Summer at the Comfort Food Cafe

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HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016

Copyright © Debbie Johnson 2016

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is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008150242

Version 2018-09-21

PRAISE FOR DEBBIE JOHNSON’S BOOKS

‘A sheer delight’

Sunday Express

‘A lovely, emotion-filled, giggle-inducing story’

Milly Johnson

‘The perfect summer story’

Jane Costello

‘My new favourite author’

Holly Martin

‘Has all the best ingredients for a holiday read: the beautiful West Country, a family-run farm, and a mystery man with Poldark-style charms’

Yours Magazine

‘Funny, raunchy, and heartwarming…Buy it. Read it. Tell your friends about it’

Hello Chick Lit

‘I’ve got nothing but love for this amazing novel and its author’

Spoonful of Happy Endings

‘I laughed, screamed in frustration and felt the truly happy feeling that you get when you turn the final page of a great story…Bridget Jones eat your heart out’

Lisa Talks About

‘A beautifully addictive read’

Reviewed the Book

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Debbie Johnson’s Books

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Week 1

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Week 2

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Week 3

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Week 4

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Week 5

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Week 6

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Down Dorset Way …

And Now for the Yummy Bit …

Also by Debbie Johnson

Debbie Johnson

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

COOK WANTED – MUST BE COMFORTING

We are looking for a summer-season cook for our busy seaside café. The job will also involve taking orders and waiting on tables. The successful applicant will be naturally friendly, be able to boil an egg, enjoy a chat and have a well-developed sense of empathy with other human beings. Good sense of humour absolutely vital. The only experience required is experience of life, along with decent cooking skills. Pay is pitiful, but the position comes with six weeks’ free use of a luxury holiday cottage in a family-friendly setting near the Jurassic Coast, with use of a swimming pool, games room and playground. Children, dogs, cats, guinea pigs and stray maiden aunts all welcome. No application form needed – if you’re interested, send us your heart and soul in letter form, telling us why you think you’re right for the job. Post your essays to Cherie Moon, The Comfort Food Café, Willington Hill, near Budbury, Dorset.

Chapter 2

Dear Cherie,

I’m writing to you about the job you advertised for a cook at the Comfort Food Café in Dorset.

This is about my sixth attempt at composing this letter, and all the rest have ended up as soggy, crumpled balls lying on the floor around the bin – my aim seems to be as off as my writing skills. I’ve promised myself that this time, no matter how long it gets, or how many mistakes I might make, this will be the final version. From the heart, like you asked for, even if it takes me the rest of the day. If nothing else it’s pretty good therapy.

This is probably not the most professional or brilliant way to make a first impression, and you’re most likely thinking about filing this under ‘N for nutter’ – or possibly ‘B for bin’. I can only apologise – my hand’s a bit cramped now and I have a blister coming up on my ring finger. I haven’t written this much since my A levels, so please forgive me if it gets a bit messy.

To be honest, everything in my life is a bit messy. It got that way just over two years ago, when my husband, David, died. He was the same age as me – I’m thirty-five now – and he was the love of my life. I can’t give you a romantic story about how we met at a wedding or got set up on a blind date by friends, or how our eyes met across a crowded nightclub – mainly because our eyes actually met across a crowded playground when we were seven years old.

He’d joined our school a few years in and appeared like a space alien at the start of term one in September. He was really good at football, was impossible to catch in a game of tag and liked drawing cartoons about his dogs, Jimbo and Jambo. We sat next to each other on the Turquoise Table in Miss Hennessey’s class, and that was that – my fate was sealed.

That story sounds completely crazy now, I know. I look at my own kids and think there’s no way anyone they mix with at their age could turn out to be the love of their life. That’s what my parents thought – and his. I lost track of the number of times we were told we were too young. I think they thought it was sweet when we were seven, saying we were boyfriend and girlfriend – innocent and cute. By the time we were sixteen and we’d stayed together all through high school, they didn’t think it was quite so cute any more.

I get it, I really do. They wanted us to see a bit of the world. See other people. Although they were all too polite to say it, they wanted us to split up. My parents would always phrase it nicely, saying things like ‘I’ve nothing against David – he’s a lovely lad – but don’t you want to travel? Go to university? Have a few adventures before you settle down? Follow your own dreams? And anyway, if it’s meant to be, you’ll come back to each other in a few years’ time.’

He got the same speeches from his family, too. We used to laugh about it and compare notes on the different ways they all tried to express the same thing: You’re Too Young and You’re Making a Mistake. We weren’t angry – we knew it was because they loved us, wanted the best for us. But what they didn’t get – what they never really understood – was that we were already following our dreams. We were already having the biggest adventure of our lives. We loved each other beyond belief from the age of seven, and we never, ever stopped. What we had was rare and precious and so much more valuable than anything we could have done apart.

We got married when we were twenty, and no matter how happy I was, people still commented on it. I even found my mum crying in the loo at the reception – she thought I was wasting my life. I’d got decent enough grades in my exams – including a grade A in home economics, I should probably point out, as it’s the first relevant thing I’ve said. So did David. He got a job as a trainee at the local bank, and I initially worked in what I’d like to claim was some fancy five-star restaurant, but was actually a McDonald’s on a retail park on the outskirts of Manchester.

I know it sounds boring, but it wasn’t. It was brilliant. We bought a little two-up two-down in a decent part of the city, and even at that stage we were thinking about schools – because we knew we wanted kids, and soon. Lizzie came along not too long after, and she’s fourteen now. She has his blonde hair and my green eyes, and at the moment is equal parts smiley and surly. I can’t blame her. It’s been tough losing her dad. I’ve done my best to stay strong for her, but I suspect my best hasn’t been up to much. She’s fourteen. Do you remember being a fourteen-year-old girl? It wasn’t ever easy, was it? Even without dead dads and zombified mums.

Nate is twelve and he’s a heartbreaker. Quite literally, when I look at him, it feels like my heart is breaking. He got David’s blonde hair too, and also his sparkly blue eyes. You know, those Paul Newman eyes? And David’s smile. And that one dimple on the left-hand side of his mouth.

He looks so much like his dad that people used to call him David’s ‘mini me’! Sometimes I hug him so tight he complains that I’m breaking his ribs. I laugh and let him go, even though I want to carry on squeezing and keep this tiny, perfect little human being safe for the rest of his life. We all know that’s not possible now and sometimes I think that’s the biggest casualty of David dying – none of us feel safe any more, which really isn’t fair when you’re twelve, is it?

But I have to remind myself that we had so much. We loved so much, and laughed so much, and shared so much. All of it was perfect, even the arguments. Especially the arguments – or the aftermath at least. Sometimes I wonder if that was the problem – we had too much that was too good, too young. Even after thirteen years of marriage he could still give me that cheeky little grin of his that made my heart beat a bit faster, and I could never, ever stay angry with him. It was the uni-dimple. It just made it impossible.

One of David’s favourite things was holidays. He worked hard at the bank, got promoted and enjoyed his job – but it was his family life that really mattered to him. We saved up and every year we’d have a brilliant holiday together. He loved researching them and planning them almost as much as going on them.

To start with, they were ‘baby’ holidays – the most important thing was finding somewhere we’d be safe with the little ones. So we stayed in the UK or did short flights to places like Majorca or Spain.

As the kids got older, we got more adventurous – or he did at least! We started by expanding our horizons and going on camping holidays on the continent. Tents in Tuscany, driving to the South of France with the car loaded up, a mobile home in Holland. The last two before he died were the most exciting ever – a yachting trip around Turkey, where the kids learned to sail and I learned to sunbathe, and three weeks in Florida doing the theme parks but then driving all the way down to the Keys and going native for a week.

Every holiday, for every year, was also given its own photo album when we got home.

It wasn’t enough for him to keep the pictures online, he got them all printed out and each album had the year it related to and the place we’d visited written on the spine on a sticker.

They’re all there now, on the bookshelf in the living room. Lined up in order – a photographic journey through time and space. Lizzie as a baby; Lizzie as a toddler and me pregnant; Nate joining the party. They grow up in those photo albums, right before our eyes – missing teeth and changing tastes and different haircuts, getting taller each year.

I suppose we age as well – I definitely put a bit of weight on as the years go by; David loses a bit of hair, gets more laughter lines. We never lose our smiles, though – that’s one thing that never changes.

The only year we didn’t have a holiday was when the kids were too old to share a room any more, and we had to buy a bigger house. We were skint, so we stayed at home – and even then, David set up a massive tent in our new garden and bought a load of sand from a builder’s yard to make our very own beach! Even that one has its own album, although on quite a few of the photos we’re wearing our swimming costumes in the rain!

If I’m entirely honest, the main reason I’m applying for this job – and doing a very bad job of it, I know – is because of all those holidays, and the memories that David managed to build for our children. For me. The memories that are all we have left of him now.

The last holiday David planned was over two years ago. We were going to Australia, flying in to Sydney and touring up to Queensland. The kids were buzzing about seeing koalas and kangaroos, and I was slightly concerned about them getting eaten by sharks or bitten by a killer spider. David was in his element.

He never got to go on that holiday. It was the first properly sunny day after winter – February 12th, to be exact – and he decided to do some house maintenance, the way you do once the sun comes out again.

While he was clearing some leaves out of the guttering, he slipped off the ladder and banged his head on the concrete patio. He seemed all right at first – we laughed about it, joked about his hard head. We thought we’d been lucky.

We were wrong. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had bleeding around his brain – his brain was swelling and bit by bit a disaster was going on inside his skull.

By the time he started to complain of a headache, he’d probably been feeling bad for hours. Taking Paracetamol for his ‘bump’ and trying to get on with his weekend. Eventually he collapsed in front of all three of us – fell right off his chair at the dinner table. At first the kids just laughed – he was a bit of a buffoon, David. He was always doing daft things to amuse them – it was like living with Norman Wisdom sometimes, the amount of slapstick that went on in our house!

But he wasn’t joking. And even though the ambulance got there so fast and the hospital was so good, it was too late. He was gone. He was put on a life-support machine and his parents and my parents came and his brother came, all to say goodbye. The kids? That was a hard decision. Nate was just ten and Lizzie was only twelve – but I thought they deserved it, the chance to say their farewells. I still don’t know if it was the right decision or not – it was impossible to weigh up whether the trauma of seeing him like that, hooked up to machines, would be worse than knowing they never got to see him off to heaven. Was it the right thing to do? I suppose I’ll have to wait and see how messed up they are over the next few years before I get my answer.

I can’t go into any detail about how I felt, Cherie, having to make those kinds of decisions. I just can’t. I’ll never, ever get this letter written if I do that – it’s too big and too raw, and even now, after all this time, I still have moments where the pain paralyses me – where I struggle to even get out of bed and put one foot in front of the other. They are only moments, though, and they are becoming further and further apart – I suppose that means my own brain injury is healing, which makes me feel strangely guilty.

I hate the fact that he died doing such a mundane thing. Cleaning the gutters. He was funny and kind and quietly brave – he was the type of man who would have thrown himself under a bus to save a child, or would have jumped into a raging sea to rescue a Labrador. Losing him because of leaves in the gutters seems so … pointless. He was an organ donor, though, which is some small comfort – the thought of all the lives he saved or changed for the better through that does help. I take consolation from someone walking around with that big, beautiful heart of his beating inside them.

So … by now, you’re either hooked and wondering how this story ends, or you’re considering calling the police to get a restraining order in case this crazy woman turns up at your café and tries to comfort random people.

The answer is, of course, that the story hasn’t ended – the story is still playing out, albeit at a very slow pace. We had a holiday the year after he died, and it was a disaster – a trip to Crete to stay in a hotel that turned out to be full of eighteen to thirty-year-olds, all on a mission to give themselves liver failure and complete their set of STD top trumps. It was loud, it was foul, and we all hated it – mainly, of course, because he wasn’t there. It was awful.

Now, I’m looking ahead and I see that there needs to be a change. David left us with enough life insurance to pay off the mortgage and the car loans, and to live on for a little while. We have no debt at all, which I know puts us at a big advantage over lots of families who are struggling to make ends meet.

But there’s nothing coming in – no income. Which means no holiday – not because of my lack of planning skills, but because we can’t afford it. Not if we want to eat as well. Don’t get me wrong, our heads are above water, but there isn’t much spare after paying the bills and doing the shopping and coping with what feels like the mountain of expense a teenage girl piles up!

If we ration we’ll be fine for another year. Rationing means no holiday – and I just can’t face it. I think we need a holiday – one that we actually enjoy, this time. We’ve all started to feel just a little bit better now. Almost against our will, there is more laughter, more easy chat, more smiling.

The kids’ lives have moved on, certainly a lot more than mine! They’re both in high school now, both starting to grow into young adults, both changing. I’d like to add another photo album to that shelf before they’re too cool to be bothered with their poor old mum.

I also know that I need to get my act together. I need to get a job – and not just for the money. I need to get out there, back into the world. Because the kids are that little bit older and more independent now. They don’t need me as much. They’re out a lot – or Lizzie is at least, and Nate is showing signs of following suit. That’s only right – it’s good. It’s what I want for them, to have normal lives. But me sitting at home in a rocking chair, counting cobwebs and watching The Good Wife on repeat isn’t going to do any of us any good.

Getting a job will help me to meet new people. Get away from my own problems. Make my world bigger. I have my sister, my parents and his family too – but sometimes, if I’m honest, that feels like more of a responsibility than a help. They’re all so worried about me all the time, I feel like I’m under a microscope. I think they’re waiting for me to crack.

I think they’re scared that long term, I can’t live without him. Maybe they’re right, I don’t know – but I have to try. I don’t want to forget David – that would be impossible even if I did – but I do need to start living my life After David. AD, if you like.

I started looking at jobs a few months ago and came to the depressing conclusion that I’m officially useless. I have the aforementioned Home Economics A level, which is the pinnacle of my academic achievement (I also have a C in Health and Social Care and a B in General Studies, which are really of no use to anybody). I worked at McDonald’s for a year before I had the kids and I got a food hygiene certificate when I did volunteer work at the school kitchen. Not hugely impressive, I know – it’s not like Marco Pierre White is hammering on the door with a job offer.

But I do cook – I cook a lot. Family dinners, occasional forays into something more exotic like Thai or Japanese. I do a mean roast and can make my own meatballs. I can bake and I can whip up marinades, and I can do a full English fry-up with my eyes closed.

I wouldn’t get very far on Masterchef, but I can cook – proper home-made stuff – the kind of food that isn’t just good for your body but good for your soul as well. At least I like to think so. I’m amazed, in fact, that the kids aren’t the size of that giant marshmallow man in Ghostbusters by now – one of the ways I’ve tried to console them (and if I’m honest, myself as well) over the last few years is through feeding them. It keeps me busy, it makes me feel like I’m doing something positive, and it’s a way to show I love them now they’re too old for public displays of affection.

They just scarf it down, of course, they’re kids – but perhaps, at somewhere like the Comfort Food Café, I could actually be of some use. It would be really, really nice to feel useful again – and to spend the summer in Dorset, and fill up another one of those albums.

So. There we go. I think that’s everything. Probably more than everything. I’m not sure this is what you meant when you said send your heart and soul in letter form, but that serves you right for being so vague! I bet you got some really strange replies – this one being possibly the strangest of all.

I won’t hold it against you, Cherie, if I never hear from you. But if you want to talk to me, or find out anything more, then let me know. Whatever happens, good luck to you.

All the best,

Laura Walker

WEEK 1

In which I travel to Dorset, sing a lot of Meatloaf songs, accidentally inhale what might possibly be marijuana, wrap my bra around a strange man’s head and become completely betwattled …

Chapter 3