fork only, the other hand holding him tight.
    Later, when the kids tired of their robot pets and ran outside to play in the last of the light, Lesley closed the doors to the deck and Vik lit the stove; propane flames danced around the coals.
    â€˜I’m really hoping we’ll have one more,’ Lesley told Anna as they cleared up, ‘once Sam’s done preschool.’
    Mama slept in the car on the way home from Vik’s. Anna, driving under a sky clotted with stars, felt lighter. It seemed to her that she had let things get on top of her, but now she had support, a perspective on what was happening, and life would eventually return to how it used to be.

10
    â€” ♦ —
    THE EIGHTH-FLOOR OFFICE OFFERED A VIEW through Venetian blinds and tinted glass of other office blocks; the street between rose very gently into the distance and bore a steady stream of afternoon traffic, though no sounds from the outside penetrated the room. There was a scent of synthetic fibres and cologne.
    â€˜May I call you by your first name?’ Pamela Schott asked, as they took their