Now, she was the one propped on her elbow, running a hand over his tattooed shoulder, down his arm, bending down to drop a soft kiss on his chest. “Lately, would you say?”
She felt him still. “No,” he said, and eased a little more. “Not so much lately. But I wasn’t the best husband. May as well say it now.” He turned his face to her, and his expression was sober. Nearly weary. “I didn’t cheat, I didn’t lie, and I brought my paycheck home. There’s more to marriage than not doing the wrong things, though. There’s doing the right things. I didn’t give Victoria enough attention, and I definitely didn’t give her enough sweetness. I could say I didn’t know about that. It’s probably more that I didn’t try.”
“Or,” she said, her heart filling up a little more, “that you didn’t know what that looked like.”
“No. It was that I focused on one thing, and it wasn’t her. I had examples around me of how to do it better. I’m not a stupid fella.”
“Despite what my parents seem to think,” she said, to tease him out of it.
He smiled. Reluctantly. “I’m going to be gone too much. And when I’m home, I’m going to work too much.”
“Yes. You are.”
His hand, which had been stroking her back, stilled.
“I’m going to miss you,” she said. “I already do. But I’d rather miss somebody I love than not love him at all.”
Rhys had her hand in his again, was running his thumb over that bare ring finger, thinking that he wanted to put a diamond on it almost as much as he wanted to put a baby in her belly. He knew what she looked like pregnant, and he wanted to be the one making it happen. Call him whatever you like. He wanted it.
She sighed, then asked, “What time is it?”
He had to laugh. “Sweetheart. Not the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
She smiled, but said, “Kids. Babysitter. You may not realize how important that is. And that’s the other thing we need to talk about.”
“The babysitter? I’m paying her. Driving her home, too. Driving you home, but not yet. It can’t be much past ten. We have time.”
“You didn’t get your steak yet. We should heat it up.”
She sat up, and not like a languid woman stretching out. More like a Jack-in-the-box. Was there a reason she was dragging the conversation away?
He hadn’t paid enough attention before? He was paying it now. “And the reason you’re talking about that, instead of talking about rings and dates and moving in with me, is . . .”
She dragged a hand through her hair, mussing it some more. “It’s not what people will say, whatever you’re thinking. It’s the kids, and maybe . . .”
“It’s you,” he said. His heart, which had been somewhere up there in the stands, took a dive that nearly gave him vertigo. “I did speak too soon.”
“Yes. No.” She sighed. “I feel it, too. I don’t have your courage. I never have. I don’t have your mana.”
“Don’t say that.” It came out rough, and she jumped. “It’s not true.”
“I’m scared right now,” she said. “By the thought of making the move. Of telling the kids. Of taking the leap.”
“Of believing.”
She didn’t answer, and that told him everything. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said, after searching around inside himself for a while. “And if you don’t know the right answer, you don’t answer at all. But I know one thing. It’s a rugby thing, though, like most bits of wisdom I’ve got.” He was sitting up, too, and had her hand again, because maybe it would help.
She was scared? He was here.
“I’ll take rugby wisdom,” she said.
“There’s more than one way of being strong, then,” he said. “There’s being the player who has the magic moments that can turn your momentum around in a heartbeat, yeh, or the one who comes off the bench and finishes up with so much flash, the public asks why he isn’t starting every time. And there’s the bloke who doesn’t do any of that, the one who does his role every single game and never has a bad one, and makes the team better. The one who’s as strong in Minute Eighty as he was in Minute One. It’s not because he’s not tired. It’s because he trained harder and he cared enough to do the boring parts of that, but it’s also because he’s got the kind of will that pulls his body along with him, and that when somebody else would say the tank is empty, he finds more in there, and he gives it. And because he won’t let his mates down.”
“Which is you,” she said.
“It’s who I tried to be in rugby. It’s not who I’ve been in the rest of my life. It’s who I want to be with you, though. I want to be that man who’s as steady during the hard parts, when the tank’s empty, as he was at the beginning. And none of that is my point. I didn’t do it for the money, or for the glory, but the money and the glory were there. You haven’t done it for either. You’ve done it because it’s who you are, and because it had to be done. You’re still doing it. Do you know what I see when I look at you?”
“No,” she said. She wanted to hear, though, and he needed to tell her.
So he did. “I see the player you can trust to give until his heart bursts. The one who plants his feet, puts his head down, and gets stuck in. I see that fella in the front row who’ll never win Player of the Year and never be the one scoring the try, whose nose will be broken too many times, and who’ll play on through every one of them. A woman whose van breaks down on the side of the motorway, and who gets up the next day at five to start again. The teammate I can trust to be there with me in Minute Eighty, the one who’ll empty the tank. I see the one with mana. And that’s the one I want beside me.”
She was crying. Silently this time, silver streaks down her face, her expression twisting with it. Not trying to be beautiful, and beautiful anyway. Belly deep. He said, “People are going to say you’re lucky, because people can be bloody stupid. You’re not going to be the one who’s lucky. That’s going to be me.” He grabbed for a box of tissues from the drawer and handed it to her. “So if that one’s solved, tell me the next one.”
She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, tried to laugh, and said, “My mum would be so horrified. I’m sitting up in the most unflattering way possible, showing you my stretch marks and my tummy, I’m blowing my nose, and my eye makeup’s streaking all over the shop. And you’ve just told me I’m not flash. Doubly horrified.”
He smiled. “I’m not the most polished fella myself, in case you didn’t notice. I told you I wouldn’t say it right, didn’t I. Tell me the next thing, though. I feel I’m on a roll here.”
This time, she did laugh, but said, “Isaiah. I was a bit preoccupied earlier this evening, but you must have heard that, too. We need to go slowly. He’s not like Casey. He’s not a fast adapter. He needs stability.”
He lay down again and sighed. “OK. I can’t argue with that one. So what do you want to do?”
She came down over him, to his surprise, kissed his mouth, and smiled into his eyes. “Do you know—that could be my favorite thing you’ve ever said to me. Thanks.”
He tried to manufacture some outrage. “After all that? Minus the rugby part, comparing you to a front-rower, I’ve said more beautiful things in one night than I have in forty years.”
Now, they were both laughing. “Nah, boy,” she said, “I loved it all. But ‘What do you want to do?’ ranks right up there. You’re still married, for one thing, and an engagement wouldn’t look good for you anyway, never mind the part with Dylan, which is a pretty big part. But what I want to do? I want to hold your hand at home, to cuddle with you on the couch when we’re watching a movie with the kids, and to give you a kiss when I see you. To tell Casey and Isaiah we’re going on a date and let them get used to it, but hold off on the ring and the date and the moving-in part of it.”
“What about the ‘getting you pregnant’ part of it?”
“Zoomed straight there, didn’t you. Maybe we could think . . .” She considered. Another thing he appreciated about her
. Normally. When he was getting his way, at least. “That pregnancy takes nine months. Worst case? We’ve got nine months to get Isaiah used to the idea.”
“No,” he said, and her head whipped around again. “That would be the best case.” He smiled at her, then put a hand down low on her belly, where a few stripes showed the effort it had taken her body to carry Isaiah. Like his much-broken nose, the knuckles that didn’t look anything like they had twenty years ago, the scar on his forehead, and all the rest of the trophies he carried on his body. The price you’d been willing to pay, because nothing that good came easy. Women could be warriors, too. He rolled over with her, pressed his lips to one of those lines, and said, “Good things come to those who wait, eh. I reckon we’ll wait, then, and I’ll do my best to settle for feeling engaged. And possibly buy you a ring and try to think of a more memorable way to offer you my heart and hand than blurting it out in bed. Meanwhile, let’s heat up those steaks. If I’m going to keep you interested in our quasi-engagement, I could need my strength.”
The next morning, everything got more complicated.
The first part went fine. Rhys got up at six, pulled on a T-shirt, shorts, and trainers, and headed up the road a few kilometers for a dawn run on a track in the Waitakeres, the one he hadn’t taken on that evening when he’d come back from Japan. When he’d sat on a bench instead, held Zora, and told her he loved her for the first time.
Six o’clock had come early after finally getting to bed at one, but as always, pushing his way up the first incline through his muscles’ initial resistance, feeling his breath and his legs settling into their rhythm, then picking up the pace, did the business. No sound but birdsong, the pounding of his feet on earth and of the blood in his ears, and the snaking thoughts in his head had begun untwisting themselves.
He was a one-track man who was on about four tracks just now, between rugby and Casey and Isaiah and Zora, and Finn was right. A sportsman needed his workouts to make that kind of adjustment. You needed emotional balance to do his job, and more for the rest of this, but it came from the same place as physical balance. From knowing what tools to use and working to use them better. Which he knew how to do.
By the time he’d left the first few kilometers of bush behind and was headed across a windswept stretch at the top of the bluffs, with the wild waters of the Tasman foaming against the rocks below, the pink light of dawn had turned to glowing blue, a fresh breeze was blowing the mists away, and was stretching out and finding his stride, things were settling into place.
The air was chilly, but it was clean. You could breathe it deep into your lungs and collect your thoughts. That was the reason he’d come home. The connection to this place, to his mountain and his river and the spirit of his ancestors, was like no other.
He might not be an All Black anymore, except that you always were. That never left you from the minute you pulled on the black jersey, the first time your feet stamped the ground in the haka, connecting you to the earth beneath you and the mates around you.
Everyone he loved was here, and everything he loved, too, and he was going to make it work. Zora loved him, he was learning to be a dad, and surely he could learn to be a good husband, too. There was nothing like practice and determination to make you better at something. You made a plan, and you executed. It was trickier when somebody else was making the plan with you, but by the time a man was forty, he ought to have learned something. Maybe even to work on four tracks at once.
So that was good, and so was sluicing his body down in a shower that was too big for one, thinking that pretty soon, Zora’s bottles of nail varnish would be lined up in the empty drawers under the sink, in a pretty basket, maybe, her perfume and shoes would be on the dressing-room shelves, and his house would smell like flowers.
He could need some better towels. The big, fluffy white kind. Another warmed towel rack, too, on the wall by the bath, so all she’d have to do was reach out for it afterwards. She’d enjoy that.
When he got to her house at nine-thirty, though, it was all a bit different than he’d expected. Zora was in the flower shed, dressed in stretchy black leggings, a long T-shirt, an apron, and jandals, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her hands deft and quick as she put together an arrangement about the size of a bus. Isaiah and Casey were sitting on the floor at her feet, picking leaves off flowers and sticking them into buckets. Pop music was playing on a portable speaker, but Zora didn’t look relaxed.
“Hi,” he said, leaning against the open door.
Casey stuffed a pink rose into a bucket and ran to him, and he swung her up, gave her a cuddle, and said, “Morning, monkey. Did you have a good time last night?”
“Yes,” she said, “except not really, because Isaiah said I couldn’t do his robot, so I had to do a puzzle instead by myself. And I wanted to read a story with you, but you weren’t there, and Auntie Zora wasn’t there, either, and you won’t be there tonight, because you have to do your job.”
“Because I was at the hard part, and you don’t know how,” Isaiah said, still taking leaves off flowers. “Hi, Uncle Rhys. Mum’s very busy.”
“What can I do?” Rhys asked Zora. They weren’t going to be having a talk with the kids this morning, clearly.
“Get me a very large coffee at the shop,” Zora said, “and cook a better breakfast for the kids. Bring me a couple eggs on toast out here, and I’ll be your slave.”
He laughed out loud, then set Casey down, came over to give Zora a kiss on her smiling mouth, and said, “Done. What is that?”
“Wedding bouquet.”
“Looks as big as the bride, eh.”
“Trailing bouquet. It’s a thing. Big’s a thing, too. Dahlias, hydrangeas, roses, hypericum berries, calla lilies, greenery. The bride wanted a cottage garden effect.”
He inspected it doubtfully. Well over a meter long, and, geez, almost that wide, too. The feathery greenery would nearly reach the floor. He said, “She’s got the garden, anyway. Maybe if it was all one color.” Peach, white, pink, lavender. It was all pale, which he guessed was good, but . . .
“You’re not supposed to tell her it’s not nice,” Isaiah said. “That’s not helpful.”
“You’re right, mate,” he said. “No excuse.”
Zora said, “Not my favorite, either, but she wants what she wants, and she saw a picture. I shouldn’t complain. She’s got six bridesmaids and six groomsmen, and the bride and groom each have a mum and stepmum. Flower bonanza.”
“It’s three thousand seven hundred dollars,” Isaiah informed him. “Because there’s an arbor, too. Arbors cost heaps of money. Mum did that yesterday, though. The other wedding is only six hundred dollars, because it’s just little.”
Those would be the deep-purple and white bouquets on the other table, Rhys guessed. And she’d done an arbor yesterday besides all her deliveries? And gone out with him? “I like those other ones,” he said. “The six-hundred-dollar ones. What are they?”
“Eggplant calla lilies, white roses, dusty miller leaves,” Zora said. “Elegant. Striking, but soft. Nice, eh. And you say ‘little’ like it’s a bad thing, Isaiah. I’m glad to have the big orders, but I‘ve delivered too many flowers on wedding days to think those huge events are much fun. Too stressful, I’d say. Nothing like the view from the inside.” She sounded weary, and she looked it, too.
“Right,” Rhys said. “Very large latte, coming up.” He told Casey, “Come with me to get Auntie Zora’s coffee.”
“OK,” she said. She was wearing her Girls Can T-shirt with leggings, and she looked as cute as a bug. “I’m very hungry, too. We went to the flower market before it was even light. We had to get up in the nighttime. If we went to Café Vevo, we could get those kinds of special muffins that have chocolate inside. Muffins are breakfast. That would give Isaiah and me energy.”
“Brioche,” Zora said. “More dessert than breakfast, really.”
“If you ask them to,” Casey said, “they will put them in a little box and
put whipped cream in the box.”
Rhys was about to say, “Eggs on toast. Tomato. Mushrooms.” Instead, he asked Zora, “D’you want a brioche? Breakfast, then dessert?”
“Possibly,” she said. “Or possibly, I’d kill for one.”
He laughed again. He had one of the toughest matches of the season coming up tonight, so why was being here better than being home alone, where he could think about it?
Because he’d made his preparations, and until things started unfolding tonight, it was out of his hands. He didn’t even give the motivational speech anymore. He left that to the skipper. The players were the ones out there on the field, and they needed the confidence of knowing the game was in their hands, and that they could seize it. Leadership wasn’t always telling people what to do. Sometimes, it was finding the right people to do the telling.
What he’d said to Zora was true. The way you’d always done things might not be the best way in the world. He said, “Sounds like I’d better provide, then.”
He did, and then he cooked breakfast, did the washing-up, and took the kids to the park for some rugby practice while Zora did her deliveries, which would help, too.
When he’d taken them through their warmups and passing drills and was going through some kicking with Casey, Isaiah said, “You kissed Mum on the lips again today.”
“I did.” Rhys kicked the ball back to Casey, watched as she jumped for it and brought it down, thought, Not bad, monkey, then turned his attention back to the boy.
What did you say? Something simple, he guessed, and true. He decided on, “That’s because I love her.”
“You’re my uncle, though,” Isaiah said. “Your uncle isn’t supposed to kiss your mum. I asked my friend Aiden. He said, your mum can say he’s your uncle, but he isn’t really. That just means he sleeps in your mum’s bed and they have sex, but he’s not your stepdad. But you really are my uncle. Uncle Hayden only kisses Mum on the cheek, and only sometimes. Usually, he just kind of hugs her.”
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