“Good girl,” she praised, rubbing my cheek with her thumb.
“Grandma? Where’s Daddy? He’s late. He’s never late.” He was always home to see me after school. He always smelled of mucky beer, though, but he’d always smelled like that. It wouldn’t be Daddy if he didn’t.
“Molly, something happened to Daddy today,” she told me with a shaky voice.
“Is he poorly? Should we make him some tea for when he gets home? Tea makes everyone feel better, doesn’t it, Grandma? You always tell me that,” I said, beginning to feel a strange, funny swirling in my tummy at the peculiar way she was looking at me.
She shook her head as her lip wobbled. “No, sweetie. Tea won’t be needed today. You see, God decided to take your daddy to heaven this morning to be with the angels.”
I tipped my head back to look up at the ceiling. I knew that God lived way up above us in the sky. I could never see him, though, no matter how hard I tried.
“Why would God take Daddy away from us? Are we bad people? Was I too naughty? Is that why God didn’t want me to have a Mammy or Daddy?”
My grandma held me close, her nose tucked into my long brown hair. “No Molly-pops, never, ever think that. God just felt sad that your daddy missed your mammy so much. He decided it was time for them to be together again. He knew you were brave and strong enough to live without them both.”
I thought about that as I sucked on my thumb. I always suck my thumb when I’m scared or nervous.
Grandma smoothed the hair back from my face. “I want you to know that nobody on this whole planet loved each other as much as your mammy and daddy. When Mammy died, Daddy didn’t know what to do. He loved you so much, but he also missed her. When the lady on the TV—”
“Margaret Thatcher?” I interrupted. We’d learned about her at school. Not many people liked her in my town. They called her nasty names. She made a lot of people very sad.
Grandma smiled. “Yes, Margaret Thatcher. When Mrs. Thatcher closed the mines, your daddy no longer had any work and it made him very unhappy. Daddy tried for a very long time to make money and buy us a better house, but he’d only ever worked in the mines and didn’t know how to do anything else.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “Today Daddy died, sweetie. He’s gone to heaven and he’s not coming back to us.”
My lip began to tremble and I felt tears sting my eyes. “But I don’t want him to go! Can we ask God to bring him back? What will we do without him?” A heavy feeling spread in my chest and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I reached for my Grandma’s hand, and my voice went all croaky. “There’s no one but us now, is there, Grandma? You’re all I have left. What if he takes you too? I don’t want to be on my own. I’m scared, Grandma.” A loud scream ripped from my throat. “I don’t want to be on my own!”
“Molly—” Grandma whispered as she cuddled me close and we dropped to the floor, crying in front of the fireplace.
My daddy was gone.My daddy was in heaven.
He was never, ever coming back.
1
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, United States of America
Present day…
I was so bloody late!
I puffed out short, ragged breaths as I ran across the sprawling University of Alabama campus, trying my hardest not to fall flat on my face.
My hands were full to the brim with printouts of the philosophy course syllabus I’d been ordered to copy over an hour ago—the first task of my TA duties.
Class was literally about start, but my seemingly endless run of bad luck ensured that the printer in the staff reprographics room decided to break down halfway through my order with a melodic swan song of a pathetic high-pitched wheeze and a stuttering poof of mechanical smoke.
The print room was on the other side of the college, which led me to my current predicament—rushing across the humongous quad in my non-athletic-worthy orange Crocs in the blistering Tuscaloosa sauna from hell—or as it more commonly known, a typically hot summer’s day.
I caught a brief glimpse of myself in the reflection of a glass door.
Not good. Not good at all.
My brown hair resembled the frizzy coat of a miniature poodle, the sweat on my nose was currently encouraging my wide, black-framed standard-issue British national healthcare glasses to kamikaze bomb off my face, and my short denim dungarees and white T-shirt felt like a boiler suit.
England’s constant overcast skies were pretty appealing right now.
Nothing today seemed to be going right—the defective printer being the second of my mounting misfortunes, my crazy friends’ harassment of me this morning being the first.