Memories are made of this

Her sad duty done
Their house might as well have been inhabited with little green men and a space ship moored up near Arthur’s current hobby, a triumph motor bike he was slowly re-building in his shed at the bottom of their garden. Esther had realized years since that there was little point in losing patience with him anymore than there was point in pleading that he bought himself a suit in over twenty years. He wasn’t likely to buy one for Joe was he?
“I don’t suppose you had found the right time to telling the kids yet about their granddad being dead,” he said, as he tucked into another piece of shop-bought fruit cake.
No more need for Arthur to have to carry Joe’s Sunday lunch up a ladder propped against the bedroom window when he refused to let her in. Just as there was no more use of his wheelchair as she pushed him hard up Rose Hill and past the co-op where her mum had drawn her divvy there on the steps, and they had played with their hula-hoop, or her brothers their marbles, down on the sloping ground. It was strange how suddenly all those things had gone, just as the boot and shoe industry had gone, as well as most of the corner shops and fish shops and pubs being left with antique shops that seemed to breed like flies, and fed the houses of the novae-rich from miles around, it seemed to her then.
Esther couldn’t ever sob for his passing, but still tried so hard to remember, to find goodness there for after all no-one could be all-bad, could they? It was at that point she remembered how in those sad weeks of her mum’s own life he had seemed to soften, and carried his beaten and cow-towed wife throughout their house. First lifting her from her then single bed with its thin worn mattress to the bathroom close by when she was unable to stand. Then how she would share with him the Macmillan nurses, who sat overnight with her when she seemed most scared, and they talked together about a miracle and Esther had tears in her eyes as she bathed her mum’s skeletal body, as she lay there on that second hand, or was it a third hand, bed? Knowing that another of her dreams would remain just that and so she bent down and kissed her and told her how she loved her, just in case she wasn’t there to tell her that the next day. So their life and her life continued and Social Services provided his home help visiting him daily and carrying his food and his beer in her mum’s tartan trolley.
Then moments later, she returned from their open-plan kitchen where it had always been so much easier to keep an eye on their kids and where in the corner seat her mum’s shadow still rested.
“Is this stew okay for you? I hope that the dumplings are okay and not too hard for you. You know that cooking is not my forte don’t you?” As he tucked in, she spoke. “I have had a word with Ted and Margaret and they say they are fine to have the kids for the funeral on Wednesday.”
“Of course they will,” he spluttered as gravy dripped back onto his deep plate, and he licked the thick gravy from around his lips.
“We are so lucky to have Ted and Margaret for our neighbors, and they more than some grandparents don’t you think?”
Esther smiled as she watched Ted in the distance, then busy at the bottom of their neighboring garden reaching over to cut with his small shears their wide shared privet hedge. It had in fact been them she went to see after her mum had died, and they had offered her tea and quietly listened as she spoke of her mum’s almost beautiful death after all the suffering she had been through. It didn’t seem right that she had lost so much.
Arthur followed her back to the kitchen with his empty plate and gently dropped it into the sink. “I did tell the kids earlier, and they all cried, but then less than an hour later they were dangling from Ted’s apple tree and asking for some of Margaret’s Yorkshire pudding, shame you can’t cook like her though pet!”
She ignored his jibe, and he drew a deep breath and then continued.
“At least now it’s all over, and I would say quite enough done down here. You’re definitely not sorting out his funeral, that’s for his own family in the north to sort out!” Both Esther and Arthur knew then who they were talking about but neither wished to use his name. How he reminded her of…. he almost was…. and Esther felt sick to the depth of her stomach. Nothing else could go wrong could it? Managing breathlessly to just pick up the phone, Esther dropped her carrier bags onto her hallway floor.