by Lilian Darcy
‘I’m sorry?’ Did this have anything at all to do with the unreliability of ex-husbands? ‘I’m not here for perennials, I’m here for a load of—’
‘I was being whiny and boring,’ she explained seriously—and inaccurately. ‘I heard myself, and—Laura, don’t drop the wrapper on the ground.’
‘You weren’t. Being whiny or boring.’
And if you ever are, I can always entertain myself by looking at your hair.
For some reason, it fascinated him. Maybe because he’d first seen her without it, when it had been hidden beneath the surgical cap, and so he hadn’t realised that she was pretty.
He’d even told Tarsha that she wasn’t, which now felt like a betrayal.
Tammy’s hair made sense of her colouring, and of the whole shape of her face. It was like the flowers here at the garden centre. You could get away with colour combinations that would never work in clothing or paint colours. Her hair made her…he hesitated over the word, in his thoughts, but then threw caution to the winds…beautiful.
Her hair really made her beautiful.
Inconsequentially, he remembered something his mother had once said. ‘Natural redheads. So unfair! They can be seventy years old, most of them, and they still won’t have so much as a grey hair!’
Watching the calm, cheerful way Tammy dealt with her brood, Laird decided that she thoroughly deserved nature’s reward in this area. Thirty or forty years from now, when her kids were grown and gone, she would still have the most glorious, beautiful hair.
‘Decided to spare you. Let’s talk about something interesting.’ She looked over his shoulder. ‘Ben, there’s another piece going to slide off.’ Ben peered at his ice cream. Tammy watched anxiously. Without taking her eyes from the little boy, she asked, ‘Have you travelled much? What do you like to do when you’re not saving babies? Oh, good, he’s got it. What are you going to buy here today, apart from coffee and ice cream? Are you a garden nut like I am, or do you just put in a bit of decoration to maintain your property value?’
She turned back to him at last, and beamed at him, took a big bite of her friand and a sip of her latte and fixed her lively blue eyes on his face ready to listen, the way she probably listened to her kids when they talked about their day at school.
‘Do I have to answer all those questions at once, or can I tackle them one at a time?’
‘One at a time will do. I’ll keep track of which ones you’ve done, tick them off, and tell you when to go on to the next.’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘Not often. If you ask for serious, you’ll be sorry, we’ll really be scraping the bottom of the barrel.’
‘Hmm, don’t know about that. I’m open to all options at this stage.’
They smiled at each other.
Was that…a date?
Surely not.
Leaving the garden centre, Tammy was flustered and sort of mushy inside for reasons completely unrelated to Laird Burchell—delirious excitement about going home to plant the lemon thyme, perhaps. Nothing to do with that lovely half-hour—longer, actually—that she’d just spent having coffee with the man.
Coffee that hadn’t been a date.
‘I mean, it just wasn’t,’ she muttered to herself, shovelling the kids into the van. ‘Or if it was, it must have been the date from hell, as far as he was concerned.’
Even though he hadn’t let it show.
He’d been…well, gorgeous, actually.
Yes, that word again.
Smiling at her. Relaxing sideways in the wrought-iron café chair with his legs crossed at his ankles, those big work boots clunky and heavy on his feet, and his elbow on the table, as if he wasn’t a rapidly rising neonatal specialist at one of the state’s best hospitals. Picking up a paper napkin one of the girls had dropped, even though it had been all sticky and sodden with ice cream and had immediately stuck in shreds to his fingers. Ploughing gamely on with what he’d been saying, even when the kids had needed her attention in the middle of a sentence, three sentences in a row.
Then, when it had been time to leave, instead of the token piece of greenery she’d expected him to take home, he’d pointed to a large truck filled with orchard trees and young eucalypts and acacias. ‘That’s my lot heading off now. I’d better get ahead of it, so I can direct the driver where to go.’
‘All of it? The whole truckful?’
‘I have a piece of land just up the valley.’
‘A hobby farm?’ she guessed.
‘Well, a bit bigger than that.’ He gave her a stern, reproachful look.
Him? A hobby farm? Please! As if that fitted with the dignity of a good-looking and well-built medical specialist.
‘More of an investment,’ he stressed. ‘A vineyard. It should start turning a profit within the next couple of years. Meanwhile, there are a couple of acres around the house that need more trees.’ Then he confessed with a wry grin, ‘You’re completely right, though, I should be more honest with myself. I own the place for fun more than money—such a change to get dirty instead of keeping watch on the scrupulous sterility in the NICU—which makes it a hobby farm.’
‘I didn’t mean that to sound rude.’
‘It didn’t. It just sounded upfront. I’m going to embrace the truth from now on, with my eyes open. I, Dr Laird Burchell, have a hobby farm.’
‘What did you say, Mummy?’ Sarah asked.
‘Nothing, love.’ Oh, dear, had Sarah heard that muttering a few seconds ago about the date from hell?
‘Who was that man?’
‘Just one of the doctors. I gave him a good suggestion about one of the babies at the hospital, so he bought us the coffee and ice cream to say thank you.’
‘Did he pay?’
‘Yes, he did.’ Even though she’d tried to protest about his offer, probably for too long.
‘So we saved money.’
‘Yes, sweetheart, we did.’
Nearly twenty dollars.
Tammy didn’t even try to pretend to herself that she wasn’t counting. Twenty dollars would pay for a school excursion each for Sarah and Lachlan, or several DVD rentals, or the part of a GP’s bill that the government didn’t cover.
It was a challenge, living on such a tight budget, but Tammy refused to let it get her down. She liked challenges. She liked the small, regular victories over her finances that came from things like making pizza at home instead of succumbing to the enticing odours of the local Italian place, or putting hot-water bottles in the kids’ beds on a cold winter night instead of running the expensive electric wall heaters.
It was all about attitude.
Which brought her back to Laird Burchell, their coffee and their much-interrupted conversation.
Definitely and absolutely not a date.
Not the right attitude for such a thing, in either of them.
But I liked it.
‘He’s so-o-o nice,’ Sarah said.
‘Is he?’ she asked absently.
‘Because he paid.’
Sarah was such a canny thing, Tammy thought with a pang. Even though she tried not to speak ill of Tom in the kids’ hearing, her eldest daughter somehow knew how much her dad had let them all down—how much he was still letting them down by never seeing them and sending those erratic, unpredictable child-support payments.
He knew her well enough to guess just when his unreliability would have pushed her to the edge of her tolerance, so that she’d start seriously thinking of taking him to court, and then a cheque would come. It hurt a lot to think that he’d use his understanding of her that way.
She’d talked about this to a couple of friends recently— Mel and Bron—and as usual they’d taken her side too heartily, indignant at what a rat he was. She hugely appreciated the way they stuck up for her…and she wished they wouldn’t. Mostly, she tried not to talk to her friends about Tom. It was safer, somehow, to keep her darker feelings and her vulnerabilities to herself.
And, Tammy discover
ed, she wasn’t thinking about Tom as she drove home. She was thinking about the sun on the garden-centre plants, and Laird Burchell’s vivid descriptions of Egypt and Japan, his cheerful admission to indulging in a hobby farm for the pleasure of getting dirty and the way he hadn’t seemed nearly as appalled by her rabble of children as she would have expected.
I’m in trouble…
Another realisation that she immediately knew she wasn’t going to share with friends who cared about her too much.
Or Mum.
To take out yet more insurance against being completely ridiculous, Tammy ate an extra piece of cake on top of her sandwich lunch. Five kids, and two more kilos on her butt, to counteract the fact that she’d been right about the Thornton baby and therefore Laird Burchell wouldn’t be able to conclude she was an idiot.
But she was worrying about it for nothing. The cake was unnecessary. No man in his right mind would be remotely interested in her.
Laird drove out to the vineyard in a daze and arrived ahead of the truck containing his trees. Knowing they’d be here any minute, he waited out front, ready to point in the direction of the arrangement of pre-dug holes. Hell, where was the plan he’d sketched out? Which tree went into which hole? He’d thought he had it clear in his head but for the moment it seemed to have gone.
To be replaced by bright, dizzying visions of Tammy Prunty.
He kept thinking about the way the sun had shone on her hair. She must have washed it that morning, because every time she’d moved her head, it had bounced or swung or slid over her ear, rippling and shimmering like a shampoo commercial. He could see it in his memory, and it gave him a bright flash of pleasure every time. Her smile and her eyes, the way she looked at her children, the moments of self-doubt he’d read in the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head.
The whole morning seemed drenched in colour. The sky, the vivid greenery, the glossy chocolate of the kids’ ice creams melting in the sun. The vivid oranges and yellows and greens of the fruits forming on the new citrus trees, which were currently wending their way in the truck up his long drive.
Into his mind there flashed another image—Tammy opening her mouth to bite into Lachlan’s ice cream.
‘Want a taste, Mummy?’ he’d generously asked.
She’d answered, ‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ given him a hug and taken a small chunk of lurid turquoise bubblegum-flavour ice cream between her surprisingly dainty white teeth. ‘Mmm, yummy!’
She’d leaned forward so as not to risk the ice cream dripping onto her summery cream vest top, and for a moment he’d glimpsed the lavishly full slopes of her breasts, as creamy white and smooth as the rest of her skin and edged with a couple of token pieces of lace. He’d looked quickly down at his coffee, but somehow the memory had imprinted itself in his mind and he couldn’t seem to let it go.
I want her. In my bed. In my life.
In his damned garden!
It wasn’t possible. Here he was, waiting for his trees as the truck slowed to negotiate a final bend, thinking lustful, rosy-edged thoughts about a curvy divorced mother of five who’d narrowly escaped spilling ice cream down her chin.
And yet he felt as if someone had hit him over the back of the head with a brick and he was seeing stars…along with her blue eyes, red hair and sumptuous figure.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before in his life. Knocked sideways. Without warning.
He must have had the experience before. Surely. Or else the feeling itself had something fatally wrong with it. Someone had drugged his coffee, or he was getting sick, or he’d temporarily taken leave of his senses.
He couldn’t be falling in love with her. Not so fast. Not on so little foundation. Not with someone so flagrantly impossible and unlikely. Had that it’s-not-you-it’s-me conversation with Tarsha the other night come as more of a disappointment than he’d honestly acknowledged to himself? Was he just an unattached male approaching middle age and getting desperate? Neither possibility rang true, despite some strenuous theorising.
The truck ground to a halt in front of him, and the driver wound down his window to speak, wanting to know where to go next. Laird directed him around the side of the house and the plan for the trees re-formed itself in his head, which made him feel a lot better. With the driver, his sidekick and Laird himself all working hard, they put the trees into the correct holes in ten minutes, and Laird himself spent the rest of the day shovelling in dirt and composted manure and mulch until the job was done.
There was something about tree roots and fresh soil and hard work. The sudden, raging fever called falling in love with Tammy settled down considerably during the course of the afternoon and he ended the day confident that he had it under control. He didn’t want it and didn’t trust it and it didn’t make sense, therefore it wasn’t real or significant, and would soon fade.
But that night, he dreamed about her—a triple X-rated dream that ended much too soon and left him lying awake afterwards for an hour.
He didn’t know what was happening to him.
‘It’s supposed to be a brilliant collection,’ Tarsha said, the following Thursday night.
She’d asked him if he would accompany her to the opening of an exhibition—‘be my handbag,’ as she’d phrased it—and he’d agreed, as promised.
‘Look good, won’t you?’ she’d cajoled him on the phone. ‘People will be there. I need to impress.’
So here they were, impressing like crazy, in a crush of other people doing the same thing as they wandered around the museum-quality collection of costumes from the star-studded history of the Australian film industry.
Laird took an hors d’oeuvre and examined his own profound state of dissatisfaction with a critical eye. He was bored. He felt instinctively hostile to almost every woman he saw…and even more hostile to the ones he actually talked to…because they were all too rich or too thin or too self-obsessed or—
Because they weren’t Tammy Prunty, basically, and because he couldn’t kid himself for a second that they were anything like her. This was what it boiled down to, and he was horrified about the strength of his feelings on the subject. For heaven’s sake, he barely knew the woman.
You know enough, said a part of him he hadn’t known existed, and that he didn’t trust.
‘Earth to Laird,’ Tarsha drawled. The crush had begun to thin. The hors d’oeuvre platters and wineglasses were emptying. People had started to leave. ‘Where are you tonight? You’re miles away.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Work?’
‘No. Not work. Well, sort of.’
‘Someone at work?’ she shrewdly guessed.
‘Uh, yes. Someone at work.’ Someone who filled out a surgical scrub suit very, very well, and who hid what was arguably her best feature under her cap. ‘It’s OK. Go and talk to someone important.’
‘Laird, you’re being nice enough to pull handbag duty, I can express an interest in your life. Besides,’ she added with ruthless honesty, ‘the important people are leaving now, and I’ve talked to them already. Tell me about this woman at work.’
‘I never said it was a—’
Tarsha gave a knowing smile. ‘I read the look on your face. You didn’t have to.’
Her female perception was his undoing.
‘It’s idiotic, Tarsha. I think I could be falling in love with her.’ The fatal words fell from his lips as if spoken in the confessional.
They sounded crazy, even to his own ears, and he completely understood Tarsha’s sceptical tilt of the head. ‘Then you’ve known her for a while…’ she murmured thoughtfully.
‘No, not very long at all.’
And, so help him, he told her everything…
Tarsha was right.
Her common sense and well-articulated cautions carried Laird home from the exhibition opening in a better frame of mind, and he was sure, for a whole eleven hours, that he had the problem licked.
‘I’d hate to see you getting into some
awful situation, Laird.’
True.
‘You said yourself you hardly know her.’
True again.
‘That kind of mismatched relationship is unfair to both people involved, and with all those kids…’
Once again, hard to argue.
He arrived in the NICU at six-forty on Friday morning after a good night’s sleep, ready to focus on the problem babies, convinced it was going to be a good day, and with Tarsha’s warnings about the temporary insanity of this knocked-sideways feeling about Tammy Prunty metaphorically clutched to his chest like a protective shield.
The suggestion she could be a gold-digger he’d objected to, but Tarsha had told him, ‘Gold-diggers don’t always come with bleached hair and fake boobs.’
‘Mmm, she doesn’t need those…’
‘OK, so she’s not a gold-digger.’
‘No, but I take your point.’
‘You do have family money, and that very nice investment property.’
‘Well, hobby farm.’
‘But even if she’s not a gold-digger, I can still think of half a dozen scenarios here, and they all end in tears.’
Laird definitely didn’t want anything that ended in tears. There were enough of those in the NICU already, and the bright photos of healthy babies on their pin-up board didn’t seem bright enough. They’d had a new admission overnight. Normal full-term pregnancy, mother in her late twenties, and then a baby born with a struggling heart and a list of abnormalities that suggested a rare genetic defect.
The parents wanted answers and reassurance, and no one could give those yet. For the moment they were treating the symptoms, going through the literature and deciding on tests.
On his way to take his first look at the baby, Laird passed Tammy with another new mother—a teenager, out of her depth, who’d given birth to a baby with intrauterine growth retardation. The little boy had needed breathing support but he was doing well enough now to be out of his cot and in his mother’s arms.
