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As Gaia pushed open the door to the coffee shop at half past six on Friday morning, she struggled to believe that a whole week had passed since Evan's accident: today marked the seventh day that he had been virtually housebound, and the sixth working day he had missed, but they had made it. If they could make it a week without crumbling, Gaia thought, then they could make it two. And if they could do two, then four would be fine. Part of her hoped that by then, Evan would be well enough to return: she missed working beside him, spending almost every minute of the day by her husband's side. As amazing as Max was already proving herself to be, a whirlwind of near perfection who had saved Gaia from potential disaster, she was no match for Evan.
It was hard to shake the feeling that she had forgotten something. After two years of almost always having a child with her in the café, Gaia was alone today for the first time in more than a month and she felt as though she was missing a limb without Clover tucked against her chest of Alfie's hand in hers. Zara was babysitting, after she had spent a good thirty minutes outlining why her brother and sister would be fine staying at home with her, and it was only when Evan had backed up his daughter that Gaia had acquiesced. There was no issue of trust between her and Zara, but she wanted her to be able to enjoy her free time and spend it however she wanted.
She wanted to spend it babysitting, clearly, and when Gaia had left the house at twenty-five minutes past six after setting Clover up with her first feed of the day, Zara had been up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to prove her maturity. As if she needed to prove it. Ever since before her brother's birth, she had been ready with a pair of helping hands and a willingness to do whatever was needed of her; when Gaia had miscarried halfway through her second pregnancy, Zara had stepped up to the plate to help out more than she had before, giving her parents space to grieve. Now, nine days into life as a sixteen-year-old, she acted like as much of a mother to her siblings as Gaia did.
It was too quiet. There was no sound of Alfie talking to himself as he coloured, no happy gurgles coming from the bouncer where Clover amused herself with her mobile, and the kitchen felt a little too eerie to Gaia as she set the oven to preheat while she mixed up a rich dough for triple chocolate cookies. Working in the café had only worsened her sweet tooth, nibbling on the scraps as she baked, and it was only being on her feet all day, both at work and at home, that kept her from piling on the pounds. She was still trying, in the most passive sense of the word, to shift the stubborn last ten pounds of baby weight, though it didn't bother her: if an extra ten pounds was the trade-off for her children, then she knew she had a good deal.
The whir of the oven and the pad of her flat shoes, with the occasional jangle of her silver bracelets, were the only sounds in the kitchen until she turned on the radio at a low volume. When the news filled the room, repeating the same story she now knew inside out, she switched over. It pained her to consider the story with anything more than an abstract thought, settling instead for an eighties channel that played the same music her parents loved and she sang along with the wrong lyrics, shaking her hips and bobbing her head while she mixed chocolate chips into the dough and dolloped it onto a baking tray.
