Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2)

by Rosalind James

  I went back to the table without her instead. It was better for her to sleep, and anyway, you couldn’t always hold a baby. Some things, you just had to face. My mum left with Olivia, and Buddy barked a couple times, then trotted back and curled up at my feet once I was the last choice left. And Matiu took my hand.

  He didn’t say anything at all. He just held my hand.

  My dad said, “If there isn’t much there on Max’s side, the marital property will be your bank accounts. Your profits from the books.” He paused a minute. “This house.”

  “I understand.” My legs were trying to tremble, which was stupid. It wasn’t fear. It was dread, and it was fury. I didn’t want to go through all this. I didn’t want my kids to go through it. We had no choice.

  “And if his salary doesn’t look like much,” my dad went on, “you won’t get much maintenance for the kids, either.”

  I nodded dumbly. That wasn’t the most important thing. I was fine. We were fine. Then why was I so shocked?

  I did my best to calm down, to refocus. I took a breath and said, “Thanks for telling me. I’ll be ... prepared, I guess.”

  Dad said, “I didn’t come over to tell you that. Your lawyer could’ve told you that. Though if you’re doing this, best get it done fast. Don’t let it hang over your head. Does nobody any good there.”

  I said. “I’d like to get it done, too. It’s just ...” I waved a hand. “A lot to ... to think about.” Seeing as my mind was trying to close down, that was certainly true.

  “That’s the reason I’m here,” Dad said, and I tried to look at him warily and couldn’t quite do it. I was numb. Things were coming at me from all sides, and I was starting to lose the ability to react.

  Dad went on, “I came to tell you that if you need help, to keep the house and all, you’ve got it.” Some more clearing of his throat, and he was looking past me. “Better for the kids to stay in the place they know. Whatever you need for that, you’ve got it.”

  “Dad.” The tears were there behind my eyes, and I had my hand on his arm now. “Thank you.”

  “No worries.” It was still gruff. “Not forever, mind. I’ll not have you getting dependent on me. That’s no good. If it comes to that, you can come into the business. Once the baby’s older, of course. I’ll find a spot for you somewhere.”

  I had to laugh. My entire body was so tense, I trembled, but I still had to laugh. “You sound like you’re bracing yourself for it. Just how rubbish at it do you think I’d be?”

  He smiled. Not much, but it was there. “Maybe as rubbish as I was when I started.”

  It was so much better to talk about this than about me, so I said, “Really? You were? I thought you always wanted to work there.”

  “Nah. No choice, that was all. Your grandfather was a hard man, and he was probably right to be. It was a good firm, and a family firm should be run by family.”

  “I remember him,” I said. “He was a bit ... spiky. That’s the main thing I remember. What did you want to do instead, though?”

  He looked at me. His gray eyes that Jax had inherited, his strength of will and steadiness of purpose that maybe we all had. Even me. He said, “I wanted to be an artist. Not a painter, mind,” he went on hastily, as if I’d laugh. “Not practical, and I knew it. A graphic artist, was the idea.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. “So Heather ...” I said slowly. “With the art. And me.”

  “Well, it’s not your mum,” he said. “I love the woman, but she can’t draw a straight line.”

  “I always thought it was Grandad Charlie,” I said. “Though his thing is stories, which are different. If it’s you, though ... why have you always told me it wasn’t worth doing? Why did you say it was a hobby?”

  “Because,” he said, and looked over my head again, “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

  I had my arms around him, was laughing, somehow, and he was giving me a cuddle, too. “I do love you, Dad,” I told him. “But I’ve earned eight hundred fifty thousand dollars with the Hazel books over the past five years. Most of it in the past three years. And heaps more from selling the glamping firm to Hemi Te Mana, which Max can’t touch, because you advised me exactly right.”

  He looked gobsmacked. “What?”

  “The firm,” I said, “because I was right about what people would want, and because I did it right. Poured the profits back into it, and upscaled everything. And Hazel, because there’s a big wide world beyond New Zealand, and kids worry everywhere. There’s a film company interested as well. All right, television. They aren’t going to make an actual film about a blue hippo. But—yeh. Television. A series for kids, is the idea. It may not happen, who knows, but my agent is working out a deal where they’ll pay me for the chance. Option it, is what they call it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “Dunno. On the television deal—maybe because I don’t want to be too disappointed if it doesn’t happen, and if I tell people, I will be. And maybe also because I didn’t want you to only think my job was worthwhile if it made enough money, same as you did with Jax. Stubborn, aren’t I. Same as you. Same as Heather. Same as Jax. I know exactly where that gene came from.”

  He looked away again. “Your mother says I was wrong about that as well. About Jax.”

  “I should just about think so,” I said. “Jax is doing what he loves. But I think it’s the same thing. I think it’s not about the money, not really. It’s that you don’t want him to suffer, and you don’t want to lose him.”

  He didn’t shift in his chair. He was too disciplined for that. He glanced at Matiu, then away. “Of course I don’t want to lose him,” he said. Gruffly, the way he said most things. “Would you want Hamish to get his leg blown off? To lie in hospital like that, or worse? To take that much risk?”

  “No.” My chest ached, and I laid my head against his shoulder. “No. I wouldn’t. I’d be so scared. I’d try to get him to do anything else, probably. Even if it was what he loved.”

  “Also,” he said, sitting up straight again and not brushing at his eyes, although they were glistening, “you shouldn’t be letting this fella hear how much you’re earning. He seems all right, but then, so did Max, didn’t he.”

  Oh, no. I looked at Matiu, expecting fireworks.

  I didn’t get them.

  Matiu said, “She’s doing well, yeh. Got a nice house and a nice life, a person could think.”

  “If she can keep it,” Dad said, which I ignored. That was just Dad.

  “I’ve got a house myself,” Matiu said. “In Otumoetai, up in Tauranga. Not too bad. Not too different from this one, in fact. Harbour views and so forth. I’ve been earning for a wee while now, you see.” He was smiling now, back to being his charming self. “I’ll show you my bank balance, if you like. Got a few investments as well.”

  “You’re not interested in a woman with money,” Dad said flatly. “With a flash family, and maybe more money to come.”

  Matiu said, “Well ... crass as it may seem to mention it, Hemi Te Mana is my cousin. Reached the billion-dollar mark some time back, they say, and still going. Could be that flash families impress me less than most. And then there’s my brother, of course. Machinist for thirty years or so now, and married to the same woman for longer than that. Heaps of hard things in his past, and the happiest man I know. And my grandfather. Auto mechanic. Got all sorts, haven’t we, including a black sheep or two. Which isn’t actually me, surprising as that may be.”

  “Auto mechanic’s all right,” Dad said. “Machinist as well. Nothing wrong with hard work.”

  “You’re right,” Matiu said. “Nothing wrong with patching people up when they injure themselves, either. Shocking their hearts back into rhythm, or sending a kid back home to her whanau instead of to her tangi. A mechanic of a different kind, maybe.”

  “That why you do it, then?” Dad asked. “Not for the money? I asked, you know. Emergency pay is one of the highest. Four hundred t
housand a year, they say you could make, being a Fellow like you are.”

  Matiu said, “Odd conversation, this one. I can’t suss out whether it’s better if I’m noble, or if I’ve got an eye to the main chance. Here’s why I do it, then. Because I can. Because it takes skill, and it takes a certain kind of person to handle it. One who cares enough to do it right and give his best, but doesn’t burn out. Doesn’t crack up on the one hand, or lose his compassion on the other. Not too many of us out there, but I’m one, and that matters. I could do something easier, I guess, but I don’t want to. I like it. And if I want to keep doing it,” he said, standing up, “I’d better get my skates on and get ready for my shift. As somebody’s given me my job back, and I’d like to keep it.”

  I was still trying to work out what to say next when he bent over, put a gentle hand at the back of my head, and kissed me. “Thanks for my orchid,” he said. “I loved it. And I love you.”

  43

  The Winning Hand

  Poppy

  I’d love to say that I buckled down and got stuck into my work, once Matiu left and my dad followed him, not saying much at all. Possibly as stunned as I was, and shutting down in the same way, too.

  In actuality, I wandered around the house in a distracted fashion, tidying the playroom, throwing in another load of washing, and scrubbing the laundry room sink in that way you do when you don’t know what else to do, but you want to feel like you’re doing something. When you’re not sure if you’re angry or happy, because you’re both of those things, and most of all, you’re overwhelmed. Until my mum’s cleaner, Analyn, turned up, and I realized that I’d forgotten yet another thing.

  “Oh,” I said blankly, when I opened the door. “I forgot you were coming.”

  “Is it a bad time?” she asked, in her lilting Filipino accent. She was a neat, small-boned, middle-aged lady who didn’t look big enough for hard work but somehow did it anyway. My mum had told me that her son was studying to be a doctor, which was heaps more than Analyn had ever said to me in the five or six years she’d been cleaning for my parents. Normally, she smiled and moved on in an efficient, businesslike sort of way. Much like my dad’s secretary, in fact. The world is full of quiet, capable women like that, women who make things run and make things work.

  It’s also full, apparently, of women standing in their doorway with a new and excited dog at their side and a baby at their breast, blinking in surprise that the scheduled thing has happened on schedule.

  I stood back and said, “No. Please. Come in.” I shoved Buddy gently aside with my foot, since my hands were busy, led the way into the kitchen, and glanced around wildly. “Sorry. I forgot you were coming. Things may not be entirely tidy.”

  “I can tidy up,” Analyn said, setting her basket of supplies beside the island and looking around herself, possibly noting my broken-crayon, discarded-dog-hair, dirty-dishes decorating motif. “I can stay until six. Anything I don’t get to today, I’ll do next week.”

  “Do I stay?” I asked. “Show you around, or whatever? It’s mostly the bathrooms and the kitchen, and hoovering, of course. Dog hair. Dusting, too, probably. Or would you rather I leave? Oh—this is Isobel, and this is Buddy. That is—the baby’s Isobel, and the dog is Buddy. He’s friendly.” Since he was, in fact, lying at Analyn’s feet and swishing his feathery black tail back and forth on the floor in a mild-but-pleased sort of way, I probably didn’t need to say that.

  “Just as you please,” Analyn said. “I can find my way around if you’d like to leave. I’ll start in here, though.” She didn’t say, Hopefully this is the biggest disaster, or I reserve the right to quit. I’d bet she was thinking it, though.

  “I have three kids,” I said.

  She smiled a bit. “I know. I as well. It can be hard to keep up when you have little ones. And are writing books, too.” She was straightening up as she talked, opening the dishwasher and the cabinets, whisking things away as if they offended her sensibilities, which they probably did.

  “You know about the books?” Isobel finished nursing, and I adjusted my top, hefted her to my shoulder, and began patting her back.

  “Your mother is very proud of you,” Analyn said. “As she should be. She gave me two of the books for my goddaughter, who liked them very much. You have a great gift for understanding children, I think.” She’d moved on to the benchtops now, and was wiping them down with a clean sponge and something in a spray bottle. She saw the direction of my gaze and said, “Vinegar water. I use only nontoxic products, especially when there are little ones.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s good.”

  Possibly because I was still standing there in her way, she said, “You can go do your work now, if you like. I can manage here.”

  I didn’t. I was well and truly shaken up. Matiu. My dad. Max. Max spending his money on ... what? On anything, so he could get more of mine. Not being able to talk it all over with Matiu, because he’d gone to work, and his work mattered. And, now, somebody else’s energy in my house.

  What I actually did? I took the baby and the dog and drove the fifteen winding kilometers around the Otago Peninsula, past stone walls and rolling hills, cabbage trees, flax plants, and windswept cypresses, emerald-green paddocks and curving inlets. I drove past the Pukehiki intersection where Max had smashed his car and remembered that day eight weeks ago, when I’d thought my life was falling apart. When I’d panicked.

  All the way around, then, and to the top of the paved road at Bacon Street, where I put Isobel into her carrier, called to Buddy, and set off up the track. I was puffing by the time I crossed Highcliff Road, and blowing by the time I was walking beside the ruins of stone paddock walls and a tiny stone house that had once held somebody’s whole life. I took in great breaths of the sea breeze that had come to me from all the way across the Pacific, watched sheep with their fluffy white lambs frisking and jumping beside them, butting impatiently with their heads in their eagerness to feed. I climbed higher and breathed harder all the way to the summit of the Harbour Cone, the volcano that had shaped this place. And when I got to the top, I turned in a circle, because I’d made it.

  There was the Harbour, stretched out before me with its tree-covered green islands and all its inlets, the whole curving, pleasing, organic shape of it. There was the city, too, the cranes at the docks beside the curved roof of the stadium, and then on to where the extravagant Gothic Revival splendor of the railway station dominated the skyline, its dark gray basalt blocks contrasting with the facings and trimmings of nearly white Oamaru stone and the columns of pink granite.

  It was silly, really, to spend all that effort and money on a railway station, but I loved that they’d done it. The triumph of hope, daring to dream big in this new land that was richer, greener, and so much more forgiving than the old one.

  All the pinnacles of churches, too, battling with office blocks and the buildings of Otago University for their share of the skyline, because the Scots had loved their churches. Otago Boys’ High, up on the hill, and the Registry Building of the University of Otago down below, both done in the same Gothic gingerbread as the railway station and looking more like cathedrals than schools had any right to look, because the Scots had loved education, too. The big old houses perched at the tops of the hills, and the green spaces and tidy little houses around them, because Dunedin was nothing if not tidy. Scots again.

  It was a very optimistic place, if by “optimistic,” you meant, “Hard work will get you there, and the rain makes the grass grow.”

  On the other side of me, the untamed land rolled down into the sea. Huge boulders of volcanic rock littering the hillside, the calm blue of Hoopers Inlet, and the rugged green hills beyond. And beyond, the wide, wild sea, reminding me that I needed to come back with all the kids and plant Isobel’s whenua at the base of a tree, in a high place where the long grasses were tossed by the wind, overlooking the waves and the hills and the journey she would take someday.

  Whether my kids stay
ed here or left to go halfway around the world, there would be a journey. My job then wouldn’t be to hold them and protect them anymore. It would be to let them go. It would be the right thing, and it would hurt.

  What must my dad have felt that day, when he’d got the phone call about Jax? Knowing he’d been medevac’d out from that base in Afghanistan in a helicopter with a corpse covered by a blanket beside him, all that remained of somebody else’s son? A tourniquet around his thigh, and his leg left behind? What had it been like to know that your only son might not make it through the next twenty-four hours, and to imagine the future he faced if he did?

  Letting go could be the hardest thing of all.

  Also, my life hadn’t really fallen apart that day, either in the middle of the Pukehiki intersection or on the grass in front of the hospital, a few steps from all those helping hands that I couldn’t reach. My life had been falling apart for a long time before that. That was just the day I’d realized it.

  Or maybe nothing had fallen apart. Maybe the pieces of my life had just reshuffled. I’d lost Max, but he’d been on a different road for a long time before that day.

  He’d tried to do better than me, to earn more than me. That was what his firm had been for him, and when he’d failed, he hadn’t told me. Which was partly down to me for not seeing his struggle for what it was, maybe, not letting him know I was there for him either way, or maybe not.

  I hadn’t needed him to be better, or to be more. I’d needed him to be there. And how supportive did a wife have to be, if she was already taking care of the house and the kids and a job and everybody’s life? I wasn’t sure. I thought that a man should be able to handle the downturns and the struggles in life, if he was a man and not a boy.

  Or maybe Max had succeeded at the firm, but had spent the profits to set up a glam life with somebody else, which meant that I was going to have to give him half of what I’d earned, so he could keep doing it.