Two Weeks 'til Christmas

by Laura Greaves

  There wasn’t one.

  It was Scotty who broke the silence. ‘The thing about me and Nina is —’

  But he was cut off by the jingle of the shop bell as Toby Watts yanked the door open and poked out his head.

  ‘You two gonna stand there gabbing all morning or are you coming in?’ he barked.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Scotty said with a forced laugh. He placed his hand on the small of Claire’s back and guided her into the shop.

  What? Claire’s mind raced. What was the thing about Scotty and Nina?

  She was surprised to find the shop empty. Scotty had confided that he thought Toby may have been less than discreet about Claire’s involvement in the wedding. She had half expected to walk in and find it packed with curious Bindallarahns – the way people always went to stickybeak at their neighbours’ houses when they went up for sale.

  ‘Welcome back to Bindy, Claire,’ Toby said, giving her a cordial nod. ‘Been a while.’

  Claire steeled herself for the recrimination she was sure was coming. Toby was aged in his late fifties and had once been a good friend of her father’s. He was also one of the people who had invested – and lost – the most money in Big Jim’s get-rich-quick scheme. Toby had nearly lost his business and only just managed to hold on to it by the skin of his teeth. He’d never said so, not even when Jim had died, but Claire was sure Toby held her personally responsible – just like everyone else in town who’d been caught in her father’s web of lies. If she had done the right thing and come back to Bindallarah to help Jim after her mother left, the farm wouldn’t have hit the skids and he wouldn’t have deceived his friends in his desperate attempts to save it.

  But to her astonishment, Toby smiled and said, ‘Good of you to help Scotty out with his shindig. You always were a good egg. Young fella needs all the help he can get, I reckon.’ Claire’s heart swelled, buoyed by Toby’s generosity. Maybe she wasn’t persona non grata in Bindallarah any more. The town had changed so much – maybe its residents’ opinion of her had changed too.

  Scotty rolled his eyes. ‘I’m not totally incompetent, you know,’ he said, but his tone was lighthearted. ‘But yeah, it’s great to have Claire here. I’ve missed her.’

  She waited for him to clarify, to clear his throat and hurriedly add, ‘We’ve all missed her.’ But he didn’t. He just looked into her eyes and smiled.

  She felt small under his gaze, humbled by his affection for her even after she’d caused him so much pain over the years. ‘I missed you too,’ she said. If only you knew.

  ‘Right, then. How many people you got coming to your do?’ Toby asked. He pushed a sheaf of papers across the counter to Scotty. ‘These are the catering packages and order forms.’

  ‘Catering packages? Wow, Toby. You’ve come a long way from sausages and chops,’ Claire said as she peered over Scotty’s shoulder at the lists of street-food-style canapés and main-meal options.

  Toby shrugged. ‘Gotta give the folks what they want,’ he said. ‘And it pays to diversify. Learned that the hard way.’

  The words hung in the air like a noxious gas. The confidence Claire had felt just moments ago withered and died. This town would not forgive her for what her father had done. She was an idiot to have hoped she could ever be redeemed.

  As if he sensed her dismay, Scotty put his hand on her back again as he leaned in closer to show her the paperwork. It was such a small gesture, but it was an intense reminder of how well Scotty still knew her, even after all these years. He understood what wounded her, which cuts were the deepest.

  ‘We’ve got two hundred on the guest list,’ Scotty began, ‘so I was thinking —’

  ‘Two hundred people?’ Claire interjected. ‘That’s practically the entire town.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Scotty replied, clearly amused by her outburst. ‘Bindy’s grown a lot, Claire. But, yeah, it’s a reasonable-sized wedding. My family’s been here a long time, remember. We know a lot of people.’

  She knew he was right. Mike and Janine Shannon, Scotty’s parents, had established Cape Ashe Stud nearly forty years ago. There were few people in the horse world in Australia, much less in Bindallarah, who didn’t know the family. And with Scotty now one of the few vets in the district, he had friends far and wide.

  And yet somehow Claire had imagined that Scotty and Nina’s wedding would be a small affair. They’d been together such a short time, and Nina was so new to the town that Claire had pictured an intimate ceremony witnessed by just their families and a few good friends.

  But then she wouldn’t have made the cut, she had to admit. Claire could hardly expect to have qualified as a close friend when she’d been back in Scotty’s life for mere months after an absence of eight years. So he was inviting lesser friends and acquaintances, too. She was on his B-list.

  In her mind, she realised, a wedding arranged in such haste wasn’t serious – at least, not serious enough for the whole town to turn out. It wasn’t something people would change their Christmas Eve plans for. They wouldn’t book expensive last-minute flights and rush their formal wear to the dry cleaner. It wasn’t worthy of much of a fuss, because it surely wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last. What was that old saying? Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

  That was what Claire believed – it was the reason she had come to Bindallarah – but clearly two hundred of Scotty and Nina’s nearest and dearest didn’t agree. Scotty and Nina may be marrying in haste, but their friends didn’t seem to be worried that it was a mistake. They were going to converge on Cape Ashe Stud on Christmas Eve to watch Scotty and Nina tie the knot, because they believed the couple was the real deal. They believed their union would last.

  Claire was the only one who thought otherwise. She’d assumed everybody could see the same impending disaster she could, but perhaps she was blind. The only one with doubts. And she did have doubts. Every time she saw Scotty, she had less faith in the fate of his marriage. Every moment she spent with him made her more convinced that his marrying Nina was the wrong move.

  Every minute Scotty was by her side, Claire felt a growing sense of panic at the thought of letting him go.

  ‘Okay,’ Scotty was saying to Toby, ‘let’s make it two pigs on spits, your Tex Mex food truck and the salad buffet for the vegetarians. And what about just a barbeque for stragglers? Bacon-and-egg rolls at midnight, that sort of thing. Could you do that?’

  ‘No worries, mate.’ Toby took a stubby pencil from behind his ear and scribbled down Scotty’s instructions. ‘How are you for grog? It’s not really my area, but I could probably sort something out. Package deal.’

  ‘Thanks, Toby, but I’ve got it covered. Noel is doing a few kegs and a cocktail bar for us.’ Scotty gestured beyond the shop window in the rough direction of the Bindallarah Hotel, where Noel Thomas had been the publican for donkey’s years. ‘The wedding’s at five. Do you think you could be set up by three o’clock?’

  Toby nodded and went to the register at the back of the shop to calculate the cost of Scotty’s order.

  ‘Well, that was easy,’ Claire said. ‘You don’t need me here at all, Scotty. You know exactly what you want.’ That was becoming increasingly obvious.

  ‘I do need you here, Claire,’ he said. ‘You’re the voice of reason. I probably would have only ordered a dozen snags and a loaf of bread if you weren’t here to remind me of the ridiculous number of people coming to the wedding.’

  She laughed, but Scotty let out a troubled sigh. ‘This is a lot to handle in a short space of time. Honestly, I was feeling pretty stressed out until you offered to help.’

  ‘Really?’ Claire was taken aback. ‘You haven’t seemed stressed out at all. To the casual observer it looks like you’re taking everything in your stride.’

  Scotty gave a wry smile. ‘I guess I’m a good actor.’

  Before Claire could respond, Toby returned and handed Scotty an invoice. ‘There you go, mate,’ the butcher said. ‘It’s ten per cent up front, with the balance due the
day before the bash.’

  Scotty handed over his credit card and Toby retreated to the register once more. Claire seized the opportunity.

  ‘Scotty, why get married so quickly? If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just wait a while. There’s really no need to rush,’ she implored. ‘Spend some time getting to know Nina better. Enjoy being engaged. Give yourselves a chance to figure out if this is truly what you want.’

  She saw the muscles of his jaw clench as he gritted his teeth. Claire knew what that meant: he was annoyed. He was rarely angry, but she knew when his fuse was burning. The jaw clench was a classic Scotty Shannon tell. But whether he was irritated by what she’d said or simply the fact that she’d said anything at all, Claire couldn’t distinguish.

  ‘You’re right. There’s no need to rush,’ Scotty said eventually, and for a beautiful instant her heart soared. ‘But there’s no need to delay either. We know what we’re doing. What’s the point in waiting?’ His deep-green eyes bored into hers. ‘Can you give me one reason why I shouldn’t marry Nina on Christmas Eve, Claire?’

  I can give you a thousand reasons, she thought. Her legs felt shaky under the weight of Scotty’s intense gaze. You just met. You barely know her. Nina seems weirdly detached from the whole thing.

  And I don’t want to lose you.

  The thought struck her with the devastating force of a freight train.

  She didn’t want to stop mattering to him. Maybe they would still be friends after Scotty married Nina, but it wouldn’t be the same. Claire would return to Sydney and Scotty would get on with the business of being a husband and, inevitably, a father. She wouldn’t have the same access to him – neither tangibly nor emotionally.

  Claire didn’t want the lifetime they had shared – give or take a few absences – to be less important to Scotty. And they would. A friendship would never compare to a marriage, no matter how longstanding or profound. It couldn’t. It shouldn’t.

  But she wasn’t about to tell Scotty any of this. It wasn’t his job to allay her fears for their friendship when she’d shown him more than once over the years that she could take it or leave it. She wouldn’t put that burden on him when he was already under so much pressure. Especially not in the middle of a butcher shop in Bindallarah.

  Instead, she smiled and said, ‘You always were so decisive, Scotty. What’s your secret?’

  She thought she saw a flicker of resignation in his smile. ‘Some might call it stubbornness,’ he said.

  ‘Can you give me some tips? I feel utterly incapable of making decisions.’ It was the most honest thing she’d said to him all morning.

  ‘You’re more decisive than you think,’ Scotty said, echoing Jackie’s sentiments of a few days earlier. This time his smile was warm, genuine. ‘You just take your time with it. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  Isn’t there? she wanted to shout. Perhaps if she’d been a little less deliberate in her decision-making process over the years, she wouldn’t be back in Bindallarah helping her first love choose the menu for his wedding.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was nearing dusk by the time Claire staggered, exhausted, into Vanessa’s cottage and collapsed next to Gus on the sofa.

  ‘Tough day?’ her cousin asked, looking up from her Cosmopolitan magazine.

  ‘You have no idea,’ Claire groaned, kicking off her rubber thongs. Her feet ached as intensely as if she’d run a marathon in stilettos.

  She must have traipsed ten kilometres up and down Bindy’s main street. After leaving the butcher shop, she and Scotty had gone to the bakery to choose a wedding cake. For once, he had lacked his usual resolve. He wanted an enormous traditional fruitcake, but with only ten days to go it simply wasn’t possible. Claire had sold him on the benefits of a ‘cake’ made of tiers of individual cupcakes instead – one for each of his guests and easily able to be made within the ever-narrowing timeframe.

  When Scotty had to get back to work at the clinic, Claire had continued on alone. She felt conspicuous as she shopped for streamers and balloons in the discount store. It seemed somehow wrong to be making decisions about the wedding with neither the groom nor the bride present. She tried calling Nina to ask her to come along, but the call went straight to voicemail and Claire figured she must be teaching a yoga class. She worried the decorations she chose were a little bit twee, but with nobody on hand to approve or reject her decisions, she wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to do. Anyway, she reasoned, nobody was really going to expect sophisticated styling at a country wedding thrown together in mere weeks.

  Next, armed with a list of Scotty and Nina’s favourite songs, Claire met with the DJ – yet another old schoolfriend, Jared Miller, who was a surfing instructor by day and moonlighted as a one-man mobile disco – and vetoed all the gangster rap that inexplicably peppered his playlist.

  Then she went to Bindallarah’s lone florist. The wedding was cocktail style, meaning there wouldn’t be a formal meal, so she didn’t have to bother with table centrepieces. Claire chose two towering arrangements of natives to stand either side of the altar, and hoped Nina liked Australian flora as much as she did.

  When the florist asked about the bride’s flowers, Claire had balked. Surely, even with Nina’s laidback approach to wedding planning so far, her bouquet was something she would want to choose for herself. Claire sent her a text message and Nina’s reply was swift and direct:

  Happy 4 U 2 decide. Whateva goes w green! N ☺

  Hesitantly, Claire selected a soft-pink protea surrounded by cream roses, Esperance pearl and sprigs of eucalyptus. She was tempted to throw in some bright-red poppies for a truly Christmassy touch against Nina’s mint-green dress, but something told Claire that this particular bride would prefer something understated.

  ‘How was everyone?’ Gus asked as Claire kneaded the burning arches of her feet with her thumbs.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she replied. ‘Everyone who?’

  Gus rolled her eyes, as if her older cousin was particularly dense. ‘Everyone in town,’ she said. ‘Mum told me you’ve been worried they’d, like, chase you with pitchforks or something. So were they cool? Do I need to beat up anyone for you?’

  Claire snickered. She didn’t doubt that Gus would go in to bat for her if she asked her to. She may be just eighteen, but she was as assertive and unapologetic as any woman Claire had ever met.

  ‘You know, it was okay,’ Claire said. ‘Kind of nice to catch up with people, actually.’

  Vanessa was right. Claire hadn’t realised it, but she had been skulking around town with her head bowed for the past five days. She was so sure the people of Bindallarah still detested her – still blamed her for deserting her father, for driving him to deceive them all – that she unconsciously expected abuse at every turn. Toby Watts’s comments that morning had only confirmed that she wasn’t welcome by anyone aside from Vanessa, Gus and Scotty.

  And yet everyone else she’d spoken to throughout the day had been friendly. Some even seemed pleased to see her after such a long time. Karen Steiner, the bakery manager, once a close friend of Claire’s mother, had wrapped her in a tight hug and made her promise to come over for coffee before she went back to Sydney.

  At the discount store she’d bumped into Eloise Marshall, one of her best friends from primary school, who now worked on the checkout. Eloise had ignored the grumbling customers behind Claire in the checkout queue to show her photos of her kids and the house she was building just out of town.

  Jared Miller had asked her all about her work as a vet – and then asked for her phone number. She gave it to him with the proviso it was to be used for wedding business only, but she felt surprisingly flattered that he’d asked.

  ‘That’s awesome,’ Gus said. ‘What were you so stressed about anyway? Why would anyone in Bindy have a problem with you? You haven’t lived here in forever.’

  ‘I think that’s part of the problem. There were – are – people in town who thought that I should have come ba
ck here when my parents split up to help Dad with the farm. And that I definitely should have come back after he died and left a lot of people missing a lot of money.’

  ‘And after Scotty asked you to marry him,’ Gus said matter-of-factly.

  Claire’s jaw dropped. ‘You know about that?’ Except for Vanessa, she hadn’t told a soul about Scotty’s mad idea that getting married at twenty and twenty-one respectively would somehow fix everything.

  ‘Everyone knows about that,’ her cousin replied. ‘This is Bindallarah.’ The look she gave Claire told her Gus couldn’t believe she was so clueless.

  Claire groaned. ‘Well, that’s just marvellous,’ she muttered. Just one more reason for the community to believe she was totally heartless.

  Gus was unfazed by Claire’s angst. ‘So was Uncle Jim a crook or something?’ she pressed.

  Claire paused mid-lament, perplexed. Big Jim Thorne’s many misdeeds were common knowledge in Bindallarah. Hell, he’d ripped people off all over the district. How was it possible that Gus didn’t know all the sordid details of his transgressions?

  ‘Gus, has your mum never talked to you about what happened?’ Claire asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I was only ten when he died. All I know is that he was killed in a car accident. I suppose Mum thought I was too young for the full story,’ she said.

  Claire’s heart gave a painful throb as she pictured Gus as a tiny and bewildered ten-year-old, frightened by the magnitude of her mother’s grief over the loss of her brother, confused by the drama surrounding his death – and with absolutely nobody to talk to about it.

  I should have been here, she thought. She was ten years older than Gus; she could have been a surrogate big sister to her. Another entry for her shame ledger.

  ‘You went to boarding school when I was five,’ Gus continued. ‘I’ve heard people say stuff about you in town over the years, but nothing really bad. I think they felt sorry for you more than anything. Mum’s always telling people how great you are. Scotty too.’