I turned 47 on the 5th, and I'd been telling people for months I already felt 47, so the actual day landed soft. Jas gave me money toward new clothes instead of a wrapped thing, said it was the best she could give me that week, and I told her I could think of something physical she could give me instead, which got a laugh in the car as we did the school run faster than we ever had, Lou then Dot then Fox at his train.
The house had been trying to sell since spring and wouldn't. A builder's report scared off two buyers over a mould stain that turned out to be tomato sauce wiped off a wall, and eventually we pulled the listing rather than put it through another round. The plan flipped itself over: stop trying to sell this place, buy another one, rent this one out instead. We found a place on Wesley Road, up in Kelburn in the city, got our own inspector through it before making an offer, offered less than asking, told the agent to let the vendor sweat when they countered high, and the whole negotiation went almost exactly the way I'd told Jas it would the night before. We bought it. The kids voted for it over the smaller alternative, unprompted, which felt like it should have meant more than it did at the time.
In the middle of all that, a lump came up on the back of my ankle fast enough that I rang the nurse convinced it had doubled overnight. The GP couldn't explain it, booked an ultrasound with a six-week wait, and a physio gave me shockwave therapy and strapping while admitting, essentially, that nothing conclusively fixes these things. I kept walking on it anyway and kept being wrong about how far.
I'd already booked a week in Hong Kong, mostly to take Lou somewhere before he turned two the way I once had with Fox and Dot, partly for work, partly because doctors there have a reputation for fixing feet ours don't. Jas talked me into it almost before I'd finished worrying about leaving the four of them behind. Folding up his cot the morning we left felt bigger than it should have. On the plane he had, as one attendant put it, no one to fight with, so he got all of me: butter chicken by hand, three cartoons negotiated down to one, a seatbelt argument settled by offering my lap as the compromise. Finding our way to some friends' tower after dark, him asleep against my shoulder, I told someone my arms were getting sore from carrying him because he'd gotten so heavy, and meant it as a complaint and didn't mean it as one, both at once.
A doctor across the border cupped and bled the ankle and told me it would take six months of patience, which was more honest than anything the physio at home had said. Lou got a toy duck at the same clinic and would not put it down. Crossing into Shenzhen with him mid-tantrum, and a stranger occasionally deciding I looked like a bad father, was its own kind of humbling.
The day before I left, Jas's week turned into a much harder one than mine, and I'd be gone for most of it. I told her to make herself as necessary as possible and that I'd start ringing recruiters. We had a strained conversation in the car about money and communication that settled before we all went down to the beach, where Lou went into the sea for maybe the first time in his life and came out screaming with delight, then said goodbye at an airport hotel with him crying and clinging to both of us at once. I told the older two to look after each other and that their mother was carrying a lot. Then it was just me and Lou, and a foot that still hadn't decided what it wanted to do, walking toward a gate.
