Bea looked down at the text message from her cousin, Madeleine, and stifled a groan. ‘You guys can’t park there!!!! We’ve parked there. Your dad will spot our car. Go somewhere else. Now!!!!!’
This was going to be a long day. A very long day.
Mads was right, naturally. Her dad held quite the torch for Uncle Carl’s burgundy-hued 1967 Jaguar which Bea thought looked like something from an outdated English sitcom, but he described as “the embodiment of class”.
“Hey, Mickey.” She leaned forward in the car, head between the two front seats. “Don’t park here. Go further down, behind the supermarket. That way we can walk back along the water.”
Sliding her eyes towards the other side of the road and the family’s ultimate destination, Captain’s by The Sea, the 19-year-old thought she spied the blue of Madeleine’s favourite denim dress heading back through the restaurant’s front doors. For months the two girls had been secretly hatching this plan and now the day had arrived. They would need a combination of careful timetabling, crafty seating, and Christmas goodwill to pull it off but, for Grandma Shirley’s sake, the cousins had to try.
“Would you stop calling your father ‘Mickey’, please Beatrix. It’s disrespectful,” her mother, Abbey, said, pulling a lipstick and small hand mirror out of her bag, ready to tackle repairs. “And we’re parking here. These are restaurant shoes, not walking shoes.”
