Daisies

I wait for their visits, hardly able to think of anything else all week long. Every week, Saturday afternoon at 3, they gather to see me.

I often wonder what they do with their mornings. Does my daughter have a long, lazy morning with her husband and her own children? Breakfast in bed - stacks of greasy toast, lukewarm tea and Peppa Pig playing louder than the screaming of her youngest son? I was never one for wasting away a Saturday. My mornings were spent walking, at the farmer's market, weeding the garden. Has my husband picked up these routines now?

I think about their mornings while I wait for them, trying to insert myself into their days. When they leave, my own Saturday evening is spent thinking obsessively about theirs. What does my husband do? Does he sit by himself, two fingers of whiskey and the football on the telly?

It gives me a perverse sense of enjoyment, thinking about him sitting alone in a damp old house. I can see the mould beginning to crawl stealthily up the walls, spot his crumpled collar that needs a wash and an iron. The carpets would be thick with a layer of dust, and the windows almost opaque for want of a wash. His cupboards lie empty in my mind's eye, and he grows thin and wasted. His knobbly knees and sharp collar bones and elbows add years to his life as they poke through his tight, lined skin. He needs me as much as I do him. My daughter is happy with her new little family, run off her feet and moon-eyed over her children, but I am all my husband has.

He never speaks to me very much, but he is always there on Saturday. He often comes during the week too, wandering by on a sunny Tuesday or battling his way to me on a gusty Thursday, his head bowed against the wind.

My daughter does speak, whispering any news she has, any little tidbits from her life that she's saved up all week long to tell me on Saturday. My granddaughter sniffles and whines, kicking at her brother and whining into her dad's trouser-leg. She never quite understands, never wants to stay or speak to me. If she is bad at this, my grandson is hopeless, and he kneels close to the ground, wheeling his toy trucks up and down.

I savour these Saturday afternoons. Any mid-week visits are an unexpected treat, but I have come to expect my Saturdays, to bank on them. I listen to my daughter, revelling in every morsel of information about her life. I listen to my husband's wheezing breaths, knowing it won't be long now. I listen to my granddaughter bicker with her brother, my son-in-law's patient reprimands.

They all leave together, leaving me with flowers, and a wave of longing rises up in me almost immediately. Until next Saturday, I think. The bunch of daisies they picked on the walk to the cemetery flutters in the breeze above me.