But miracles do happen and at ten to one, the doorbell rang and husband and wife were standing at the front door. Becky was holding a large box and almost fizzing with excitement.
‘You’ve got to see it!’ she gushed. ‘It’s beautiful!’
Dee insisted they go into the kitchen so that they could keep an eye on the children through the windows. Because of the sunny weather, David had set up the paddling pool and the two girls were splashing around giving shrieks of delight. Becky was close to shrieking with delight herself as she put the box on Dee’s kitchen table and unpacked one of the three lamps she had bought.
Bryan stood in the background, watching his wife spend a good ten minutes extolling the virtues of the lamp and how she had found it and why it was better than the others and how the texture of the lampshade was similar to their bedroom curtains and how she would have missed that if Bryan hadn’t pointed it out. Both Dee and David were good sports, saying ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Wow!’ at the right moments, although Bryan could see that even Dee was wondering how someone could get quite that excited over a lamp.
But that was Becky. She was a woman of extremes and right now, she was extremely happy, as bouncy as a kid at Christmas. She looked at Bryan with eyes glittering with aliveness and he folded his arms so that she wouldn’t jump on him in front of their friends. He loved it when Becky lost control of herself, but still… there was a time and a place.
‘How about some lemonade?’ said Dee brightly. ‘It’s homemade!’
‘I love homemade lemonade!’ cried Becky.
‘Great!’
Dee seemed relieved that the whole lamp story was over. Meanwhile, Becky started putting the lamp back into its box.
‘Let me do that,’ said Bryan. ‘You go outside with Dee and I’ll put this back with the others in the car.’
‘Oh, Bryan!’ said Becky. ‘I love you!’
She gave him a massive kiss on the mouth, then went off with Dee, the two women chatting away happily. David stood watching Bryan pack the lamp into the box and carefully fold the flaps at the top. Then Bryan picked it up and went through the house, heading towards their family car parked in the Turners’ driveway.
For some reason, David felt the urge to follow. He stood on his driveway a few feet before the open door as Bryan placed the box next to two others in the open boot of his car. Satisfied that everything was safely packed, Bryan shut the boot and pressed the car key. A ‘blip-blip’ and flashing orange lights indicated that the car was now locked. He turned and saw the other man looking at him.
‘Are you okay?’ said Bryan.
‘What did you do?’ said David.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The last time Becky was here, she was adamant that marrying you was the worst mistake she’d ever made. And now today, she’s like a bride on her wedding day! I’ve never seen a woman so happy! And over a lamp!’
‘Well… that’s Becky.’
‘Yes, but Dee and I couldn’t imagine either of you backing down on this issue. So how did you resolve it?’
Bryan leaned back against his car. He folded his arms and gazed at the colourful shrubs in David’s front garden.
‘I made a deal with her,’ said Bryan.
‘A deal?’
‘Yes. I suggested a three-step process for shopping for the house. Step One: I look after Tara while she goes out on her own to look for stuff. Step Two: She makes a shortlist of her favourite options. Step Three: I join her on a second trip and I choose my favourite from her favourites.’
‘So you make the final decision?’
‘Well, that was my original idea,’ said Bryan. ‘That way, we could legitimately say it was our decision. But when I pointed at my favourite of her lamps and said “That one”, Becky realised she was secretly hoping I’d pick another one. So we went and bought three of that model instead.’
‘My god! What a palaver!’
‘Yeah, but it beats being dragged round the shops for hours at a time. And when Becky went out on her own, she really liked it. She could take her time without worrying about me. It turned out that she only wanted my help with making the decision.’
Bryan put his hands in his pockets and gave a kind of laughing sigh. When he spoke, his voice was wistful.
‘You know, Becky is always banging on about having the right to choose,’ he said. ‘But whenever she’s faced with options, she doesn’t want to choose… she wants all of them!’
‘Oh, Dee’s the same.’
‘Is she? Because I’m wondering whether this is one of those “differences between men and women” that we’re not supposed to talk about these days?’
‘What differences?’
‘Look, when I buy something, I immediately discard from my mind the things I didn’t buy. And so long as the thing I’ve bought does what it’s supposed to do, I don’t think about the other options, even if they might have been better in some way. D’you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, totally.’
‘But Becky’s not the same. She continually thinks about what else she might have bought if she’d looked harder or been more patient. To this day, she looks at the orange front room curtains we bought six months ago and wonders whether the blue ones would have looked better. Hell, there are times I’ve seen her looking at me that way!’
‘Yes…’ said David, looking uncomfortable. ‘But she’s not looking at you that way now, is she?’
‘No, not today,’ said Bryan. ‘I did something right, whatever it was. But sooner or later, something will happen and I’ll be back to square one. The only thing Becky never looks at with those ‘I wonder if I could have done better’ eyes… is Tara. Everything else–‘
‘Are you talking about me, Daddy?’
The men jumped. They turned and saw a deputation of two little girls standing in the open doorway of the front door. They both wore swimsuits and flipflops and had beach towels tied around their waists like sarongs. David and Bryan exchanged a glance and Bryan turned to his daughter.
‘We were just talking about grown-up stuff,’ he said.
‘Yeah, we know,’ said Tara.
She managed a tone that suggested ‘grown-up stuff’ was the most boring topic in the world. Sally turned to her father.
‘I have a message from Mummy,’ she said.
‘What message, darling?’ said David.
‘How long does it take to put a box in a car?’
Both men laughed and the two girls giggled into their hands.
‘We’ll be right there,’ said David.
The girls ran inside, screeching with laughter. Bryan absently pressed the car key a second time, just to be sure, and the two men looked at each other.
‘Well,’ said David. ‘Back to the fray…’
‘Yes,’ said Bryan. ‘After you.’
‘No, after you.’
The sun shone down on the tarmac drive as the two men went into the house, one after the other. And as the door closed, a butterfly fluttered across the front garden, landed on a pink azalea flower and opened its wings to catch the sunshine.
*****
Afterword from the author:
This is the sixth story featuring the marital ups and downs of Becky and Bryan Sandford. As a writer, I wanted to explore the ways in which a marriage goes through phases and how a man and a woman can be both the best thing in each other’s lives and sometimes also the worst. However, after the last story was posted, I received a comment which said, ‘Why doesn’t the author let readers know what the other stories are?’ It was a fair point. So here are the six stories in story chronology (although not the order I wrote them):