Dennis, who are they? Where did all these people come from? Christine’s voice trembles. She grips her son’s arm tighter. A thought flashes through her mind: “He sold it. He sold the cottage without asking, and these are the new owners come to take over.” Her mouth goes dry. She lets go of his arm and freezes, staring into her own garden.
The planks smell of pine. The smell is so thick and sharp that Christine’s nose tingles even as she approaches the gate. Now that scent mingles with lime and sweat. People fill the garden. Lots of them. Twenty or more. Men in old T-shirts and dusty jeans, a couple of girls carrying rolls of plastic sheeting, a lad on a stepladder, another right on the roof with a hammer. Someone drags sacks of cement, someone stirs a white sludge in a bucket that gives off a sharp lime smell. Her country garden, quiet and dreary just yesterday, now looks like an anthill in April.
“Dennis,” she says dryly, almost inaudibly. “Do you see this? If you sold the cottage without asking, I will never forgive you. Tell me honestly, are these strangers?”
“Mum, stop. What new owners?” Dennis looks bewildered. “What do you mean? They’re mine. All of them.”
“What do you mean ‘yours’? What’s going on? I have my phone in my bag – if you don’t explain right now, I’m calling the police.”
She does reach for the bag hanging from her elbow. Her fingers feel clumsy. Everything rushes through her mind at once: the little house she has been keeping going for fifteen years, the veranda she never built because first it was Dennis’s tuition, then the car loan, then her own dentures – those can wait, then the linoleum in the city flat – that can wait too. Everything has been waiting, and now strangers are trampling her garden. Hers. The one she has tended like a child.
“Mum,” Dennis touches her shoulder. “Listen. They aren’t any new owners. I asked them to come.”
Christine freezes, bag still in hand. She looks at her son as if seeing him for the first time. Thirty-five years old, grey already showing at his temples, broad shoulders – like her, not his father. No fear in his eyes, no cheekiness. Just a quiet, calm expectation.
“You?”
“Me. Mum, they’re all mine. From work, from university days, lads from the street I used to play football with. Remember Paul?”
Christine remembers Paul. Skinny, always hungry, always staying for dinner because things at home weren’t great. She used to give him a double helping and pretend not to notice how embarrassed he was.
“Paul is here?”
“He’s here. And Alex, and Red Mike, and George – he was my best man at the wedding. Almost everyone you fed, Mum.”
Christine looks around the garden. So that’s it. That’s why the faces seemed vaguely familiar. That lad on the stepladder – the boy she gave Dennis’s old bike to when his family moved into a council flat. And that one with the bucket – Alex, who broke their window with a football in Year Nine; she didn’t shout, just asked him to put in a new pane. They have grown up. They have become grown men with strong hands and serious faces. And they are standing in her garden with planks and seedlings.
“Why?” Christine asks quietly. “Dennis, why?”
Dennis is silent for a moment. Then he takes her hand – carefully, as if it were glass – and turns her to face him.
“You’ve been saving for this cottage your whole life, Mum. Remember you wanted a veranda? A big one with sliding glass doors so you could drink tea in the summer and watch the sunset? You pinned a picture from a magazine on the fridge. Fifteen years ago.”
Christine remembers. Yes, there was such a picture. It yellowed, the corners curled, but she didn’t throw it away until she replaced the fridge. Then the clipping got lost, and she almost forgot it. Almost.
“You were putting money aside then,” Dennis continues, “from every pay packet. Then came my university, the tutors, the rented flat when Emma and I got married… Mum, you put off redecorating your bedroom for six years. You still have that floral wallpaper that’s probably older than me. I remember you saying, ‘Never mind, the veranda can wait.’ But you know what? It won’t wait. No more waiting.”
Christine stays silent. She is silent so long that Paul on the roof stops hammering and freezes, watching them.
“I’m paying back what I owe,” Dennis says. “The work crew is free. We decided – we’ll finish in a week. Here’s the plan, look.”
He pulls a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket and unfolds it. Christine sees a drawing – neat, with measurements, with notes in the margins. Not a magazine clipping. A real plan. Drawn for her small plot, taking into account the old apple tree she begged them not to touch.
“We’ll go around the apple tree,” Dennis says, catching her eye. “We’ve thought of everything. We’ll reinforce the foundations. And we’ll put in underfloor heating – I checked, there’s a special system, cheap and reliable. You’ll be able to sit there in November, wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea.”
The first tear rolls down Christine’s cheek and stops somewhere near the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t wipe it – she doesn’t even notice. She stands and looks at these grown men who once played football in their yard, skinned their knees, stole hot cutlets straight from her saucepan, copied each other’s homework in the kitchen and argued hoarsely about computer games. Now they have come here. Voluntarily. For free. To build the veranda of her dreams.
But the idyll doesn’t last long. A cough comes from beyond the fence, and a head in a floral headscarf appears above the wooden slats. Mrs. Vera, the neighbour on the left. A woman with a permanent “I told you so” expression. She plants her hands on her hips and watches the scene as if someone is dismantling the national border right in front of her.
“Christine, is that you?” she trills in a sugary voice that clearly has a metallic edge. “I hear all this noise and commotion, vans from early morning. What’s this, a job fair?”
“Good morning, Vera,” Christine says, automatically wiping her cheek. “It’s my son and his friends helping out. We’re building a veranda.”
“A veranda?” Vera throws up her hands. “Do you have permission? Do you know the fines for unauthorised building these days – you’d have to sell the cottage and still not cover them? And anyway, your plot is tiny, Christine – it’s only three metres to my fence. Are you keeping the proper setbacks? I won’t stay quiet, you know. My nephew works in building control – I can tip him off.”
Hearing this, Dennis turns round and calmly walks over to the fence.
“Hello, Mrs. Vera. We have permission. The plan is approved. And we meet all fire regulations. My friend is an architect – he checked everything before drawing it up. Would you like to see the documents?”
Vera turns purple. She clearly didn’t expect that.
“Well, well,” she drawls, stepping back a pace. “We’ll see how it turns out. You know, sometimes people build and then have to take it down at their own expense. And the noise, Christine. My grandchildren won’t be able to sleep.”
“That’s all right,” Christine says quietly, and her voice suddenly stops trembling. “Your grandchildren ate pancakes at my house last August when you forgot to feed them. So they can sleep later.”
Vera purses her lips and disappears behind the fence. Paul, who has been watching from the roof, snorts softly and picks up his hammer again. And Christine suddenly feels something spreading inside her – for the first time in years – something like fighting spirit. No way. She will defend her dream now.
The next two hours Christine spends in a strange, half-dreamlike state. She feels as though she is asleep. Dennis sets her up on a folding chair in the shade of the apple tree, brings from the house an old mug with a chipped handle – the very one she used to drink tea from when she took him to nursery – and pours hot tea from a flask.
“Sit,” he says firmly. “Your job today is to watch. No ‘I’ll just sweep here’, no ‘I’ll water the cucumbers now’. Got it?”
Christine wants to argue – out of habit, because she has been arguing non-stop for the last forty years – but suddenly she changes her mind. She leans back in the chair and watches.
She watches Paul and his mate sawing planks, the saw screeching so loud that the neighbour’s dog starts barking. She watches Red Mike – no longer red, but bald and distinguished – mixing mortar and explaining something to a girl with seedlings. She watches Dennis moving from one to another, checking details, helping someone hold something, nodding to someone, his face grown-up, focused, authoritative. Her son. The master of this garden. No – the master of the life he is now giving back to her, his mother.
Around three in the afternoon, Christine finally gets up. Enough. Watching is fine, but not to that extent.
“I’ll make lunch,” she says to Dennis.
“Mum…”
“Don’t ‘Mum’ me. There are twenty people here, they’ve been on their feet since eight in the morning. What have they eaten – sandwiches?”
“Well, we have bread and sausage…”
“Exactly. I’ll be quick.”
She goes inside. It is cool and smells of summer dust. She opens the fridge, which always looks pitiful at the start of the season – eggs, butter, a carton of kefir, mustard from three years ago – and sighs. Never mind. She’ll have to improvise.
But when she steps onto the porch to call Dennis and send him to the shop, she is already being waited for. One of the girls – the one with the phloxes – hands her two huge bags.
“There are vegetables, chicken, eggs, flour, oil,” the girl says. “Dennis bought them yesterday. He said: ‘Mum will want to cook – don’t argue, just give her the ingredients.’”
Christine takes the bags. She looks at the girl. Then at Dennis, who stands a little way off pretending to study the rafter fixings.
“You,” she says to his back. “When did you have time for all this?”
“Mum, I’ve been preparing for three months,” her son replies without turning. “You’d better tell me when the pancakes will be ready.”
This is too much. Christine goes into the house, closes the door firmly, and stands for a minute with her hands pressed to her face. Then she exhales, rolls up her sleeves, and gets to work on the batter.
An hour later, a long table stands in the garden – the lads knocked it together from the same planks in about fifteen minutes. On the table, potatoes steam – Christine has been frying them in three pans one after another because the cottage doesn’t have a big pot. There are cucumbers and tomatoes, roughly chopped, just like in her youth when salads weren’t fussed over. In the centre rises a mountain of pancakes – thin, lacy, with crispy edges. The very same. Her signature. The ones that hungry tenth-graders used to devour in stacks in three minutes flat.
“Auntie Christine,” someone says with a full mouth – it sounds like Alex, the one who broke the window. “I haven’t had pancakes like these in fifteen years. Honest. My mum never baked, it was always ready meals.”
“I know,” Christine says and suddenly smiles. “That’s why you used to stay at ours until evening.”
Everyone laughs. Loudly, freely, youthfully. Twenty adults laugh in her cottage garden, and this laughter is probably the best sound in the last ten years.
Christine suddenly stands up. She looks around at everyone. Paul, spoon in hand, freezes; Dennis tenses. She picks up a ladle, pours some compote from the pot into a mug, and raises it in front of her.
“Guys,” she says, and her voice sounds unusually loud. “Forgive me, but I’ve cried three times today. First from fright. Second from joy. Third because I didn’t know how to thank you. But now I know. I want to drink to you. To each one of you. For remembering. I never forgot your faces, but I thought you had forgotten mine. But you haven’t. So I didn’t feed you for nothing. To you.”
She downs the compote in one gulp, as if it were something stronger. A second of silence hangs over the table, and then such a cheer erupts that a crow takes off from the neighbouring apple tree.
She walks among them, piling on pancakes, topping up tea, listening to the conversations, and realises that she no longer feels that familiar anxiety she has been falling asleep and waking up with for years. The worry about Dennis, his marriage, the mortgage, that he earns too little, works too much, calls too rarely. All of that has suddenly retreated. Because there he is, her son, sitting on an upturned crate with a plank on his knees instead of a plate, spreading jam on a pancake, and saying to someone: “No, the frames are for tomorrow – today we need to finish the gable or the rain will wash everything out.” And she understands: he has grown up. He can organise twenty people and build a veranda. And he has done it – for her.
In the evening, when people start dispersing to their tents (they have set up camp just beyond the garden, by the woods, so as not to crowd), Christine sits on the old porch. Dennis sits down next to her.
“Well, how do you like it?” he asks.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Mum, don’t be silly. What thanks? It’s me thanking you. For everything.”
They are quiet for a while. Then Christine says:
“You know, I always thought that parents give to their children, and the children go off into their own lives and that’s it. Well, that’s how it is for everyone. I didn’t expect anything. Honestly, Dennis. I just wanted you to have a better life than me.”
“And I do,” he says. “I have a better life precisely because you wanted that. And now I want you to have a better life too. At least a veranda.”
Christine grins and nudges him with her shoulder – just like old times, when he brought home a bad mark in literature and said: “Mum, I’m not Shakespeare.”
“Alright, builder. Tomorrow you’ve got those gables again.”
“The gables aren’t going anywhere,” Dennis says and offers her his hand to help her up.
The week flies by like a single day. On Friday evening, Christine stands on her new veranda and watches the setting sun flood the garden with orange. The veranda is exactly like the one in that clipping: bright, spacious, with sliding glass doors and a fresh smell of wood. The planks are not painted yet, but that’s fine. There’s time. An old blanket already lies on the floor, and a mug of tea sits on the windowsill. The lavender the girls planted by the entrance smells delicate and unsettling, like a promise of the future.
Tomorrow everyone will leave. But today they are sitting around the table again, laughing, drinking tea, eating pancakes. And Christine catches herself thinking: more than anything in the world, she wishes that each of these twenty people – Paul, who is going through a divorce, Mike, who is going bald, the girls with the seedlings whose names she never quite learned – that all of them would one day have a moment like this. A moment when they understand that kindness comes back. Not necessarily with pancakes. Maybe with planks. Maybe with a veranda. Or maybe just with twenty people standing behind you without a contract and saying: “We remember how you fed us.”
In October, when the first frosts come, Christine sits on her new veranda with a blanket over her knees. Beyond the sliding glass doors, the wind bends the bare branches, but inside it is warm – the underfloor heating works perfectly, and the tea in her mug doesn’t cool. She takes her phone, photographs the sunset over the apple tree, and texts Dennis: “Son, a flock of robins has arrived. Come over. Pancakes on.” The message sends, and she leans back in her chair and smiles – slowly, calmly, like someone who has finally stopped waiting.
