Cleo

“Strangers in the Night” dribbled out of a nearby speaker. To the untrained ear the recording had been made inside a shipping container, with musicians scraping instruments made of tin cans. Their Muzak was a welcome silence filler.

Philip’s attention moved to the paper place mats with games printed on them. He asked Rob if he’d like to play snakes and ladders. (Not snakes and ladders! I wanted to tell Philip. Rob grew out of that years ago. He thinks it’s a game for babies!) But it wasn’t Philip’s fault he hadn’t kept pace with child development. I held my breath waiting for the inevitable combination of rejection and scorn to catapult across the table.

“I’d rather play this,” Rob said, indicating a mass of dots arranged in rectangles. I hadn’t seen the game before, but it looked brutally competitive. Each player was allowed one pencil stroke to join two dots at a time, gradually amassing territories of fully formed rectangles. Whoever gained the largest number of completed rectangles won the game. This was the restaurant place mat version of war.

The game started casually enough for me to munch through a triangle of Hawaiian pizza while concentrating on keeping Lydia’s mouth full so no more conversational frogs could leap out of it.

To keep the atmosphere cheerful I read from a section of the menu about the history of pizza, since its humble beginnings when the Greeks first came up with the idea of decorating flat bread.

“The real turning point was in the early nineteenth century, when a Neapolitan baker called Raffaele Esposito decided to make a bread that would stand out from everyone else’s. He started by just adding cheese…”

I was, of course, reading all this while surreptitiously monitoring the battle taking place between the two men in my life. Rob claimed a cluster of rectangles in the right-hand corner. Philip filled in a strip on the other side. The game was evenly matched.

“After a while he started putting sauce under the cheese. He let the dough fluff out to the shape of a pie…”

Rob’s territory was spreading across the square. Philip, on the other hand, appeared to be making listless progress on his side. My lips wanted to smile, but I tried to keep them in a straight line. Philip was demonstrating unexpected maturity by letting Rob win. Maybe he was stepfather material after all. He certainly looked the part in his corduroy trousers and fisherman’s knit jumper.

“Everyone loved Esposito’s pizza so much he was asked to create a special one for the King and Queen of Italy. He made one in the colors of the Italian flag—red sauce, white cheese, green basil…”

The two blocks of rectangles moved closer together. Their pencils flashed like swords. It was starting to look like a draw. That would be okay, I thought, as long as Rob’s dignity was kept intact. There was hardly any free space left now.

“He named his pizza Margherita, after the queen…”

The tension was unbearable.

“The new Margherita pizza was a huge hit.”

I didn’t dare watch the last few strokes. I knew it was over when I heard two pencils clatter onto the tabletop.

“You won,” said Rob, with a brave smile.

“You what?!” I said, turning to Philip.

“It was a tough game,” he said, shrugging with an unmistakable glint of satisfaction.

A tough game? Didn’t he understand there’s no such thing as a tough game when children were involved, especially my children? My kids’ lives were tough enough without some jerk in pseudo stepdad corduroys turning up and knocking their self-esteem around.

I should never have let Philip near them. He was behaving like a child. Worse than a child. And the last thing I needed was another child. The relationship was doomed. Rob would be devastated for days after losing that game.

We drove home in silence and exchanged chaste farewells at the gate.

“It’s good he’s going home,” said Lydia, echoing my thoughts. “His mother will be missing him.”

“What did you think?” I asked Rob after I’d fed Cleo and put Lydia to bed.

“He’s cool.”

“I don’t suppose he comes across as a very warm person.”

“No, I like him.”

“You like him? But he beat you at that stupid game.”

“I’m sick of the way grown-ups always go out of their way to let me win,” said Rob. “They think I don’t notice. He treated me as an adult. He’s cool. You should see more of him.”

People and Places

Cats have a reputation for being more attached to places than people. But some remarkable individuals have proved the generalization quite wrong.