“Dennis, who are they? Where did all these people come from?” Christina’s voice wavers; she grips her son’s elbow 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 at that idea, and she lets go of his arm, freezing as she stares into her own garden.
The planks of wood smell of pine. They smell so thick and sharp that Christina’s nose started itching even as she approached the gate, and now that smell mixes with lime and sweat. People stand in the garden. Lots of them. Twenty or more. Men in old T-shirts and dusty jeans, two young women with rolls of plastic sheeting, a bloke on a stepladder, another right on the roof with a hammer. Someone carries bags of cement; someone else stirs white sludge in a bucket, giving off a sharp lime scent. Her cottage plot, quiet and dreary just yesterday, now looks like an anthill in April.
“Dennis,” she says, dryly, almost voiceless. “Do you see this? If you sold the cottage without asking, I will never forgive you. Tell me honestly — are these strangers?”
“Mum, hold on, what new owners?” Dennis is taken aback. “What are you on about? These are mine. All mine.”
“What do you mean ‘yours’? What is going on here? I have my phone in my bag — if you don’t explain right now, I’m calling the police.”
She really does reach for the bag hanging from her elbow. Her fingers won’t obey. Everything rushes through her mind at once: the little house she’d worked on for fifteen years, the veranda she never built because first it was Dennis’s education, then the car loan, then her own dental implants — they can wait — then linoleum for the flat in town — that can wait too. Everything waited, and now strangers are trampling her garden. *Her* garden. The one she’d looked after like a child.
“Mum,” Dennis touches her shoulder. “Listen. They aren’t new owners. I invited them.”
Christina freezes, bag in hand. She looks at her son as though seeing him for the first time. Thirty-five years old, grey clearly showing at his temples, broad shoulders — from her, not his father. In his eyes there’s neither fear nor cheekiness. Just a quiet, calm expectation.
“You?”
“Me. Mum, these are all my people. From work, from university — the ones still around — lads from the street I used to play football with. Remember Paul?”
Christina remembers Paul. Skinny, always hungry, always stayed for dinner at theirs because his home wasn’t great, she guessed. Back then she used to heap an extra portion onto his plate and pretend not to notice how embarrassed he was.
“Paul’s here?”
“Here. And Alex, and Red-headed Mike, and George — he was my best man at the wedding. Nearly everyone you fed, Mum.”
Christina looks around the garden. So that’s it. That’s why the faces seemed vaguely familiar. That bloke on the stepladder — definitely the boy she gave Dennis’s old bike to when his family moved into a shared flat. And this one with the bucket — Alex — he broke their window with a football in Year Nine, and she didn’t yell, just asked him to put in a new pane. They’ve grown up. Become grown men with strong hands and serious faces. And they stand on her plot with planks and seedlings.
“Why?” Christina 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 saved up 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 summer and watch the sunset? You had a picture from a magazine stuck on the fridge. Fifteen years ago.”
Christina remembers. Yes, there was such a picture. It yellowed, the corners curled, but she never threw it away until they replaced the fridge. Then the clipping got lost, and she almost forgot about it. Almost.
“You were saving up back then,” Dennis goes on, “from every paycheque. But then my university entrance, and tutors, and the rented flat when Vera and I first got married… Mum, you put off the repair in your bedroom for six years. You still have that flowery wallpaper that’s probably older than me. I remember you saying, ‘Never mind, the veranda can wait.’ But you know what? It can’t. Enough waiting.”
Christina says nothing. She is silent so long that Paul stops hammering on the roof and freezes, watching them.
“I’m paying back my debt,” Dennis says. “The 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. Christina sees a drawing — neat, with measurements and notes in the margins. Not a magazine clipping. A proper plan. Made for her little plot, taking into account the old apple tree she’d asked not to touch, no matter what.
“We’ll go around the apple tree,” Dennis says, catching her gaze. “We’ve thought of everything. We’ll reinforce the foundation. We’ll put in underfloor heating — I checked, there’s a special system, cheap and reliable. You’ll sit there in November, wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea.”
The first tear rolls down Christina’s cheek and stops somewhere near the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t wipe it away — she doesn’t even notice. She stands and looks at these grown men who once played football in their yard, scraped their knees, snitched hot cutlets straight from her pan, copied homework from each other at her kitchen table, and argued hoarsely about some computer games. Now they have come here. Of their own accord. For free. To build the veranda of her dreams.
But the idyll doesn’t last long. From beyond the fence comes a cough, and a head in a flowery scarf appears above the pickets. Brenda, the neighbour on the left. A woman with a permanent expression of “I told you so.” She plants her hands on her hips and watches the scene with a look that suggests the national border is being dismantled before her very eyes.
“Christina, is that you?” she sings out in a sweet voice laced with steel. “I saw the noise and commotion — vans from this morning. What’s going on here, a job fair?”
“Brenda, good morning,” Christina wipes her cheek automatically. “It’s my son and his friends. They’re helping. We’re building a veranda.”
“A veranda?” Brenda throws up her hands. “Do you have planning permission? Do you know the fines for unauthorised construction these days? You’d sell the cottage and still not pay them off. And your plot is tiny, Christina — three metres to my fence — are you respecting the setback? I won’t keep quiet, you know. My nephew works in building control; I can have a word.”
Dennis hears this, turns, and walks calmly over to the fence.
“Hello, Brenda. We have permission. The plan is approved. Fire safety regulations are met. My friend is an architect — he checked everything before drawing it up. Would you like to see the documents?”
Brenda turns beetroot. She clearly hadn’t expected that.
“Well, well,” she drawls, stepping back a pace. “We’ll see what comes of it. You know, people build things and then have to tear them down at their own expense. And the noise, Christina. My grandchildren won’t be able to sleep.”
“Never mind,” Christina says quietly, and her voice no longer trembles. “Your grandchildren ate my pancakes last August when you forgot to feed them. They can sleep later.”
Brenda purses her lips and disappears behind the fence. Paul, who had been watching from the roof, gives a quiet chuckle and picks up his hammer again. And Christina suddenly feels — for the first time in years — something like fighting spirit spreading inside her. No way. She’ll protect her dream now.
Over the next two hours, Christina moves in a strange, half-transparent state. She feels as if she’s dreaming. Dennis settles her on a folding chair in the shade of the apple tree, brings out an old mug with a chipped handle — the same one she used to drink tea from when she took him to nursery school — and pours hot tea from a thermos.
“Stay put,” he says firmly. “Your only job today is to watch. No ‘I’ll just sweep here,’ no ‘I’ll water the cucumbers right now.’ Got it?”
Christina wants to argue — out of habit, because she’s argued non-stop for the last forty years — but then she changes her mind. She leans back in the chair and starts watching.
Watching Paul and his mate sawing planks, the saw screaming so loud the neighbour’s dog starts barking. Watching Red-headed Mike — now not red at all but bald and solid — mixing mortar and explaining something to a girl with seedlings. Watching Dennis walk from one to another, checking something, helping someone hold, nodding to someone else, and his face is adult, focused, in charge. Her son. The master of this garden. No — the master of that life he is now giving back to her, his mother.
By three in the afternoon, Christina gets up anyway. Enough. You can watch, but not to that extent.
“I’ll make lunch,” she tells Dennis.
“Mum…”
“No ‘Mum.’ 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. The house is cool and smells of summer dust. She opens the fridge, which always looks lonely 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 back onto the porch to call Dennis and send him to the shop, she finds she’s already been anticipated. One of the girls — the one with the phlox — hands her two huge carrier bags.
“There are vegetables, chicken, eggs, flour, oil,” she says. “Dennis bought them yesterday. He said, ‘Mum will want to cook — don’t argue, just give her the ingredients.’”
Christina 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 arrange all this?”
“Mum, I’ve been preparing for three months,” he replies without turning. “Better tell me when the pancakes will be ready.”
That’s too much. Christina goes inside, closes the door firmly, and stands for a minute with her palms pressed to her face. Then she exhales, rolls up her sleeves, and starts making the batter.
An hour later, a long table stands in the garden — the lads knocked it together from the same planks in fifteen minutes flat. On the table steam rises from potatoes Christina has fried 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 younger days when salads weren’t fussed over. In the centre sits a mountain of pancakes — thin, lacy, with crisp edges. Her signature ones. The ones that used to be wolfed down in handfuls by hungry Year Eleven boys in three minutes flat.
“Auntie Christina,” someone says with a full mouth — it sounds like Alex, the one who broke the window. “I haven’t had pancakes like this in fifteen years. Honestly. My mum never baked — it was always ready meals at home.”
“I know,” Christina says and suddenly smiles. “That’s why you used to stay until evening at our place.”
Everyone laughs. Loudly, freely, youngly. Twenty adults laugh in her cottage garden, and that laugh is probably the best sound in the last ten years.
Christina suddenly stands up. She looks around at everyone. Paul freezes with his spoon in mid-air; Dennis tenses. She picks up a ladle, pours some compote from the pot into a cup, and raises it in front of her.
“Guys,” she says, and her voice sounds unusually strong. “Forgive me — I cried three times today. The first time from fright. The second from joy. The third because I didn’t know how to thank you. Now I know. I want to drink to you. To each one of you. To the fact that you remember. I never forgot your faces, but I thought you’d forgotten mine. But you haven’t. So I didn’t feed you for nothing. To you.”
She drinks the compote in one gulp, as if it were something stronger. A second of silence hangs over the table, and then a cheer erupts so loud that a crow takes off from the neighbouring apple tree.
She moves among them, piling pancakes onto plates, refilling tea, listening to conversations, and realises she no longer feels anxious. That familiar anxiety she had fallen asleep and woken up with for the past few years — worry about Dennis, about his marriage, about his mortgage, about him earning too little, working too much, calling too rarely. All that has receded. Because here he is, her son, sitting on an upturned crate, using a plank on his knees as a plate, spreading jam on a pancake, and saying to someone: “No, the window frames can wait — today we need to finish the gable wall, otherwise rain will come and soak everything.” And she understands: he has grown up. He can organise twenty people and build a veranda. And he did it — for her.
In the evening, when the crowd begins to drift off to their tents (they’ve set up camp just beyond her plot, next to the woods, so as not to crowd the garden), Christina sits on the old porch steps. Dennis sits down beside her.
“So, how do you like it?” he asks.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Mum, what are you saying? Thank *you*. For everything.”
They sit in silence. Then Christina says: “You know, I always thought parents give to their children, and then 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 I did.”
“And I do,” he says. “I have a better life precisely because you wanted it. And now I want you to have a better life too. At least a veranda.”
Christina gives a wry smile and nudges him with her shoulder — just like when he was a kid, bringing home a bad mark in literature and saying: “Mum, I’m not Shakespeare.”
“All right, builder. Tomorrow you have those gable walls again.”
“The gable walls aren’t going anywhere,” Dennis says, and reaches out a hand to help her up.
The week flies by like a single day. On Friday evening, Christina stands on her new veranda and watches the setting sun flood the garden with orange. The veranda looks exactly like the picture in the magazine: light, spacious, with sliding glass doors and the fresh smell of wood. The planks aren’t painted yet, but that’s fine. There’s time. An old blanket already lies on the floor, and a cup of tea sits on the windowsill. The lavender the girls planted by the entrance smells delicate and stirring, like a promise of the future.
Tomorrow everyone will leave. But tonight they sit around the table again, laughing, drinking tea, eating pancakes. And Christina suddenly catches herself thinking: more than anything in the world, she wants each of these twenty people — Paul, who’s getting divorced, Mike, who’s going bald, the girls with the seedlings whose names she still hasn’t memorised — she wants all of them to have a moment like this someday. A moment when they understand that good deeds come back. Not necessarily as pancakes. Maybe as planks. Maybe as a veranda. Or maybe just as twenty people standing behind you without a contract, saying: “We remember how you fed us.”
In October, when the first frosts come, Christina sits on her new veranda with a blanket over her knees. Behind 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 cup doesn’t cool down. She picks up her phone, takes a picture of the sunset over the apple tree, and texts Dennis: “Son, some bullfinches have arrived. Come over. I’ll make pancakes.” The message sends, and she leans back in her chair and smiles — slowly, calmly, like someone who has finally stopped waiting.
