Miss Understood (14 page)

‘Why won’t she even text me back?’ I asked Muppet (even though he’s a dog, and like I’ve said before, dogs can’t talk). ‘I bet she’s with that horrible Amanda Jenkins.’

A little while later, the phone rang. It was Jenni.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘Hey.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At home. Where else would I be?’

I was about to say, ‘You might have been at Amanda’s house, being her best friend,’ but somehow I managed to stop myself saying it. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said instead. ‘Can I tell you about my day?’

‘Why? Oh, yeah, the poor-people clothes shop.’

‘Don’t call it that,’ I said. ‘It’s the Helping Hands shop. They have all kinds of different things there. Do you want to hear what they have?’

‘Sure,’ she replied.

So I started listing all the stuff they had at the shop, which I think might have been a bit dull for Jenni, because after a while I was sure I heard her yawn.

‘Am I boring you?’ I asked.

‘Sorry,’ she answered. ‘But seriously, Lizzie, I’ve been to that place with Mum heaps of times. I already know what they sell there.’

‘Yeah, but there’s a whole bunch of other stuff out the back that we haven’t put out in the shop yet,’ I said.

‘Like what?’

‘Well, last night someone left a box at the back door, and when we opened it, it was full of bits of car.’

‘Which bits?’ she asked.

‘How would I know what bits they were? I don’t know anything about cars! But there were heaps of these bits. They were all metal and plastic and stuff, and bendy with springs and wires and things, and they had grease on them.’

‘And whoever left them there thought you could sell them?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Maybe if you collect enough bits of car, you could put them all together and make an actual car!’ Jenni suggested.

‘Yeah, maybe!’ I said, even though I knew that it was a silly suggestion, and couldn’t possibly work.

Could it?

I was about to tell her about Mum and Dad’s argument, but her mum said that she had to do her own homework, so she had to go. ‘I guess you’ve finished your homework for today,’ she said to me.

‘Yeah, all done.’

She sighed. ‘You are
so
lucky.’

*

Dad didn’t come down for dinner that night, which was surprising, since Dad
never
misses a chance to eat. In fact, sometimes I think he eats just because it makes him happy. (But please don’t tell him I said that.)

‘Where is he?’ I asked Mum.

‘Upstairs. He’s not feeling well.’

I wasn’t sure what to say about that. Basically, it felt to me like he was having a monster-sized tantrum because Mum had made him take the coffee machine back. And if that was the case, he’d still be hungry, because I’ve always found that tantrums make you hungrier.

That was why, as soon as I’d finished eating my spaghetti bolognese and taken my plate to the dishwasher, I headed straight upstairs.

Dad was lying on his and Mum’s bed, just staring at the window. Or maybe it was at the alarm clock beside the bed. But definitely staring.

‘Hey, Dad,’ I said. ‘Do you want some dinner?’

He didn’t even look at me. ‘I’m fine thanks, Betty,’ he said in a really flat voice.

‘But it’s a wonderfully rich meat and tomato sauce infected with just a hint of basil –’

‘Infused,’ he said, still not looking at me.

‘What?’

‘It’s
infused
with basil, not infected.’

‘
Infused
with basil. And it’s served on a bed of squiggles. It’s very good. I give it four stars.’

‘Maybe I’ll have some later,’ he said. ‘I’m not very hungry at the moment.’

‘Oh. Do you want anything? A glass of water? A cup of tea?’

Finally he looked at me. ‘A cup of tea would be lovely, Betty. Thank you.’

‘And then I’m going to put out the big bin,’ I added, because it was Wednesday night, and I didn’t want him to have to think about reminding me. I was pretty sure he had enough on his mind already.

As I left the room, I almost ran into Mum, who’d been standing at the door, listening. And as I went past her, she just cupped her hand on the back of my neck and kissed the top of my head.

You know what’s weird, though? The next morning, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Dad came downstairs while I was having my bowl of cornflakes, and he was chatty, and happy, and he was even singing (although I wasn’t sure what song it was, since the words didn’t make any sense at all). But the most weird thing was that he didn’t say anything about having to use his old coffee machine instead of the new one he could’ve had. Or that he
did
have for a little while, until he had to return it.

I did notice one thing, though: when he gave Mum a hug in the middle of the kitchen floor, it was a bit longer than it would normally have been.

But later on in the day, everything came crashing down again.

I
t was lunchtime, and I’d been washing my hands before lunch. (My teacher was very particular about hygiene, you see.) I came back into the kitchen wiping my hands on the seat of my jeans. Mum was at the table feeding Richie some kind of browny-orangey mush, and Dad was there too, making a coffee. And he didn’t look happy. He
wasn’t
happy. I knew he wasn’t happy because of the way he was using all these jerky, cranky movements. He jammed the coffee powder stuff down into the silver thing that has the handle, slid it into the machine really roughly, and pressed the button so hard that I thought he was going to push the machine right off the bench. I wondered if he was trying to break it, so he could go back to the shop again and buy the new, expensive one he’d had to return.

‘You okay, Dad?’ I asked him.

‘What’s that, Betty?’

‘You seem cranky about something.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, but I could totally tell that he was lying. It was mainly the coffee tantrum, but I also saw the way the muscles around his jaw were all tight, and that’s usually a pretty good clue with most people, but with my dad in particular.

‘You don’t seem fine,’ I said. ‘You’re all –’

‘Lizzie,’ Mum said, and she made a tiny little shake of the head.

‘But –’

‘Lizzie.’ Another head shake.

I couldn’t work out what was going on. Shakes of the head usually either mean ‘no’, as in ‘No, Lizzie, don’t push your little brother down the stairs again’, or ‘I can’t believe it’, as in ‘I can’t believe you actually pushed him after I told you not to!’

But these head shakes from Mum weren’t really very clear ones. I knew they meant ‘no’, but I couldn’t work out why she was telling me not to ask Dad if he was okay.

Meanwhile Dad had started thumping his fist against something on the side of the coffee machine. ‘See,
this
is why I
thought
I’d get a
new one
of these
things
!’ he said in time with the thumps.

‘Marty!’ Mum said.

‘The doo-hickey on the side has come loose!’ he said. ‘That’s why it’s not frothing properly! I hate you, you piece of –’

‘Marty! Marty, it’s fine.’

‘It’s not fine!’ he snapped. He pulled out the top drawer beside the stove and started rummaging around in it. ‘Where is it? Where
is
the stupid thing?’

‘Where’s what stupid thing?’ Mum asked.

‘The little screwdriver with the red handle.’

‘I don’t know, Marty,’ she replied. ‘Probably in the garage.’

‘If it was in the garage I’d be getting it out of the garage, wouldn’t I?’ he said.

He slammed the drawer shut, grabbed the small knife from the knife block that stands beside the microwave oven, and bent down beside the coffee machine, muttering to himself.

‘Marty, don’t use a knife to do that – use a screwdriver,’ Mum said.

‘I can’t find my screwdriver! Oh!’ Dad yelped, dropping the knife on the floor and spinning away from the bench, holding his hands close together. Then he said a word I’d heard heaps of times in Mass, but never when someone had just cut themselves.

‘Oh Marty,’ Mum said, standing up and handing him a tea towel. ‘Let me see. Is it bad?’

‘No, it’s great! It’s fantastic! What do you think?’ he snapped. He snatched the tea towel from her and wrapped it around his bleeding hand, then stomped away up the stairs.

‘Is he okay?’ I asked Mum, who looked as though she was about to cry. This surprised me – I’d cut and scratched myself heaps of times, and I’d never seen her cry about it.

‘He’ll be fine, Lizzie,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t think it’ll need stitches.’ She was behind the bench now, picking up the knife and checking the pointy tip, which was all bent and crooked from being used as a screwdriver. ‘Well,
that’s
completely ruined,’ she said, sliding it back into the knife block.

‘But Dad was cranky before he cut himself,’ I said, because he had been. ‘Why was he so cross?’

‘Bad review,’ she said.

‘Someone gave him a bad review?’

‘No,
he
wrote a bad review. Do you remember the one about the German restaurant?’

‘Yuck Sausage?’

‘Yes, Yuck Sausage. Well, they want to take him to court.’

‘Over a food review? That’s crazy,’ I said, because I thought it was. ‘The food
was
horrible.’

‘How would you know what the food was like?’

I shrugged. Wasn’t it obvious? ‘Because Dad said it was, and he’s . . . like, it’s what he does. He’s a food eating and describing and marking guy.
That’s what food reviewers do
, Mum!’

A bit of a smile was playing on Mum’s lips. ‘Quite right. But it’s still shaken him up.’

‘Maybe the people who own the restaurant were a bit shaken up by what
he
wrote,’ I suggested, which I still think was a very good point. ‘So maybe he should be a bit tougher.’

‘You mean he should write a
worse
review?’ Mum chuckled. ‘Yeah, why don’t you go upstairs and suggest that to him while he’s bandaging up his finger?’

‘No, I mean maybe he needs to be tougher when people say they hate something he writes.’

‘They’ve threatened to sue him, Lizzie – it’s a bit more than hating his review. And they’ve insisted on a full apology.’

‘What, he has to go in there and say sorry?’

‘They want him to apologise in the newspaper, and say that he made a mistake.’

‘That’s stupid!’ I said, which it was.

‘Yes, well, he has a lot to think about at the moment, so go easy on him,’ Mum said. ‘I’m going to go up and see if his finger is still attached to his hand, and then I have to go and grab something for dinner, so I’d like you to keep going with those maths problems you were working on.’

I groaned. ‘I hate maths.’

‘I know. But I don’t care. Go.’

So I went and did my maths problems, and a little while after that I heard Mum come back down into the kitchen.

‘Is he okay?’ I called out.

‘He’s fine. It wasn’t that bad at all, once the bleeding stopped. I’m just making him a coffee, then I’ll go to the supermarket.’

She seemed to take forever giving him his coffee, but finally she came back down. The second I heard her drive away, I left my pages of numbers and went upstairs.

Dad was in his study, sitting at his desk with his chin resting on one hand (he had a couple of big brown plasters on his sore finger), while the other hand slowly turned his cup around and around on the desk. I was going to say something, but then I thought of another better thing I could do, and I walked over and began to massage his shoulders. They were really tight, but when I started rubbing I felt them relax, just a little. Plus he kind of sighed.

‘Is your finger okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, it’s fine. They always say that you should never use knives for anything other than cutting.’

‘Well, you did use it for cutting – cutting your finger!’ I said, and he gave a really short chuckle.

I kept rubbing his shoulders, and they kept relaxing. ‘That’s so good, Betty,’ he said. ‘Man, this job . . .’

A letter was on his desk, lying on his computer keyboard, and at the top of the page was a name in fancy green writing:
Hector & Prince, the Professional Litigation Experts
.

‘What’s “litigation”?’ I asked Dad, which made him groan, and somehow made his shoulders get a bit tighter again.

‘This,’ he said, tapping the letter. ‘What’s happening to me is litigation. The owners of
Feine Wurst
reckon I said some nasty things about their food. But that’s not entirely right, because I said some nasty things about the service as well. Oh, and the way the place was decorated – I seem to remember I had a bit of a go at that, too.’

‘How many stars did you give it?’

He held up his sore finger.

‘One?’ I said.

Dad shook his head. ‘Half.’

‘Half! What did you say?’

‘You want me to read you the review?’

‘Sure,’ I said. I mean, I love Dad’s reviews. They’re usually pretty funny, especially when they have only one- or two-star ratings. And this one got half, so it was going to be a beaut, as Dad would say.

‘Okay, bear with me . . .’ he said, and he put the letter aside and started clicking on his computer until he found the review. ‘Okay, here it is. Ready? Oh, and you can keep rubbing those shoulders if you like – that feels amazing. Ready?’

‘Ready,’ I said.

He began to read. ‘“On occasion, one of my favourite movie reviewers would refer to poorly made films as ‘showers of offal’. I would not have been surprised to have found exactly that in the kitchen of
Feine Wurst
, the new German-Austrian eatery in the CBD. Tucked away in a small cobbled laneway, this poky little joint purports to be a tasty slice of Bavaria. Sadly, I think I could get a tastier slice of Bavaria in the frozen goods aisle of my local supermarket, without having to pay the cost of a service on my BMW for the privilege.”’

‘We don’t have a BMW,’ I interrupted him. ‘We have a Toyota.’

‘It’s a thematic thing, Betty. German food, German car. Bear with me, okay?’

‘Okay. Sorry.’

‘“From the moment one ducks one’s head to enter the low-beamed cuckoo-clock-themed dining room, it feels like you’ve been transported back over half a century to a smoky Munich beer-hall, except for the absence of the smoke, or the burlesque stage. Such a feature, should it be introduced, might in fact improve the place, especially once the food arrived. To be honest, an army of lederhosen-wearing skinheads singing a
Sound of Music
medley would have improved the place once the food arrived.”’