by Jennie Jones
She smiled, the dewy glow of her face nearly buckling him, before she stepped over the crazy-paving temporary path to the front door.
‘Adele.’
She turned. ‘Yes?’
She’d said he made her smile. Well, she made him feel. ‘I like having her as my friend.’
She smiled again, a slow, shy smile this time. One that made her eyes shine. ‘I like you being her friend, Tom.’
Attraction roared inside him so badly he had to clench his hands. ‘I like you, too,’ he said carefully.
She blushed, which didn’t help with the sexual aspect of his attraction because her flushed features made her look like pink alabaster. A fine, delicate statue he wanted to run his hands over.
‘And I like you right back,’ she told him.
Jesus, was that a reciprocal admission? His pulse banged in his throat and his temperature rose. ‘Okay,’ he said, telling himself to take it easy. ‘So we all like each other. And we’re all going to take a breath.’ And possibly a cold shower. ‘And we’ll just see what happens.’
She could read what he was saying. They hadn’t lost eye contact but there was more than visual focus floating between them. It was energy, pull. A mutual desire to move closer—and touch. It made his heart beat like a hammer.
She took a visible breath, paused a moment longer, then slipped inside the house and closed the front door.
***
After a restless night, Tom had risen early, showered, and discovered he didn’t have any food in the house.
Twenty minutes later, replete from poached eggs and toast, Tom put the spanner he’d used to fix Imelda’s washing machine onto the Formica-topped table and accepted the mug of coffee his grandmother handed him.
‘So?’ she asked.
‘What?’
She pulled out her ironing board from its slot against the wall and unfolded it. It was so old it didn’t have the ratchets modern ironing boards had, just a metal hook. One height. Too high for Imelda and way too low for Tom.
‘Being right neighbourly, aren’t you?’ she said.
Tom took a sip of his coffee and winced when the heat stung his lips. He reached for the sugar bowl on the table and added three spoonfuls to the coffee. ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ He stirred, watching the swirl of liquid as it melted a couple of coffee granules stuck to the rim of the mug.
‘I’ll go over sometime and ask her to help out with the street frontages myself,’ Imelda said, unfolding a pair of dark, thick denim jeans so she could put a crease in them.
‘I told you, she’s happy to help,’ Tom said. ‘She’s happy to do anything.’
‘Makes you wonder where all that hope she has comes from, doesn’t it? Given her circumstances.’
Tom didn’t answer. Adele was full of hope and that hope was currently focused on him. ‘I just picked the kid up from school,’ he said, knowing it was best to fall straight into the conversation Imelda wanted. ‘No big deal.’
‘Her front plot of garden looks good. Going to do yours next?’
‘No. And don’t you touch it, either.’
‘Why not? I want them all done up.’
‘Because I like it looking like a dump. Reminds me I’m not staying and that I don’t have to worry about it. Reminds me that I’d better not get too hopeful myself.’
‘About what?’
Adele. ‘Business. Scott. Occupational Health and Safety. The bank. What else would I be considering?’
Imelda didn’t answer. She folded her jeans over a coat hanger hung on a cupboard doorknob and picked up a blue checked shirt, sliding the shoulder over the end of the ironing board.
‘All right.’ Tom succumbed. He wouldn’t get any peace if he held out on Imelda. ‘I offered to pick the kid up yesterday because for some reason, she talks to me.’
‘Saw you going past.’
Tom nodded. ‘I realise that.’
‘So what did she say to you?’
‘Said something about her friend—Katrina—having left.’ Tom said it easily enough but he put a little emphasis on the name and watched for Imelda’s reaction.
The iron slid over the shirt in a smooth motion, but his grandmother obviously couldn’t hold the quick rise of her chest, as though her breath had caught her unawares.
‘Coincidence, huh?’ he asked, knowing Imelda would know what he was talking about.
She didn’t answer. She never answered any of Tom’s questions about his mother and he’d stopped asking years ago. Not for the first time, he wondered what atrocious things Katrina Wade could have done to sever a tie of love from her own mother. He knew his mother had been sick—he presumed drugs or alcohol, or depression or something—and he knew she’d left him. He knew that his grandfather had gone looking for her but hadn’t found her and had returned home—he used the term ‘home’ loosely. He usually had a far more derogatory description for the house he’d been brought up in before his grandfather had carked it eight years later. He also knew that his mother had died a few months after she’d left Tom. She was buried in Orange. Imelda had taken him to the funeral; his grandfather had stayed home.
‘She loved you,’ Imelda said.
Tom spluttered, the hot coffee spilling over the rim of his mug.
‘She just kind of forgot.’
Tom couldn’t speak.
‘Not her fault,’ Imelda continued, turning the shirt on the ironing board and straightening the sleeves.
So whose fault was it?
‘It was Samuel’s fault.’
Jesus Christ. His grandfather’s fault? Tom hadn’t moved a muscle, the mug still in his hand, the jeans on his thigh wet from the spill of coffee.
‘I gave up on hope a long time ago, Tom. Before you were born. Before Katrina was born. Now for some reason, I’ve found it again.’ She stopped ironing and looked at him. ‘Age, probably. Perhaps all this talk about times gone by at the historic society. Perhaps all the focus and energy people are putting into the plans to get the town back on the map. I don’t know. But this is my chance.’
‘For what?’ Tom asked in a near whisper.
‘To rid myself of grief, once and for all.’
***
Adele pushed the files and a dictaphone Cath had given her into her tote bag. She’d received her instructions and, as planned, she’d do her work from home for this week. The children were out in the yard having morning tea. Adele had made sure Ali hadn’t seen her come in to the school office, and she was waiting to sneak out once the bell rang.
‘I think she’s confused,’ Adele said, continuing the conversation about how Ali was getting on. ‘Not disconnected, because she possesses cognisant range and movement, mental and physical. You said she did the sports class yesterday, but she won’t play with others at playtime. You said she listens in class—she just doesn’t interact.’
‘She responded this morning.’
‘She what?’
‘A little,’ Cath cautioned. ‘I saw her smile at some silly antic going on in class.’
This was a massive breakthrough. One day. One walk with Tom.
‘How do the other children react to Ali?’
‘We have a small school, Adele. I’ve been able to sit and speak with each of her classmates and explain—in terms the individual child can understand—that Ali is not being mean or moody but that she’s in the middle of a little problem and she’s being quiet so that she can figure her way out.’
This woman deserved a medal. It was the prognosis Adele believed too. But what was Ali’s little problem? ‘Is she sad about something?’
‘Adele, I’m not going to talk in-depth with you anymore. I shouldn’t have said what I have so far. We have to wait for the school psychologist. I’m not in a position—and neither do I have the expertise—to make evaluations. But I …’
‘What? Please say, Cath. I don’t wish to put you in a difficult position, I do understand—’
Cath held her hand up and clamped her lips t
ightly, then sighed. ‘The thing is, Adele, I’m already starting to see you as a friend. I know how tough it is to wait on school psychologists, I’ve seen parents wait and worry, and I can’t do anything about it. Neither will I make any prognosis, nor do I intend to in the future. All I’m doing here is telling my friend something I saw that might help my friend understand that a miracle might be happening.’
Adele swallowed the moisture in her mouth as a tingling awareness rushed through her body. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. Cath didn’t believe that Ali was sad either. She just couldn’t say so.
Ali wasn’t sad, but Adele felt she might feel she was in trouble. Or was she grieving? Possibly for Katrina? Now that she’d spoken to Cath, Adele had no fear about telling her how Ali had reacted to Tom, and about the unbelievable bond that had formed between them.
When she’d finished, Cath sat a while, considering. ‘It’s utterly marvellous how the mind works, don’t you think?’
‘I’m not so sure I can agree,’ Adele said ruefully.
Cath smiled. ‘Tom. My goodness, of all people.’
‘The problem is, he’s not staying in Dulili. He’s going to be making more and more business trips to Canberra. I can’t rely on him to always be around—although I hasten to add that he’s willing to help, even though he says he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or how this whole friendship thing between them came about.’
‘Don’t mess with what’s happening, is my advice.’ Cath lifted her hand in a warning pose. ‘Cath’s advice to a friend that is, not Cath Foster the schoolteacher’s advice to a parent.’
Adele nodded. ‘I understand. And I thank you for your friendship.’
Cath waited, pondering something, then spoke again. ‘Tell Tom to stay Tom. Don’t ask him to change his schedules or his actions—although if it were at all possible that he could be in town a couple of days a week to pick her up from school, or to pop in to your house for a cup of tea or something, then Cath, your friend, would tell you to be prepared to beg him to do so.’
The school bell rang, and Adele turned her attention to packing her tote bag. Tom had so much on his plate. He had his own traumas, and perhaps he was going through his own grieving process, for his friend and for his business.
She slung the strap of the tote over her shoulder and chewed the tip of her thumb, a childhood habit, all the while wondering what Tom’s reaction to her begging him to stick around might be, given the shock of communicated desire and awareness of each other yesterday.
***
Tom had got used to the quizzical stares of the car-pool mothers, and the ones who had children under the age of eight who came to the school steps to collect their kids.
He knew them, although hadn’t had anything to do with them since high school. He nodded to them as he reached the school railings a second before Ali appeared at the doorway. He’d worked out his timing this last three days.
Don’t arrive early because you haven’t got any answers for the women hanging around, staring at you.
Don’t do anything stupid and out of place like taking Ali’s hand when she reaches your side because that’ll give them something else to think about and you can’t explain that either.
And don’t forget that the kid is the reason you’re doing the neighbourly pick-up.
They left the school gate, Tom keeping his eyes on the pavement, not the gaggle of staring mothers, and walked up Union Street towards High Street.
‘Sometimes, I just don’t want to talk either,’ he said to himself as they reached the main street and came to a stop. He hadn’t had to tell the kid to remember the routine, she’d just done it, two afternoons ago when he’d picked her up for the second time, chanting the old school song even Tom remembered. Look to the right, look to the left, and look to the right again.
She slipped her hand into his, startling him. He squeezed her fingers to let her know he felt her. He just didn’t want to talk about anything heavy.
‘You got homework?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘What is it?’ he asked as they made the uncommunicated joint decision that the road was safe to cross.
She didn’t answer.
Goddamn. He’d messed up. Again. Yesterday, he’d asked her about her Katrina, about how she looked. She’d told him, then asked him about his Katrina. Tom hadn’t been able to answer with any truthfulness. He didn’t have a photograph of his mother except two from when she’d been a child and a young woman. Before she’d had Tom. There weren’t any pictures of Katrina smiling as she cradled her baby, or lifting him up to the camera to show him off, because Samuel Wade had burnt them. Not that Tom was sure such photos had existed anyway. He had no idea what his mother had felt when she’d had him. Or before she’d had him. Which pissed him off. He was pissed off with his mother in a way he’d never been before, and freshly pissed with Imelda for opening up with some never-before-revealed knowledge of Katrina.
‘Don’t take any notice of me,’ he told the kid, reassuring her of her safety by squeezing her hand and swinging it a little. ‘I’ve got business on my mind, that’s all. You should be telling me off, you know, for not behaving like a …’ Like a what? A good neighbour?
‘It’s okay,’ she said, and his heart turned over like someone had picked it up and resettled it.
Such a gentle, accepting kid. ‘I’ve been worrying about my friend, Scott,’ he told her. ‘He’s not feeling too good.’ Scott was sinking in despair at never being able to walk again and Tom was sinking into desperation trying to find a way to make it better. To make it all better.
‘Will you have to go visit him?’
‘Maybe.’ Scott wouldn’t talk to anyone and didn’t want to see anyone. Tom was fighting for him from afar; over the telephone and by email. The worker’s comp people were delaying any commitment due to Scot’s previous bouts of depression, which they were using as a possible reason to renege on the huge amount of money they’d need to cough up for Scott’s future care. Although it hadn’t been depression—how easily people labelled stuff. It had been heartbreak at the failing of his marriage and an inability to recognise it. That’s what had cost Scott his legs. He hadn’t been concentrating.
‘Will you miss me?’ he asked, putting a laugh into the question.
‘I have to do a poster for my homework. About farming and what kind of things they grow that we eat every day.’
‘Okay, so we’d better not do the swings today.’ He hadn’t expected her to answer his question. His pathetic question. When the hell in his entire life had he ever worried about someone missing him?
When they reached the kid’s gate, Adele was coming out of the house with a smile. She ruffled Ali’s head as she said hello.
‘Tom’s friend is feeling sick,’ Ali told her mother. ‘We’ll miss him if he goes to visit, won’t we? Miss Foster told us that we have to say things to people who need something, because if we don’t, the people won’t know that we care.’
And with that, she walked into the house towards the kitchen.
Adele shot her focus to Tom, her lips parted and her eyes as wide as Tom felt his were.
He swallowed. ‘I don’t know …’ Where the hell that had come from. ‘I didn’t say I was actually going anywhere …’
Adele turned to the doorway and leaned both hands on the frame as she stuck her head inside the house. ‘Your milk and cookies are on the table,’ she called. ‘I’m just popping next door for a couple of minutes to speak to Tom. Will you be okay?’
‘I’m going to start my poster homework,’ Ali called, and Adele pulled the front door to, came down the new paving-slab pathway and took hold of Tom’s hand.
‘We need to talk,’ she said, and dragged him to his front door.
***
Adele nibbled her bottom lip with her teeth, waiting for Tom to speak. He paced his living room, five steps across and five steps back, his head bent, one hand at the back of his neck.
‘I’ve messed i
t up,’ he said at last.
‘No, you haven’t.’ Adele took a step towards him and he stopped pacing, his hand falling to his side.
‘I made a stupid remark about not wanting to talk. I wasn’t even saying it to the kid! I was saying it to myself.’ His hand flew to the back of his neck again. ‘I didn’t think.’
‘Tom! It doesn’t matter what you said. You wouldn’t have said anything from meanness, I know that. But she responded. She recognised that you needed something.’
He scrunched his eyes closed, his mouth set in a grimace. ‘I’m no good at this. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m going to make things worse.’
But he’d made them so much better. Within four days Ali was recognising emotions in others and responding to them, even though she wasn’t personally directing her responses to the recipients, but rather … passing them on. Letting another person know that someone needed attention.
As Tom needed attention now.
Adele walked up to him, a calmness running through her, the way it did when she had to comfort Ali if she fell off her scooter and her scraped and bleeding knee became the biggest grievance in her young world.
‘Yesterday,’ Tom said in a gritty voice, halting her. ‘I asked her what her friend Katrina looked like. I thought it might bring her out a bit. You know—the missing her friend thing. Then I got the shock of my life when she asked me about my mother. Her name was Katrina too.’
Another Katrina. One who might have left her four-year-old son asleep in a burning house. Adele had tried to put the newspaper article from thirty years ago out of her mind, with everything else going on, but she couldn’t forget it.
‘Did you answer her?’
‘I lied.’ Tom’s eyes met Adele’s. ‘I’ve only seen photos of her, as a kid and as a teenager. I just made something up.’
‘That’s okay. It wasn’t a lie. How could you remember, anyway? You were so young when she died.’
His focus changed suddenly. ‘You know something about my mother?’
‘No. Only that …’
‘What?’
‘I …’ She stuttered and spread her hands. ‘Someone told me she died. Someone at the society.’ Now she was lying but she didn’t want to tell Tom that the reference to his young life had been found stuck in a forgotten box and wrapped around a vase.
