Ally reached forward and turned up the volume of the radio. Bron barely allowed a line of “Piano Man” before she reached forward and spun the dial to mute. “Please, Ally! I’m trying to picture where another Express Postbox is, and you’re making it very hard for me to think.”
Ally scoffed and slid down in the passenger seat. She looked out the window as Bron zipped through town on a postman-stalking expedition. They found him emptying a postbox in a back street behind the train station. She wasn’t oblivious to just how ridiculous she looked, swerving into a stranger’s driveway, jumping out of the car barefoot and breathlessly explaining how she’d driven all the way from Maple Street to catch him. She barely coaxed a smile from him when she finished her tale, but when she turned back to the car, she could see Ally’s amused expression.
Bron slumped into the driver’s seat and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Her bare feet burned from the blistering pavement of the footpath. She pulled at her hair tie and gathered her long hair into a neater bun. “That was really close,” she muttered.
“You’ve even got an audience,” Ally noted.
Bron looked up. An elderly couple were standing with their front door wide open, surveying who had pulled into their driveway. They were a pair. Each had a hand on a hip, while the other served as a visor against the descending sun. They squinted across their front lawn at the running car.
Bron smirked. “Stickybeaks.”
They drove back in silence until she recalled her mood minutes earlier. “Sorry about the radio. I was really stressed.”
“No biggie,” Ally said.
She was surprised, even impressed, when a few seconds passed and Ally hadn’t added anything else like a snarky comment.
Bron cleared her throat. “Thanks, Al.”
“No worries. Besides,” she said, looking out of the passenger window, “you’ve always been a drama queen and a half.”
By the time they returned, Carly’s car was in the driveway. The family was seated around the backyard table, which Jackie had set with the good china. The barbecue sizzled with the fresh seafood Jackie and Ally had picked up earlier, and if it weren’t for the missing lobster rolls, Bron could almost pretend she was back in Boston.
She was the first to hug Carly and wish her a happy birthday. Ally stood back and smiled awkwardly as Bron apologised for their lateness and then introduced Ally.
“Catch him?” Jackie asked as she came down the steps with a cheese platter in hand.
“Catch who?” Carly wondered as she poured Bron and Ally drinks.
“Bron’s lusting after the postie,” Ally said seriously.
Annie popped a cube of cheese into her mouth. “What’s ‘lusting’ mean?”
Bron blushed and shook her head. “Never mind.”
Carly looked confused. “Ally, do you drink Moscato?” she offered, the lip of the wine bottle hovering over a clean glass.
Bron looked up, wondering just how far Ally thought that she could push it.
“I drink anything with alcohol,” she said. Bron didn’t miss the second when Ally’s stare very briefly flickered toward her. “But unfortunately, I’ll have to say no. You know, the whole parole thing.” She waved her hand, casting her extensive criminal history aside as yesterday’s news.
“Oh,” Carly said, her cheeks reddening. “I didn’t know you were out on parole. I thought—”
Ally bit into a cracker and cheese. “Hey, no skin off my nose. It’s nice for someone to give me a break once in a while,” she said pointedly, and Bron knew it was said for her ears.
When dinner was ready and idle chitchat over drinks ended, Bron found herself seated at the back table next to a prettily-dressed Annie, who eagerly encouraged Ally to sit on her other side. But it wasn’t long before Annie was sighing that she was full and was excused from the table. Had Bron imagined the way Ally shifted closer to her when Annie got up to play with Tammy?
“So…law school,” Ally said as she cut into her steak. Bron looked down between them and watched the way the tendons in Ally’s forearm tensed as she sliced the overcooked meat. “That sounds like a handful.”
Carly swallowed and wiped at her lips with a napkin. “Well, the semester’s almost over, but I’m hoping to take up an internship before the year’s end.”
“Oh, really?” Ally asked. “Where?”
“There’s a great program running through the legal aid office. One of my professors has a contact to set me up with, so I’m hoping that it will work out.”
“She’s gonna get it,” Daniel guaranteed. “She’s going to make a damn good lawyer sometime soon.”
Ally drizzled balsamic dressing over the salad on her plate. “Legal aid’s good when they’re good.”
Carly raised an eyebrow. “You had a legal aid lawyer?”
“Three,” Ally said. “I got rid of the first two for incompetence,” she added.
Bron’s head shot up, ready to laugh at the idea of Ally having had the hide to be picky, but it seemed as though everyone else had missed the memo. Ally must have noticed, because she added, “I may have torched a car but I still had my rights.”
“So are you planning on working with Daniel into the new year?” Carly asked. “I know he’s loved having you around. He comes over every night so relaxed. Don’t you?” she asked Daniel, playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.
Bron lifted her leg over the seat to get another prawn kebab from the barbecue. Ally shifted for her, but their thighs still pressed together. However fleeting the touch was, their gazes locked awkwardly for a second until Bron removed herself completely from the seat.
“Well, Carly, I’ve been told I have a woman’s touch,” Ally joked. “But not exactly anything you’ve got to worry about.”
When Bron heard Carly laugh, she knew Ally’s face was lit up with a cocky grin. A thought came to her, and instantly, strangely, made her feel uneasy. Ally must have been popular in prison.
All night, Bron wanted—needed—to catch Ally alone. She had to know about Libby. She found Ally on the veranda, chewing on a leftover prawn kebab from dinner.
“Did you have a good night?” Bron asked, leaning against a veranda post.
Ally smiled at her from the swing chair. “Yeah, it was nice to be rewarded with a decent meal after a hard week’s work for the first time in…five years.”
She grinned. “What’s Daniel like to work with?”
“Work with?” Ally raised an eyebrow. “You don’t work with Daniel. You work for him.” Bron chuckled, encouraging her to tell more. “He’s really good. He lets me do my own thing. He listens. Doesn’t hurt that he pays well too,” she trailed off, her grin splitting at the growing smile she’d put on Bron’s face.
“She’s pretty cute,” Ally said, pointing to Carly.
Bron turned and looked across the circular driveway to where Daniel and Carly were kissing Jackie good-bye, ready to head over to Carly’s quiet and empty house for the night.
Ally pressed, “You don’t think she’s cute?”
She shrugged. “I think she’s Daniel’s girlfriend.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t pass on a few words of encouragement to him.” Ally laughed. “He does know you’re a dyke.”
She crossed the veranda and sat down next to her. “Yes, but maybe they don’t enjoy being reminded.”
As she sat back, the swing started to rock slightly, and Ally raised a foot to the side table in front of them to stop the motion. “They don’t care that you’re gay, Bron. They don’t care that either of us are.”
She sighed. “It can be easy to mistake tolerance for support.”
Ally pushed against the table, the swing subtly rocking. “You’re pretty bitter,” she said softly.
Either the scent of the bougainvillea that leeched its way from around the side to the front veranda or the controlled rocking of the swing—or both—calmed her. “Can I ask you something?”
Ally threw the wooden kebab stick dow
n onto the table and nodded.
Bron faced her. “Why did you torch his garage?”
Ally stilled her foot against the table, the swing ceasing its movement. “Because he was a mongrel.”
Bron looked at her intently. “What happened?”
“What is it that you’re wanting to know?”
“Did he ever hit Libby?”
Ally’s expression slipped into sorrow. “Honestly…I don’t know.”
“So you just did it because you were angry?”
Ally grimaced. “He didn’t realize how good he had it with Libby.” It was clear to Bron that Ally was very carefully considering her next words. “She was different after she married him. You weren’t here to see it, but she was…she was just so sad.”
Bron felt the onslaught of tears, strong and fast. Suddenly it seemed very important that Ally didn’t see her cry. She stood abruptly.
Ally sat forward, her arm dangling in midair, like a marionette without its puppeteer. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bron assured her, but she wouldn’t meet Ally’s worried gaze. “I think I’ll head to bed,” she whispered in a voice that wasn’t her own.
“Hey,” Ally called after her.
Bron stopped at the front door.
“Mind if we go for that drive on Sunday?”
Chapter Five
Bron watched Ally through the rear vision mirror. She stood at the roadside flower canteen outside the cemetery gates, shifting from foot to foot in her dirtied work boots as she contemplated her options. She bent over what Bron assumed to be bunches of carnations—cheap, funeral flowers. She cringed. Ally stood up, placed a hand on her hip and rubbed her chin in frustration. Her lips moved in apology as she stepped aside for two elderly women picking matching bundles of roses.
It was Sunday morning after church, and there were more customers at the flower stall than usual. A part of Bron wanted to get out and help Ally, to guide her toward gerberas or lilies, or even a modest bunch of stock for Libby. Ally wouldn’t know a rose from a weed. But Ally Shepherd had said that she would buy the flowers herself, and Bron wanted her to have at least that.
On the short drive to the cemetery in the next suburb over, it had been impossible to avoid Gibson Street, the connecting road to the highway. Unbeknownst to Ally, they had passed the telegraph pole Libby’s car had wrapped itself around in a fatal embrace. Bron had silently encouraged herself to focus on the double white lines in the middle of the road. But seconds after they’d passed it, she’d looked into the rear vision mirror, spotting the wilting bunch of flowers strapped to the pole on the other side of the road, the yellow plastic wrapping as bright as Annie’s school uniform. She’d refocused on her driving and pushed the thought of an unconscious, trapped Annie to the back of her mind, permitting the haunting thought to return later that day if it would simply leave her alone for now, so that she could just get through this.
Ally moved to the counter, her arms full with at least three bunches. How nice, Bron thought. She knew Ally made just ten cents an hour from her kitchen detail in prison and had very little savings to her name. She’d only been working with Daniel for a week. It was admirable that she would spend so much on flowers for Libby.
She made her way back toward the car, her hands so full Bron reached over and flicked the passenger door open. When Ally climbed in, she made an unintelligible noise of uncertainty.
“No, they’re lovely.” Bron leaned over and put her nose to the bouquet of white roses. She smiled for Ally. “You chose wisely.”
“I don’t really know what this stuff is,” Ally mumbled, nodding down to the baby’s breath in her lap, “but I thought it’d go good with the white. It’s not weird to buy roses for a grave, is it? I know she likes roses…” Ally rambled on, her use of the present tense not escaping Bron.
Bron cleared her throat and started the car. “White roses typically signify reverence. Or heavenliness.”
Pleased, Ally nodded. She quietly sat back, the wrapped stems gripped tightly in her fist.
Bron drove to the back of the cemetery. They passed the war graves, which she hadn’t noticed looking so dilapidated the last time she’d been here for Libby’s burial. In fact, she hadn’t noticed them at all. Some were almost on a sixty-degree lean into the next, like dominoes, as though, even in death, their namesakes still shared a sense of camaraderie. She drew to a stop when they reached the newer rows where the grass grew greener and wilder.
When Bron got out of the car, her feet were so heavy she could have sworn she was wearing lead boots rather than flimsy thongs. She led Ally halfway down the third row to the thigh-high white cross Daniel had made out of plywood and spray-painted. In his usually messy scrawl were perfect block letters: ELIZABETH LEE. No dates. It would have to do while they waited for the headstone to return from the stonemason.
Ally stood back, looking down at the cross, glancing up at the sky, returning her attention to the white plywood marker. For a long moment, they both fell silent.
“It’s sunken again,” Bron finally said.
“Yeah. You were right. It doesn’t look too nice.”
Ally stepped around the perimeter and laid out the bouquets of white roses and baby’s breath.
“Would you like help?” Bron asked as Ally unwrapped the bunches.
“No, I’ve got it,” she said, pulling the dehydrated, browning stems from the vase. Ally cut off the bases and checked their height against the vase. Bron felt like a stranger at a row of graves which, until Libby’s passing, she’d been visiting since her mother died.
Ally unscrewed the vase from where its base was fixed to the concrete slab behind the cross. She stood and looked around. “Is there a tap where I can clean this out?”
Bron motioned to the end of the row. Ally walked off and Bron admired her tan, which was darker than when she’d first arrived. Her work shorts had given her an additional tan line too. There was a distinct border between olive and coffee-tinted skin on the back of her toned legs, especially obvious in the much shorter shorts she’d chosen that morning.
Bron looked across the road at the UGG boot stall, which had been running for as long as she could remember. Her first pair of pink UGGS was from there, way back in the nineties when wearing UGGS in public had been socially acceptable. She cringed as she took in the giant cow skins hanging proudly around the shop, marking its perimeter. As off-putting as the visual was to her, tourists on their way to and from Sydney always stopped to land a good bargain, never finding any qualms with the animal cruelty on display or parking their rental cars in the cemetery. There’s a time for everything, she thought. A time to be born, a time to die, a time for mourning, and a time for half-price genuine Aussie UGGS.
When Ally came back with the vase full of fresh water, she arranged the roses and their garnish with a kind of care and reverence Bron hadn’t thought she possessed.
Ally stood back to admire her handiwork. “Looks okay, right?”
Knowing her voice would falter, Bron simply nodded her approval. She should have let Jackie bring Ally.
Ally didn’t try to talk at the plywood cross as though it were Libby, like Annie said Jackie did. Perhaps, like Bron, Ally felt there wasn’t any point. There was no real motivation for Bron’s life-long atheism other than simple scepticism. She tried to put herself in Ally’s shoes. She’d been imprisoned for five years for protecting her best friend, only for Libby to die just months before she was granted parole? If there was a higher power, it had certainly played a cruel joke on her.
Ally gathered the plastic and paper wrapping from the flowers and nervously moulded them into a ball in her hands. “So…You said that your parents are here?”
Bron pointed to the plot next to Libby’s: Margaret Lee. “That’s my father’s mother.” It was a much older, decrepit headstone. Their father had tried to refurbish it years before he died, but now the lettering was flaking again. The first three letters were barely legible. If anybody came
looking for the late Garet Lee of Leura, they’d have less trouble finding him than someone looking for Nanna Maggie. Bron motioned further up to a newer grave. “And there are Mum and Dad. They’re in together.”
Ally raised an eyebrow. “Jackie was okay with your dad being buried with your mum?”
“I suppose,” Bron started. She hadn’t really thought about it. “Dad had already paid for a double grave when Mum died, and when it came time to bury him, it wasn’t like any of us had any spare cash lying around. Besides, my mum is next to Dad’s mum, so I guess he figured they would all be together.”
Ally seemed to be sorting it out in her own mind. “I remember Nanna Maggie,” she said softly. “She didn’t like me.”
Bron chuckled, raising a hand to her bare shoulder to shield the bite of the hot sun. “She didn’t like most people, so don’t lose sleep—”
The unexpected roar of a motorbike flying across the main road interrupted her. It was speeding, no more than twenty kilometres too fast, but fast enough to be perilous. Her mind spun just as it did when she had seen or heard anything similar in the last three months. That was the thing about triggers. They were easy to pull once the gun had been shot the first time. Libby had died and suddenly Bron was noticing car accidents everywhere—late night reruns of medical procedurals, the news and Facebook.
“Do you think your dad thought he wouldn’t remarry when he bought the double grave?” Ally wondered, drawing Bron back to the conversation at hand.
“I don’t know.”
“And what about Jackie? Where will she be buried?”
The thought of burying her second mother made Bron dizzy. “I don’t really want to think about that right now,” she rasped.
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