Something Came Loose
44. Arriving at the same decision, twice in two days, and it felt like the same thing.
The café had mostly cleared by the time they stood to go, staff already flipping chairs onto the far tables. Amandha unfolded Yogi’s pram back into its seat, and he climbed the little ramp himself, three short steps and a fourth pushing off with his back legs, then settled facing forward like leaving had been his idea.
They walked back together as far as the mall’s side entrance, the pram’s front wheels catching on every third paving stone, a small stutter and release. Wen went off there, something she needed from inside, already reaching for her phone to check a list.
“Text me when you’ve read it,” Wen said. “Or don’t. Either’s fine.”
“I said I’d read it tonight.”
“I know. I’m giving you an out in advance.”
Amandha shook her head. Wen lifted a hand and was already moving toward the escalators, swallowed by the cool rush of air conditioning before Amandha had properly turned the pram back toward her own block.
Alone now, Yogi settling into the rhythm of the wheels, she let the question back in.
Why did you marry him.
She’d answered it at the table without having to think, which should have told her something at the time. He made sense. The hours matched. The friends approved. She’d said all of it fluently, the way you recite an address you’ve given a hundred times.
He had been there.
That was underneath the hours and friends, the part she hadn’t said at the table. There in the way a light left on in a hallway is there. She shook her head at the thought.
Before him, though. Before any of that. In Melbourne when she was there studying, she had wanted a different man entirely. It had nothing to do with staying. It was not I am fond of him. Not drawn to what he could offer her later. She wanted him. Wanted, the way you want a person and not an arrangement. He had a girlfriend. And she knew that. It was the whole reason it had felt like the truest thing she’d done in years, there was no argument available that it made sense. It made none. She slept with him anyway.
Walking now, a different thought arrived. What if she’d been allowed to want him openly. No secrets.
Legitimately, she thought.
Then she stopped. There is no legitimate word for it. So the want had only ever been one thing available: taking, not asking.
The shame arrived on the heel of that. Her hand had already slipped off the pram handle. She found it again and held on properly this time, and let Yogi pull her the rest of the way home.
They had been friends first. It happened fast and she had let herself believe that was all it was for longer than she should have. Then there was a night neither of them had planned to let happen, and it happened anyway, and in the morning he was gone. Nobody had ever asked her to account for that night, not even the man who eventually did marry her. Not even herself. Until now.
Her pram wheels caught a seam in the pavement and she felt it in her wrists before she registered it. She had married the exact opposite of that night. Not the wanting. The staying. He had simply not left, and she had mistaken the not-leaving for love because after Melbourne the not-leaving was the only proof she needed.
The rest of the walk, she thought about yesterday.
She’d watched the live from the bus, AirPods in, fifty-odd strangers in the little viewer count beside her. I’m single. But I’m not available. She’d sent David a text yesterday.
I saw you on TikTok. That’s why I asked about your mum.
Yeah. I was at Lina’s house. She’s my god mother. She offered me space to work from there. Things are crowded at home right now.
I thought you were interviewing people.
Yeah I was. But they seemed wrong.
How wrong. Why wrong?
Three dots. Gone. Back. Gone again. Then her phone had rung.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s easier if we just talk.”
She’d let Yogi settle back against her hip before she answered.
“The agency I’ve been using,” he said, “keeps sending me people who check boxes. Certificates. References.” A pause, and when he went on his voice had loosened. “I sit with the bios the same way each time. I get to the line, warm and caring personality, and I think, are they all warm and caring? And then I interview them anyway. Because what else am I checking against.”
He exhaled. “She had the bio, the references, I mean she did look so much like Marina. And when I sat across from her I felt there was nobody there with me. You know, my mother likes to talk. She asks about the woman downstairs whose dog gets wheeled around in a pram all day. About the flowers. Whether they’re from the usual stall. She’s not asking about flowers. I’ve watched her do this my whole life and I still can’t tell you…”
“You weren’t screening. You were hoping you’d feel it.” She shifted the phone to her other ear. “So how many more did you interview after the Marina look alike?”
“Three more. The first one didn’t have enough English to explain a change in medication to me over the phone, which is the one thing I actually need her to be able to do without me being there. The second one was good, genuinely good, and asked for a live-in rate I couldn’t justify against what the agency told me the market was. The third one, the one I did this morning.” He stopped. “I don’t actually remember. That’s the part that worries me. I think I’d already stopped really looking by then.”
“That’s not a caregiver problem,” she said. “That’s an exhaustion problem wearing a caregiver problem’s clothes.”
He didn’t answer that right away.
“How’s their English, though,” she said. “Can they actually hold a conversation with your mum and dad, or just get through a shift.”
“It’s alright, I guess. May’s English was in bits and pieces too. Her grammar was all over the place and we understood her anyway. She was soft. She ran the house without being asked, knew what they liked to eat, was firm with them about the salt. I don’t know how to duplicate her.”
“Do you mind if I ask a few more questions?”
“Go ahead.”
“The English thing, is it actually the English, or is it that whoever you’re interviewing can manage a house but can’t hold a conversation. Your parents need someone who can read between the lines. Pace your mum. Prompt your dad without him noticing he’s being prompted. I don’t know if an agency screens for that.”
A small sound on his end. Not quite a laugh.
“Say that again.”
“You’re not looking for someone who can run the flat,” she said. “You’ve had that. Marina ran that flat for years, before she went home, and it worked because she knew when to be quiet and when not to be. That’s not a skill an agency puts on a form. What your mum needs now isn’t management. It’s someone who’ll actually be curious back. Ask her about her childhood, the flowers she keeps circling. If the woman across from you is thinking in translation the whole time, she can manage your mother. She can’t meet her.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
“And your dad’s a different animal completely,” she said. “He doesn’t need reminding to move. He needs to get moving without it feeling like he’s being managed into it. Whoever you hire has to do both of those, in the same house, on any given day, without either of them feeling handled.”
“Handled,” he said, slow, like he was hearing himself say it for the first time. Then, “That’s an accurate description of my parents, and you only met them once, years ago.”
“I filled in for HR a while back. Still do, actually. That’s the whole thing everyone gets wrong.” She turned the corner to her block. “They hire for competence and forget dignity isn’t something competence can make up for.”
“Marina used to say something like that. Different words.” A sharp inhale. “I spoke to her last week, actually. Got her and my parents on the phone together. She still asks after the dog every single time.”
Another silence, longer than the last one.
“You’ve thought about this,” he said. “What are you actually telling me to do.”
“Stop going through the agency,” she said. “I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m saying they’re handing you bios out of a pool of strangers. What you’re looking for is going to come from someone who already knows your mother’s kind of curious, or knows someone who does. Ask your own people before you go back to a stranger with a form.”
He was quiet again, long enough that she checked the screen to see the call was still running.
“I have a network,” he said slowly. “Twelve years of it. Suppliers, staff in four countries, people who’ve sent me their own cousins when I needed something reliable. I’ve been treating my mother’s care like a transaction I hadn’t built any relationships for. I have. I just hadn’t thought to use them for this.”
“There you go.”
“Amandha.”
“Mm.”
“Shall we get coffee. Actual coffee, I mean let’s meet. When are you free?”
She looked down at Yogi, who had gone still against her hip the way he did when he’d decided a conversation was over before she had.
“I’ll let you know,” she said, which wasn’t a no.
The flat was quiet when she unlocked the door. Her parents weren’t back yet, their weekly date with the supermarket running long the way it always did. She folded the pram flat and left it by the entrance and Yogi went straight for his water bowl. He took three loud slurps, lost interest halfway through and followed her into the living room instead.
She opened Wen’s link on her phone.
What the Survival Was For. She read the first paragraph twice before she let herself go on.
The math sat in the left column, number under number, the way Wen must have typed it out to see it herself. She’d seen that before. Just different handwriting. The nurse who moved back in with her mother-in-law after her husband’s bypass. The ward coordinator Amandha had once seen a few times, going through a folder of receipts at the nurses’ station; running the same numbers she must have run every month for years, when she thought no one could see.
Twelve dollars.
She let out a breath. The shocking part was that the number was real and everyone ran the same calculations and called it fine.
She stopped on one line.
The floor was built to stand on, not to stay on.
Something had come loose on the walk home dressed in different clothes.
Yogi shifted his weight against her leg. She read the line a third time and let it do what it wanted to do.
The flat, tenanted out fifteen years now, was hers again by Thursday. The British couple had had it the last eight of those, no children and careful with the place. She’d never raised the rent past the second contract. Doing it would have made her something she didn’t want to be. When they met two weeks before to finalise the handover, they gave her a card with photos of the flat from the years they’d lived in it. And a simple letter thanking her.
She had been treating the real question as admin. Locks. Meter readings. What to do with the furniture the tenants had left behind, more of it than she remembered agreeing to. A question for after she had the keys back, she’d told herself. The same thing she told her mother, every time it came through Christine instead of straight to her.
The floor was built to stand on, not to stay on.
That line she kept returning to and the question about the flat was the same thing. Moving in meant confirmation. A woman with her own address, her own key, nobody’s washing but hers. She had built exactly that kind of life once already and knew precisely what it cost to live inside something that had already decided what it was.
Complete. Finished. End of story.
She didn’t want a finished flat. She wanted to stay in range for possibility. Undecided on purpose.
That wasn’t the same as staying home because it was easier, or because she hadn’t got round to deciding. The not-deciding and the choosing-to-stay. She’d spent years mistaking those two things for each other. She had married a man once because he stayed. And mistaken the staying for choosing.
She exhaled loudly. Yogi lifted his head.
She wasn’t going to keep delaying this the way she’d delayed everything else in her life, she decided. She had done that version many times over. Waiting for decisions to arrive… made by other people.
No.
She would rent the flat out. Keep the rental going, just with different names on the lease. Stay here, in this sofa, this whole unfinished stretch of her life, on purpose. Chosen with both hands.
She stood and Yogi followed her to the door for his lead.