by LN Cronk
“I usually go to Sunday School, too,” she said hesitantly.
“That’s fine,” I answered.
As soon as we arrived at Hope Springs the following Sunday, I was pretty confident that this church wasn’t going to trip my trigger either. Everyone in the Sunday School class that Josette belonged to seemed to be a lot more . . . mature than I was (read: gray hair, bifocals, hearing aids, and dentures). I couldn’t begin to imagine for the life of me why she had joined a class where no one was even remotely close to her own age, but they all welcomed me with such open arms and seemed so genuinely glad to have me with them that I knew I was going to feel forever guilty if I didn’t come back every Sunday for the rest of my life (or at least for the rest of theirs). It was clear that they loved Josette, too, hugging her and kissing her on the cheek as she greeted each one of them by name and introduced me to them.
Then we sat down for the lesson, and after that I knew for sure that I would keep coming back.
One day in October I came home to find Josette’s purse on the table, but the house empty. Her door was open, her futon neatly made, but she was nowhere to be found. She wouldn’t have taken the bus without her purse and she wouldn’t have gone for a walk without locking the front door . . .
I found her in my tiny backyard.
“What are you doing?” I asked, stepping out onto the back stoop.
She looked back at me and smiled.
“Getting something for dinner,” she grinned.
I walked toward her. She was standing in front of a small tree and reaching to pluck some kind of fruit from it. The fruit was red and about the size of a plum, and she dropped each one that she picked into the front of her t-shirt, which she was holding out in front of her as if it were a basket.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Quandongs.”
“Quandongs?”
She nodded.
“You’re kidding, right?”
She giggled.
“Are you sure they’re edible?” I asked worriedly.
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, laughing again and handing me one. “Try it.”
I took a bite and my teeth sliced through a thin layer of fruit before hitting something hard.
“You could have told me it had a pit,” I complained.
“It’s a nut,” she corrected.
“If I cracked a tooth does it really matter what it’s called?”
“Sorry,” she smiled.
“I don’t think you are . . .”
“And I don’t think you cracked a tooth,” she said, laughing.
“It tastes like a peach,” I told her, licking my lips.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Some people call it a wild peach.”
“That sounds a whole lot better than quandong,” I said. She giggled again and I asked, “What are you going to do with them?”
“Make a pie.”
“I like pie,” I smiled.
“You’ve got a muntrie bush right over there,” she said, pointing to the opposite corner of the yard. “I don’t think they usually do great this far south, but if it gets any fruit after Christmas, I’ll make you a muntrie pie too.”
“What are muntries?”
“Ummm,” she thought for a moment. “They kind of look like blueberries, but they taste like spicy apples.”
“I’ve practically got an orchard here,” I observed, looking around my backyard. She giggled yet again.
I looked at her suspiciously.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re in an awfully good mood today,” I observed. She hardly ever laughed. I could probably count on one hand . . . well, no I couldn’t, but you know what I mean.
She smiled some more and nodded.
“What’s up?”
“I got a scholarship,” she said, now positively grinning from ear to ear.
“Really?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “I’m going to be able to start school after Christmas!”
“Cool.”
She nodded and smiled even wider.
“What are you going to take?”
“I want to major in literature.”
“Now there’s a field that’s teeming with job opportunities,” I said sarcastically.
She smirked at me.
“I’m going to go on and get my master’s degree and maybe even my doctorate, thank you very much.”
“And then what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to be a librarian.”
“Cool,” I said again, nodding my approval.
“When I was little,” she went on, “my mum used to take me to the main library in Montreal and I would–”
“Montreal?” I interrupted.
“Uh-huh . . .”
“Canada?”
“Is there another Montreal?” she asked, raising any eyebrow.
“What were you doing in Montreal?”
“I lived there until I was fourteen,” she said.
“Seriously?” I asked excitedly. “That’s where my girlfriend lives!”
“What part?”
“Well, her family actually lives in Peterborough, but she went to school at UM. I used to go there to see her all the time when I was at Princeton.”
“Then you weren’t very far from where my grandparents live.”
“Do you visit them much?” I asked, now using my own shirt as a basket to hold fruit because hers was getting pretty full.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Never.”
“Oh.”
“It’s my mum’s parents,” she explained. “My dad kind of had a falling out with them after Mum died.”
“Oh,” I said again.
“She died when I was thirteen,” Josette said. “She got stomach cancer and they tried all these alternative treatments and stuff, but she didn’t make it. Her parents pretty much blamed my dad. They said if he’d taken her to a real doctor she probably would have lived.”
I looked at her.
“They were probably right,” she said, shrugging and putting a quandong in my shirt. “My parents didn’t always make the best decisions. They were kind of ummm . . .” She hesitated. “Free spirits?” she finally suggested. “Hippies?”
I gave her a little smile.
“Come on,” she said, motioning toward the house. “We’ve got enough. Let’s go on in.”
We headed toward the house.
“My dad got into this huge fight with her parents after she died,” she went on. “They threatened to sue for custody of me and he told them that if they did, he’d move me to the other side of the world so that they’d never see me again.”
I looked at her, waiting for her to continue.
“They didn’t back down,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “So he flew me to Perth, bought a yacht, and we started homeschooling.”
“You lived on a yacht?” I asked, holding the back door open for her.
“Yeah,” she said. “For about three years, until he met Clarissa and bought a little house.”
“How’d you wind up here?” I asked. (Perth was on the other side of the continent and over two thousand miles away.)
She smiled at me one more time and headed into the kitchen.
“That’s a story for another day,” she said.
Josette made the pie while I worked on the rest of dinner. She told me how her mother had instilled in her a deep love of reading at an early age, but how she had almost regretted doing so by the time Josette finished elementary school.
“I always had my nose stuck in a book,” Josette remembered, holding a measuring cup up in front of her face. She put a hand on one hip and bit her lip in concentration as she studied the numbers on the glass, finally deciding that she had the right amount of water. She gave me a little smile. “Mum worried that she’d created a monster.”
I smiled back.
“She said that people who read too much are just trying to escape the realities of life,” Jose
tte said, pouring the water into a mixing bowl.
“Were you?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged, beginning to stir. “Maybe. But isn’t it better to escape by reading than by smoking pot all day?”
“Probably.”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes.
“Anyway,” she said. “I still love to read. Give me a rainy day and something to read by C.S. Lewis or Jane Austen and I’m a happy camper.”
“Ugh,” I said. “I hate Jane Austen.”
She looked at me as if I’d just grown a second head.
“How can you hate Jane Austen?” she asked in disbelief.
“Umm, let’s see,” I said, looking up at the ceiling with my hand on my chin as if I were thinking hard. “You have to read everything about five times to even begin to understand what she’s talking about, she writes sentences that are longer than normal people’s paragraphs, her characters are silly, her plots are boring, the endings are ridiculous . . .”
I glanced at Josette, wondering if I should continue. She was still staring at me with her mouth open.
“It does take some time to get used to her,” she finally admitted.
“I don’t have that much time.”
“She’s a wonderful writer–”
“She’s not a wonderful writer,” I argued. “The woman doesn’t know when to use a period! I had to read some stupid book of hers when I was in high school and–”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve blocked it from my memory.”
“Pride and Prejudice?”
“No.”
“Sense and Sensibility?”
“That’s it.”
“I like that one,” she smiled.
“She had one sentence in there that was so long that I actually counted how many words it had.”
“How many did it have?”
“I don’t know – like a hundred and twenty-something?”
Josette laughed and I shook my head.
“My favorite is Persuasion,” she said.
“Never heard of it.”
“You should give it a try sometime.”
“Not gonna happen.”
Josette smiled again and then, with a gleam in her eye, asked, “Do you want to see something?”
“Sure,” I shrugged.
She set down the wooden spoon she had been stirring with and went into her bedroom, emerging a moment later with a small set of light-blue books. There were five of them. They were all by Jane Austen and obviously quite old.
“My mum got me these,” she said.
“I thought you said she thought you already read too much.”
“That’s one of the reasons they’re so special to me,” she said, smiling. “She knew how much they meant to me so she got them for me anyway.”
I looked at them again.
“Where’s Persuasion?” I asked dramatically. “I thought it was your favorite.”
“She found these at an antique shop,” Josette explained. “That one was missing.”
“Well, why don’t you get one?”
“Trust me,” she laughed. “If I could, I would, but I can’t. This set is very collectible, and quite out of my price range.”
“You can’t have an incomplete set,” I frowned.
“Feel free to complete it for me any time you want,” she said, and she laughed one more time.
~ ~ ~
AS IF I wasn’t going to take her up on that.
I snuck into Josette’s room while she was at work one day and copied down the name of the publishing house and the copyright dates. It wasn’t too hard to find a copy of the missing book online, and it really wasn’t all that expensive (at least not when you have a paid internship and your parents are paying most of your bills). When it arrived in the mail a week later, I really wanted to give it to her right away, but I forced myself to tuck it into the back of my closet to save for Christmas.
By this point, Josette and I were already cooking and eating and going to church together, but after the day she made us quandong pie we started doing other stuff together, too. We went out to eat sometimes or went to the movies, and a few times we even went to St. Kilda together. Sometimes we shopped, and sometimes we walked along the beach and talked.
I learned that Josette had been stung by a Portuguese man-of-war the very first time she swam in the Indian Ocean – right after her father had moved them to Perth. I learned that Perth and Montreal were near antipodes of one another – two diametrically opposed points on a sphere. I learned that this was how she had wound up in Australia in the first place – because her father had literally spun a globe to make good on his threat to “move Josie clear to the other side of the world.”
I learned that I could call her Josie.
Josette wasn’t the roommate I had once envisioned myself playing Frisbee with . . . she wasn’t the girlfriend I was still hoping would decide to move to Melbourne to be with me . . . she wasn’t the brother I was anxiously awaiting a visit from in the spring . . .
But things were a lot nicer in Australia once I had a friend to do things with.
~ ~ ~
ONE DAY I came down with a bad cold, and when Josette found out that I was sick, she told me that she had just the thing to make me feel better. While I sat on the couch, she took a loaf of bread from the top of the fridge and opened the bag, pulling out two slices and dropping them into the toaster.
After the bread popped up, she worked away for a few minutes and soon brought me a plate with two pieces of toast, each covered with a brown paste.
“That’s not Vegemite, is it?” I asked unhappily.
“You don’t like Vegemite?”
I shook my head.
“Have you ever tried it?” she asked suspiciously.
“I bought some as soon as I moved here,” I insisted. “I opened the jar, smelled it, and I threw it away.”
She tipped her head at me disapprovingly.
“You can’t decide if you like something or not by smelling it,” she scolded. “This is just the thing to eat when you’re not feeling well. Take a few bites and see if it doesn’t make you feel better.”
I was pretty sure that it wasn’t going to, but I obediently reached for a piece of toast and sniffed at it tentatively.
“Quit smelling it,” she scolded. “Try it.”
“My mom used to make me chicken noodle soup when I was sick,” I said pitifully.
“Mine did, too,” she said. “But this is what we have right now. Try it.”
I reluctantly took a little nibble.
“All you got was bread,” she accused.
I took another bite and gagged.
“Oh, that’s gross.”
“Give it to me,” she said disgustedly, taking the toast out of my hand. She took a bite and I gagged again.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” she said after she swallowed.
Meanwhile, graduate school was going great. I was taking classes and working as a TA in an undergraduate physics lab, but most of my time was spent in my internship, doing actual research, which I really loved.
I called Bizzy almost every day. Apparently she was enjoying things at Curtis as much as I was enjoying things at Melbourne, and she told me that she was applying to travel to South America for a few weeks to study El Sistema, a music program in Venezuela that worked with impoverished children. She told me that her parents were going to take her to Italy over Christmas break (which ticked me off a bit because her trip was at the same time that I was going to be back in the States), but she placated me by assuring me that we would get to see each other in California over the summer. She was going to be one of Grace’s bridesmaids and she promised to stay several extra days after the wedding so that we could spend some time together.
I didn’t really want to wait that long to see her, but it was better than nothing, and it wasn’t as if there was anything I could do about it anyway.
There wasn’t anything I could do about that, either, however, so the day before I was set to fly out to see my family, I handed her the copy of Persuasion I’d bought for her and said, “Here . . . add this to your reading list.”
She gently tore the wrapping paper off and stared at the cover of the book that she was holding in her hands.
“I can’t believe you got this for me,” she whispered, seemingly in awe. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“It was no big deal,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”
She gawked at it for another moment and then said, “Thank you,” before adding, “I’ve got something for you, too.”
“Really?”
She nodded and went into her bedroom. When she emerged, she was carrying three gift bags, and she set them down on the couch.
“What in the world is all that?” I asked.
“Stuff for your trip!” she answered, smiling proudly. “This one,” she explained, holding up the biggest bag, “is for you to share with your family. It’s peppermint bark and cheese straws and stuff like that that’ll keep for a while so you can pack it in your suitcase.
“This one,” she said, holding up the next bag, which was quite a bit smaller, “is stuff that I think they’ll let you carry on board, but I’m not positive – you might have to throw it away when you get to security. It’s stuff for you to eat on the plane . . . some Anzac biscuits and chocolate chip cookies and stuff.
“And this one,” she finished, holding up the third bag, “you have to eat tonight.”
I peered down into the bag to see a brown lump of something that looked suspiciously like fruitcake.
