The Cafe by the Bridge

by Lily Malone

  ‘You seriously would be okay with Erik bringing a new lady to Christmas lunch?’

  ‘Of course I would,’ Ella insisted, and he had to believe her.

  Abe had only met Erik Brecker, Ella’s ex-husband and old swimming coach, once. At the opening of the new Chalk Hill pool in the winter. At the time, it had been easy to see the friendship between Erik and Ella, and how much the older man doted on the girl his big brother now loved.

  ‘Brix says he’s coming for Christmas Day. Mum and Dad will be home. It’ll be standing-room-only. Jake was talking about Charlotte coming for Christmas, too,’ Abe said, moving a cloth over the fridge displays, dusting the glass down. He didn’t think anyone would come in now, as it was getting late.

  Ella’s smile dimmed.

  ‘What?’ Abe said.

  ‘What do you mean what?’

  ‘Come on … I saw that look. Why don’t you want Charlotte to come for Christmas?’

  Ella sat back. ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to say it.’ He stopped wiping cabinets to face her. ‘What gives?’

  Ella crossed her feet at the ankle, letting the heel hang from her pretty navy shoe. Then she uncrossed her feet.

  ‘I’m still getting used to the whole Charlotte thing. Jake can’t stop talking about her. Charlie this and Charlie that.’

  ‘He’s calling her Charlie now?’

  ‘I think that’s only because Cassidy doesn’t like it,’ Ella said, with a laugh. ‘I just have to get used to it, I guess. I’m not sure I’m ready for the whole step-mum thing.’

  ‘Then don’t be her step-mum. Just be Ella.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say, but you’re not the one with an eleven-year-old boy who thinks he should be allowed to do everything this older girl does.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like stay up later than eight o’clock on a school night for one. Like watch M-rated movies.’ Ella leaned forward. ‘Cassidy lets Charlotte watch movies that scare the pants off me. Sam was worried he’d have to go see Frozen on Ice in Perth last month. Charlotte was more interested in seeing that new Stephen King movie about the clown, and you know those boy bands? Cassidy lets her go to their concerts.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think Justin Beiber is guesting at Chalk Hill Christmas carols this year, Ella, so you’re in luck.’

  ‘Irene wouldn’t let the Beeb sing. She’d say he isn’t local enough,’ Ella said, making both of them laugh.

  Spontaneously, she moved in to kiss his cheek and as she did so, she whispered, ‘I’m so glad Taylor and you found each other.’

  ‘She found me,’ Abe said.

  ‘You found her too. You’re good for each other.’ Ella waved her fingers theatrically. ‘And a little kudos to me, dahling, I knew you would be!’

  When Ella got to the front door, she called back over her shoulder, ‘Don’t get too caught up in cleaning up and going home, Abe. You’ve got customers.’

  ‘Can’t complain about having customers,’ Abe said.

  She shook her finger at him. ‘That right there is the difference in you.’

  The café door chimed as Ella pulled it open, stepped through and shut it behind her.

  The new customer parked and locked up his car and Abe had a vague sense of an older man slowly walking towards the café, although he was only paying peripheral attention as he kept tidying stuff away.

  Slow was the word. At this rate, this customer might just make it up the steps before Abe pulled in the Open sign.

  He paid more attention.

  The new patron was a big man—on the wrong side of sixty if Abe had to have a guess—wearing a dark button-up shirt with a collar and a pair of olive-coloured old-man trousers. He’d stopped walking and stood with his body half-turned towards the bridge. The sun glinted on the watch strapped around his wrist and his hands were on his hips.

  A shiver of recognition broke over Abe as the man turned and put one foot on the first step and started up the steps to the café.

  It was Dad.

  * * *

  ‘Well, this place sure has changed,’ Stan Honeychurch said, moving inside the door where he stopped to make sure it had closed properly behind him. You could always tell those people who worried about flies getting inside.

  His dad took another few steps, turning around, hands opening wide at his side like a spinning top with loose arms.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’ Abe said, aware of the shift and flow of the floorboards beneath his feet as he moved across the café.

  ‘Hi, son.’

  The older man raised his arms and Abe stepped in and wrapped his father in a deep hug. He could feel his father’s hands digging hard into his shoulder blades, shaking a little as they found purchase there.

  Abe couldn’t remember a greeting quite like it. Finally, he stepped back. ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘Lost a bit more hair.’ His dad patted his grey head. ‘Put on a bit of weight.’ Patted his stomach. ‘It’s all that sitting on my backside all day driving.’

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘She’s at home. She’s resting.’

  ‘At the farm?’

  ‘No, up at our place in town. We haven’t been back long. I can’t leave her for long on her own but I wanted to call in quickly and see you. Jake said you’d be here.’

  ‘Jake knows you’re home?’

  He nodded. ‘He’s meeting us around home later. I want you to come too. Mum wants to see you both and I’ve called Brix too. He should come see her.’

  ‘We can go now. I was just closing up.’

  His father waved his hand. ‘When you’re ready.’

  Again, his father turned a circle in the middle of the home that Abe’s grandparents had owned since they’d married. The house his dad had grown up in before he’d bought the farm on Quarry Road.

  ‘You’ve got people eating in my old bedroom,’ he said, pointing towards the woodfire and the tables to his right. ‘Your nan used to skin us alive if we ever took food in our bedrooms.’

  Abe let his dad look around.

  ‘I’m pretty much finished here, Dad. We can go whenever.’

  His father’s hands came back to his hips and he stared at the floor. His lips tightened before he brought his head up. ‘Before we go round there, there was something I should say.’

  ‘Okay.’

  His dad had never been one to chew over something he wanted to say. Stan Honeychurch was like Nanna Irma that way, like Jake, like Brix. Abe was the one who struggled getting words out, a bit like his mother.

  This time his dad didn’t know where to start. His eyes travelled the walls of the café as if searching for inspiration, or a clue. He must have found it in the collection of olive oil bottles on a shelf on the wall because he circled that far before taking a breath and cutting his gaze to Abe.

  ‘I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Not really—’

  Dad waved the words away. ‘Hear me out, hey? I’m not much good at this.’

  Abe shut his mouth like he would have done when he was eight.

  ‘I know you got the letter. I know you know about what your mum did. So here’s the thing: I know I wasn’t the best father to you growing up. The thing is, it wasn’t your fault who your father was, but I blamed you because if I didn’t blame you I blamed your mother, and I couldn’t blame your mother because I loved her too much and it made me bitter and mean about everything, and I was so damn grateful she stayed with me and didn’t take off with him.’ His gaze slipped away and he sniffed, a fierce sound in the silence.

  Abe had to swallow the lump in his throat.

  ‘I promised your mum that if she stayed with me, if she gave us another chance, I wouldn’t ever throw you in her face. And I never did.’ His father’s voice got deeper as his chin got lower. ‘What I want to say is: I was always proud of the kid you became despite me not being much of a dad. You’re a good bloke, Abel. You turned out alright.’

 
Abe didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Okay. I’m glad I got that out.’ His father turned the last part of a half circle, staring towards the door that led through to the commercial kitchen, leaning a little to the side so his view wasn’t blocked by cheesecake and tarts in the display glass.

  ‘You wanna have a look around?’ Abe offered.

  ‘Nah. Nah I don’t. Not really,’ the older man said. ‘Some things you don’t want to go back to see the change, you know? Some things you like to remember how they were.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  When his dad made a move towards the café door, Abe thought that was it, but Stan stopped, turned back.

  ‘I’m really sorry, son, for how you found out about the … about, you know … what your mum did. About your …’ He couldn’t say father. ‘About that guy.’

  ‘Do you know if he’s still alive? Does Mum know where he is?’

  ‘You’d want to find him?’ Sudden steel in the set of his father’s chin, face salted with resignation and resolve.

  ‘I think so, Dad. Yes.’

  He nodded once. ‘I think she has his last address. We can ask. Come on. Let’s go see your mum.’

  * * *

  Ella’s boss, Harvey Begg, sold his folks the red-brick property on Jacaranda Close when they retired from the farm and the farmhouse, selling it to them on the basis of it being easy to lock up and leave. Abe hadn’t ever set foot in the place.

  They had a gardener who mowed the lawns and kept the bushes trimmed, so the house always looked neat, if not lived in. At the moment, his folks’ massive caravan took up the bulk of the driveway, so Abe parked on the street behind Jake’s Landcruiser.

  When he followed his father inside, he could hear his mum’s voice.

  ‘… then Dad dropped his toothbrush down a drain …’

  A step in front, Abe’s father snorted. ‘Wondered how long it would take her to get that story in.’

  ‘Sounds like someone’s home,’ Jake said from deeper inside the house. The corridor Abe was walking through opened out into the living area, and he heard the shuffle of chairs on tile.

  ‘Look what the cat dragged in, Val,’ Dad said, moving out of the way.

  An old woman rose from her seat, and Abe looked around for his mother.

  That’s how much she’d changed.

  Fear closed cold in his lungs. Behind his mum, he caught sight of Jake and his brother’s near-imperceptible nod told him Jake knew how he felt.

  His mum had always been soft and round: in the face, in her arms, in her bosom, in her hugs. She’d always been a biggish woman, but now she’d got bigger, and yet she’d shrunk.

  Her abdomen was swollen, but the muscle of her arms and legs had wasted, and he was certain that the last time he’d hugged her, she’d reached his chin.

  Now he wasn’t sure she’d reach the centre of his chest.

  Her skin was greyer than her hair, which had gone white.

  She stumbled as she got up from the chair, put her hand down to the table to steady herself and began again, moving slowly.

  Tears glistened in the grooves on her face.

  ‘Hey, Mum,’ Abe said quietly, stepping towards her so she didn’t have to come to him when everything seemed too far; holding her close, closing his eyes in the hug until he opened them and found Jake watching, tears in his eyes too.

  Did you know? he mouthed behind her back.

  Jake shook his head.

  ‘Sit down, Mum,’ Abe said, taking his mother gently back to the table and her chair. She sat so she could face the garden. She’d always done that. She loved her garden, even when it had been down-sized from the farmhouse to the townhouse.

  ‘Look at you!’ Mum said, reaching up to ruffle that bit of his fringe that always curled at the front. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You have,’ she insisted. ‘I’m not losing my marbles. Your hair is much shorter.’

  Maybe it was. Who cared?

  Beside him another chair scraped the tiles and his father sat.

  ‘Does anyone want tea?’ his mum said suddenly.

  Jake lurched to his feet. ‘I’ll make it. Everybody?’

  ‘Not me, mate,’ Dad said. Everyone else nodded.

  Abe didn’t know where to start, what to say.

  ‘How you feeling, love?’ Dad said to Mum.

  ‘I’m okay. Tired, but okay.’

  ‘Sit down, Val.’

  His mum sat. Abe pulled out a chair too.

  ‘Alright then,’ Dad said to both men. ‘So, I guess we better tell you what’s going on, hey? It would probably be better if Brix was here, save saying the same story over again, but he can’t make it till the weekend, he says.’

  ‘I think you better,’ Jake said.

  A sigh, and Abe saw his father—that big indomitable man—eyes closed, pinching the skin between his eyebrows. ‘We’ve been to doctors in Victoria, Queensland and now New South Wales. They all say the same thing. Mum has a brain tumour and they can’t operate.’

  ‘I thought you said a CT scan at Tamworth showed a lesion or a swelling and she hadn’t had the MRI yet? How do you know? Have you had that done now?’ Abe said.

  Another sigh from his dad. ‘We know.’

  His mum sat forward. ‘The tumour is in a part of my brain they say it’s too dangerous to try to cut out.’

  ‘How long have you known? Why didn’t you tell us?’

  She hesitated and it was their father who spoke. ‘We were in Byron Bay at Easter and your mum got a funny sensation in her hip and down one leg. She didn’t think much of it, but a couple of days later it happened again. We thought she had a trapped nerve and she went to a masseur, and then a physio. She was tired all the time, thought it was just the travel, but anyway we made an appointment with a GP. That led to tests and more tests, and eventually CT scans and an MRI, and that’s when we got to see an oncologist and he put a name on it. It’s a brain tumour.’

  ‘And it’s malignant?’

  His father’s hands moved to his lap, probably clenched into fists where none of them could see. ‘Yes.’

  Malignant. What a crappy word.

  ‘So if they can’t operate, what are they doing about it?’ Jake demanded, because someone had to be doing something about it. This was their mum.

  ‘It’s too close to parts of her brain they won’t mess with. They say it’s too dangerous to try to cut it out.’

  ‘But … there must be something … Chemo? Radiation therapy?’

  His father’s voice broke. ‘There’s nothing. They’re using steroids to try to shrink the tumour. Least, to try to stop it growing.’

  ‘Is it working?’ Jake said. Abe’s big brother had forgotten about making tea. No one wanted tea anyway. Not really.

  ‘It did a little bit earlier. It stopped it growing at least. But the latest CT scans at Tamworth didn’t look so good.’

  ‘You should have told us,’ Abe said to his dad.

  His mum leaned forward. ‘I wouldn’t let him. I was in denial at first. I couldn’t believe this could happen. I mean, why me? What did I ever do to deserve cancer? We’d wanted to take this holiday for so long and if you boys knew I was sick, you would have bossed us into turning around and coming back.’

  ‘I wanted to come back,’ his dad said, hands flapping tiredly.

  ‘I kept thinking there’d been a mistake, and honestly, except for the pins and needles and being so tired all the time, I felt fine.’

  ‘Until Tamworth,’ Dad said.

  ‘I fell in the shower,’ Mum added.

  ‘It wasn’t the first time, love,’ Dad said. ‘You thought I didn’t see it. But I did.’

  ‘How long …’ Abe said, and choked. ‘How long have you got? How long do they give you?’

  ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘Of course they know. They’re doctors,’ Abe said, trying not to explode. ‘How can they not know?’

  ‘Everyone�
�s different, apparently.’

  ‘So what happens next? Chemo? Stronger steroids?’

  Gently, his mum said, ‘Abe, there’s no point. It might delay things, but where’s the fun in that? I’ll be sick all the time. No.’ Mum put her hands on the table, same way she used to when they’d spilled something off their fork at dinner time and she was about to tell them to clean it up. ‘No, thank you very much. I want to feel as good as I can for as long as I can, for however long I’ve got.’

  ‘You’ll need help, Dad,’ Jake said.

  ‘And we’ll get it. I don’t want to be a burden,’ Mum said. ‘That’s what I really don’t want. Not to your father. Not to you boys. When the time comes there’s a place for me at the Albany hospice. The same place Nanna Irma went to … well, you know, at the end.’

  Went to die.

  ‘Before that, I expect I’ll start saying and doing silly things, things that none of you will understand but you’ll nod and answer me anyway because you think it will hurt my feelings if you don’t. And all I’ll want to do, apparently, is talk about old times.’ She made a face. ‘If Irene Loveday tells me one more time about how good a dancer your father was, I might drop dead on the spot.’

  ‘Val …’ Dad said, shaking his head.

  Silence around the table. Abe tried not to stare at his mother—at her distended tummy, at her arms—but he couldn’t help it.

  ‘Jake, how about you help your dad park the van properly. I know it’s not in the driveway straight,’ Mum said.

  Dad huffed. ‘It’s straight.’

  Mum shook her head. ‘It’s not. Go help him do it, Jake. Dad will guide you. He always says I never do it properly, the guiding bit, I mean.’

  Dad heaved to his feet. ‘Come on, then. I’ll never get a minute’s peace otherwise.’

  Jake followed their dad, leaving Abe and his mum alone.

  ‘Now, Abel,’ his mum said, leaning towards him, picking up one of his hands in her own. Her skin felt thin over her bones. ‘Now we can talk. Would you open the window? I’d like to hear the garden.’

  Hear the garden? What noise did a garden make?

  Abe put his mum’s hand down gently—it looked as if a butterfly could bruise it—and stepped around the table, pulling the window on its slider. Cicada chirps and the trill of small birds flooded into the living room. His mum smiled. ‘That’s better.’