‘Sounds good.’ I watched them leave, slightly bemused by their whirlwind of a visit, but feeling a little lighter somehow. Maybe Nan had been right about me needing a Christmas away from home. In New York I could be anyone. I didn’t have to be the tragic girl who’d lost both her parents in a car crash. And maybe I could even forget, just for a few weeks, that the man who was responsible for all of that would soon be going home.
3
In the end, I decided to get my first night’s dinner from Ray’s Famous Pizza, a couple of blocks up from Candy Cane Lane. Aunt Dottie had invited me for dinner with her and Brian, but I’d taken a rain check. I was tired and in need of comfort food, and nothing hit the spot like pepperoni pizza. She’d also let it slip that they were celebrating their six-month anniversary, and I didn’t feel like playing gooseberry to my great aunt and her toy boy. It must have been the right thing to do, because she’d given me the next day off. Betty and Madison were both booked in to work, anyway, and Dottie had suddenly mentioned the possibility of jetlag. I had a feeling I’d been right about her reasons for setting me to work straight away: she’d known I needed the distraction to help me get settled in and try to forget about everything I’d left behind back at home.
Aunt Dottie had been an all-too-infrequent visitor to the UK when I was growing up, but she’d always made a big impression. Mum had been obsessed with New York for as long as I could remember, watching as many movies and TV series set there as she could get her hands on. I think she knew every line in every episode of Friends off by heart. And she lit up like a Christmas tree every time Dottie came home for a visit. She’d been planning a trip to New York for as long as I could remember, too. But something always seemed to get in the way – usually money, or the lack of it. Mum had found out she was expecting me when my parents were barely out of their teens, and they’d been playing catch-up ever since.
They’d scrimped and saved throughout my childhood to make sure I’d never miss out on opportunities, even helping to pay my way through university when the time came. And just after I graduated, Dad got made redundant. He found a new job eventually, but they were back to playing catch-up with their debts again by then, and desperately saving to be in a position to start their own business. In the meantime, I’d got a well-paid job in corporate law for a firm that had offices in several countries. It meant I jumped ahead of Mum and got a couple of all-expenses-paid business trips to New York. She was thrilled for me, but I could tell it made her want to visit even more. It was what I wanted for her, too, and my mum’s fiftieth birthday seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. I had the money to treat them and, after all they’d done for me, it felt so good to finally be doing something to pay them back, just a tiny bit. It was meant to be the trip of a lifetime, but they never even made it to the airport.
Waking up on my first full day in New York, my parents were on my mind – just as they would have been if I’d woken up in the little single bed in my grandparents’ spare room above the micro-pub in Kent. For the first few months after they’d died, I was obsessed with counting the days and weeks since they’d set off on their trip. It got easier to stop doing that after a year of firsts – my first birthday without them there for Mum to bake one of her cakes with the consistency of a rubber ball, the first Mothering Sunday, and Father’s Day. And, worst of all, the first Christmas. But they were never far from my thoughts, whatever day it was.
I was up early despite not setting an alarm, an exhausting day of travelling, and getting to grips with the systems in the shop. But my body didn’t seem to want to rest. I peered out of the gap in the open window and on to Seventh Avenue. The sidewalks were already busy, despite how early it was. People in business suits, who looked like nothing could stop them until they reached their destination, jostled for space with others who were carrying bags, looking ready to hit the shops as soon as they opened. Then there were the tourists who thought nothing of blocking the sidewalk altogether, as they stopped to snap pictures of the most famous city in the world on their mobile phones. All human life was