The First Time I Said Goodbye Read Online Free Page A

away.
    “It’s home, Belle,” she said softly before losing herself again to her sobs. “It’s home.”
    Sitting back, leaving her to her reverie, I tried to take in the sights around me. This was where my mother grew up – a place she hadn’t seen in a lifetime – a place she had always said she was happy enough to leave behind. I was surprised to find a flurry of emotion rise up in me as we turned and swept onto a blue steel bridge and across a river which seemed to cut the city in two. There was a part of me here – right in this air, in these rain-soaked pavements, in the dull greyness of the sky and in the gentle sobs from my mother.
    “It’s so different,” she whispered as we came to a halt at the redbrick bus station, where weather-battered hanging baskets swayed in the breeze. “It’s just the same.”
    I nodded, pretending to know what she meant but I knew there was no point in talking to her further. Her eyes were darting around the platform, trying to find the familiar, as I helped her from her seat and lifted her bag from the overhead rack.
    I think I saw Dolores before she did – a short stocky woman, whose grey hair was cut short and fixed in a curl but whose facial expressions mirrored my mother’s. Once again my mother called to the Baby Jesus before alighting from the bus with not a care to her age, her slightly arthritic hips or the exhaustion from the long journey. Within seconds she was wrapped in her sister’s arms, the pair crying as I pulled the weekend cases down the stairs of the bus and collected the rest of our luggage from the rear compartment. It didn’t seem like one of those moments where I could just butt in and introduce myself, so I stood there awkwardly, lifting my weight from foot to foot, trying to bring some life back into my limbs after the long journey. Auntie Dolores seemed reluctant to let my mother go – her warm voice, a slightly harsher, deeper version of my mother’s, muttered over and over that it had been a lifetime and that she couldn’t believe it had been so long. She hugged my mother close. “Poor Bob!” she said, or at least I think that is what she said as her thick accent was muffled in my mother’s hair. I could not hear my mother answer back but I was aware she was crying. A man, in flat cap and slacks with a heavy grey cardigan and obviously with Auntie Dolores, watched us from a distance, looking slightly embarrassed at the show of emotion before him. I nodded in his direction and he tipped his head at me briefly before staring off into the middle distance. I figured there was no point right now in trying to engage him in conversation – I would just have to wait for the reunion to cry itself out – which of course sounds harsher than I meant it to. But I had been travelling for the best part of twenty hours. I needed the bathroom and I could no longer feel my right butt-cheek. I was pretty sure that the slightly dodgy smell which had been lingering in my nostrils for the last hour might have actually been coming from me.
    “Poor Bob,” Auntie Dolores said again, stepping back this time and taking my mother in from head to foot before turning her gaze on me, just at the time I was trying to stretch out a kink in my neck.
    “You must be so tired,” she said, reaching for me and pulling me into a group hug with my mother. “Dear God, it is just brilliant to see you. Brilliant! Of course so sad . . . poor Bob . . . may he rest in peace.” She shook her head and made the sign of the cross on her ample bosom. “We should get you home.” She looked towards the flat-capped man. “Shouldn’t we get them home, Hugh? Sure won’t they be wrecked?”
    I was foolish to think that home actually meant the place where I would be staying. Although I dreaded being shown to my cousin’s bachelor pad, I had started to crave going anywhere that provided a bed. I didn’t even care if it was a comfortable bed. No, when Auntie Dolores said “home”