The Cafe by the Bridge

by Lily Malone

  ‘Wrap those boots around me, Doc.’

  * * *

  Later, when they were flushed from lovemaking and quiet because of it, when Abe’s car was locked, the front door was locked, his overnight bag had made it across the threshold and into her bedroom, and they’d both discussed and discarded the option of going out for a meal in favour of ordering in Thai, Taylor told Abe she’d gotten him an appointment with Dr Larissa Palmer tomorrow afternoon.

  He’d stiffened when she said it, which was natural—Taylor had yet to come across a person who didn’t feel anxious before visiting any counsellor or therapist—but he’d said, ‘Okay,’ and ‘Thanks,’ and then he’d spent time concentrating on pushing her fringe so it would stay behind her ear. Given she was lying above him on the couch, enjoying the feel of his bare chest beneath her, gravity made his job difficult.

  ‘Have you thought about what you want to talk with Larissa about?’ Taylor asked.

  ‘A bit. Not really.’

  ‘It will help to have a plan. She’ll ask you a lot of questions for your first session. There’ll be paperwork. You should write down any questions you have.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll work it out.’ Abe-speak for I don’t want to talk about it right now and why won’t this hair ever stay where it’s supposed to?

  ‘I don’t have to work tomorrow. We could have a lazy brunch out somewhere near the river. My treat. I can drop you off after and then I thought I’d go see my friend Izzy—she has a vet practice not far from Larissa’s clinic. I can pick you up.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks for that.’

  ‘After that, I thought we could go see Will. Monday afternoons he usually plays squash with his business partner. He’ll be home early. I’d like for you to meet him. I’d really like the two of you to talk about Amanda. I think it would help both of you—’

  Vehicle lights flashed across the blinds in the front room.

  ‘That’ll be dinner,’ she said, getting up to find her purse, throwing her dress over her shoulders.

  ‘I’ve got money,’ Abe said, hunting in his jeans’ pocket.

  ‘It’s cool. I’ve got it.’

  She paid the delivery guy and closed the door, bringing plastic food containers into the kitchen where Abe had his hands spread wide on the countertop, fingers digging into the stone-topped edge. His head was down, creating a groove between his shoulders and back.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked, getting out plates, spreading out the food.

  He looked up. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re quiet.’

  ‘Am I? Sorry. Don’t mean to be.’

  His eyes had that restless thing going on, like he might sprint off into the night any minute, howl at the moon and not return till morning.

  ‘Are you worried about your mum? How is she? I’m sorry I didn’t ask before.’

  ‘It’s okay. I didn’t give you much time to ask about my mum. Dad says she’s doing okay. If all goes well, they’ll start heading west later this week. As long as Mum’s strong enough. If the doctors say it’s okay. She should be out of hospital tomorrow.’

  ‘That must be a relief.’

  They lapsed into another strained silence.

  Taylor dished out the food. She pulled out one of the stools at the breakfast bar and sat, motioning for Abe to join her.

  ‘Do you want a drink? I’ve got beer,’ she offered.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll get it.’ He came back from her fridge popping the bottle tops. ‘Stubbie okay or would you like a glass?’

  ‘The bottle is good.’

  He didn’t sit. He didn’t eat.

  She poked at her Thai noodles with her fork.

  ‘Don’t you want to meet Will? I’m sorry if I’m forcing my family on you.’

  ‘We’re together. Meeting your family kinda comes with the territory.’

  So that wasn’t his problem. That was a relief.

  ‘Will told me the other night that he’s slept with Amanda since they broke up. You’d think he should bloody well know better. And I am worried about that thing I told you about, someone leaving dead animals on his doorstep and the standover-man biker ex.’

  Abe took a swig of his beer. ‘You really think Amanda is up for putting dead animals at his place? The girl I knew squealed if a spider so much as spun a web behind the toilet door.’

  ‘More like she eats spiders for breakfast,’ Taylor grumbled.

  ‘Maybe it is the ex doing those things to Will. Maybe it’s like she says. She always reckoned he’s on the psycho side of crazy.’

  ‘Please don’t go making Amanda out to be the victim here, Abe. She’s not.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just kids playing a prank.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re defending her!’

  ‘I’m not defending her.’

  Abe still didn’t sit. Instead, he prowled her living room, casing her bookshelves, stopping in front of a corkboard of photographs and checking them out.

  ‘Your dinner will go cold,’ Taylor said.

  ‘Just stretching my legs for a sec. Bit stiff from the drive.’

  How did they go from that post-sex bliss to this? She sounded like his mother. Your dinner will go cold.

  He took a deep drink of his beer.

  Taylor ate.

  ‘Are you nervous about tomorrow, Abe?’ she probed.

  ‘Nah. Not really.’

  ‘Then what’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?’ She was close to tears.

  What had changed from the moment he opened his car door and swept her up, boots and all? He couldn’t be jealous of Will and Amanda, surely? He had to be worried about tomorrow, right? Seeing Dr Palmer? She got that he must be worried about his parents, that whole thing with his real father. But they’d talked through a lot of that on the phone already these past few nights, talked late into the night, finding any extra reason not to hang up, but to say just a few more words.

  How could they talk for hours about nothing, and now they had nothing to say?

  There was a scratch on the glass sliding door that led out to Taylor’s brick-paved patio. Abe heard it too and he unlocked the mechanism and slid the door open. Bruno greeted him with a classic staffy growl and a whole lot of wiggles.

  ‘Did I forget to say hi to you, buddy?’ Abe bent low, rubbing the dog around his head and jaw. ‘Sorry about that. I got distracted by her over there in the boots.’

  That was something. Wasn’t it? More like the old Abe.

  ‘Abe?’

  He looked up from where he’d been rubbing Bruno behind his ears. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m so sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Ah, Taylor, Doc.’ He dragged his hand through his hair. ‘You’re okay. It’s me.’

  ‘Bruno. On your mat,’ Taylor ordered, then to Abe, ‘Please talk to me?’

  Bruno padded to his doggy bed in the corner and Abe came back to her. He sat on the bar stool with his knees open, legs long and loose.

  ‘Bruno was a rescue dog, I think you told me?’ he said.

  Taylor nodded. ‘My friend Izzy had him at her vet clinic. Someone handed him in because they were worried he’d get too big for their flat.’

  ‘And Will and me and Keeley, and all your patients … we’re like rescue jobs too. You’re saving the world, one loser at a time.’

  ‘You’re not a loser!’

  ‘No. I might have been, Taylor Woods, but you already saved me.’ Abe leaned close.

  He kissed her, very tenderly, very softly, with his hand cupping her face. When he finished, he pulled her forehead to his and held it there. Tears leaked down her cheeks and he wiped at them with his finger.

  ‘You can’t rescue everyone all the time. Even you can’t do that.’

  ‘I’m not trying—’

  He gave her a small shake. ‘Let me talk to Dr Palmer tomorrow, okay. Let me do it my way. If Will and I end up talking about Amanda—’ his lip curled on her name —‘let us drive it, okay? And if I want to buy
you takeaway Thai dinner, let me do that too.’

  ‘This is about who bought dinner?’ She couldn’t believe it.

  ‘No, it’s about the other things more than dinner. But I’ve got money. I might not be flush with cash but I can pay for my own counsellor. I can pay for Thai food. I can pay my own way.’

  ‘I’m not trying to save the world, Abe.’

  He arched an eyebrow. ‘No?’

  ‘I’d rather fix it before it’s broken.’

  ‘Isn’t it the same thing?’

  ‘If I wanted to save the world, I wouldn’t drive a V8 that costs me on petrol every time I take it out of the garage. I’d drive an electric shoebox that recharged on a cigarette lighter. I’d be marching for climate change and refugees and euthanasia. I’d be passionate about things. I’m not passionate about much—’

  ‘Except your car,’ Abe butted in.

  ‘Except my car, but I am passionate about my patients, and the people I—’ she almost said love, she almost said it but she caught herself in time— ‘care about. I don’t like seeing my people hurting.’

  ‘But you can’t do everything for everyone all the time. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, keeping it clipped and short. ‘Tomorrow you’re buying brunch. I might even make it lunch not brunch. I’m booking the frickin’ Ritz.’

  ‘Hope the Ritz is close to Dr Palmer’s office.’

  She kicked his shin.

  ‘Very mature, Doc. Very mature.’

  ‘I liked it better when you weren’t talking to me, Loser.’

  * * *

  Later Abe showed her his mother’s letter and sat quietly while she read it, his arm stretched on the couch behind her, occasionally stroking the back of her neck.

  When she lowered the page to her lap, her eyes were wet. Her heart felt strangely free, yet heavy at the same time, like those whales they’d seen last weekend in Albany, rolling and playing in the waves. Little Beach. The exact same beach where he’d had his twelfth birthday party. Had his father been there, watching the blonde-haired boy playing with his mates in the waves that day?

  How sad.

  ‘I never knew your mum was a city girl,’ she said, checking that section of the letter again.

  ‘She was born and raised in Perth. She came to Chalk Hill as a teacher at the school. That’s when she met dad.’

  Abe must have inherited his love for cosmopolitan life from his mother.

  ‘Am I an arsehole because I wish it was Dad who had the tumour? Not Mum?’ Abe said.

  Funny how life turned out sometimes. It wasn’t so long ago that they’d sat on Ella’s couch and Taylor had played the game while Abe rubbed her feet.

  Which of these would you give up if you had to choose? Your mum? Your dad? Or your brothers?

  He’d said his dad.

  Now his mum had a lesion on her brain.

  ‘I mean, it makes sense now. Kind of,’ Abe said, reaching for the letter, folding it carefully before lifting his hips and sliding the page in the back pocket of his jeans.

  ‘Don’t forget it’s there and wash the jeans, will you?’ Taylor said. ‘You’ve got a track record with washing important pieces of paper.’

  A smile tugged the corner of his lips as he took the letter out again, leaned forward to get his wallet off Taylor’s coffee table and tucked the page inside his wallet instead.

  ‘I never felt like a Honeychurch. Now I know why. Some Belgian chef got in Mum’s pants twenty-six years ago and wham-bam-thankyou-Mum, here I sit. Don’t ask me to shear a sheep, but I know how to cook one.’

  Taylor put her hand on his leg, resting her fingers on warm blue denim. ‘I’m sorry about your mum. I know you two were close. I’m here, okay? If you want to talk about her. About the letter. About anything. You’re not an arsehole for wishing someone you love wasn’t ill. Illness doesn’t pick or choose. If it did, every arsehole in the world who ever dealt crack to a kid, they’d die of some chronic disease.’

  ‘Dad doesn’t want me to talk with Mum about it until they get home, but she wanted me to find the letter. She wanted me to know about this. But if she couldn’t ever talk to me about it before, why would she want to talk about it now?’

  ‘She wrote it when you were twelve,’ Taylor mused aloud. ‘Do you ever remember your mum being ill when you were a boy? She said she was tired. She said something about going for a swim if she felt up to it. I wonder if she hadn’t been well, and that’s why she wrote the letter, just in case.’

  ‘In case what?’

  Taylor shifted her weight, dragging her leg higher so she could lean on her knee. ‘Sometimes when someone wants to unburden themselves of a secret and they don’t know how to say it aloud, they write it down. Writing can be cathartic in itself for the writer, even if the person it’s intended for never reads it. If someone is afraid they might not ever be around to tell the person themselves, or if they can’t quite work up the courage to tell them themselves, they’ll write it down.’

  Abe’s brow creased. After a beat he said, ‘I remember Dad taking us to Perth to see her in hospital when I was younger. She had a blood clot, I think it was. It might have been that thing that can happen when you’ve been on a long-haul flight.’

  ‘Deep vein thrombosis?’

  ‘That’s it. A clot in her leg.’

  ‘Had she been on a flight? A holiday somewhere?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘It’s some secret she’s held on to all these years,’ Taylor said. Unbidden, a kernel of a thought crept into her mind. Why would Abe’s mum want him to discover this letter now? Why couldn’t it wait another few weeks, till they got home? Why now? How sick was Mrs Honeychurch?

  Taylor suspected she knew the answer, and it wasn’t one she liked. Very sick. Possibly sicker than she wanted her children to know.

  She didn’t want to go there with Abe, not yet, not with nothing more than her own theories, so she poked him in the ribs and said, ‘I’ve got to say your family completely flips the stats when it comes to this sort of stuff. Ella and Sam, Sam’s father. Jake and Charlotte. Now you …’

  ‘Well, Ella isn’t Honeychurch, so don’t get too excited. You can’t throw her on our stat sheet, and Brix is a choir boy compared to me. Never in trouble at school. Never in trouble with Dad. Model citizen. All this time I thought Dad just didn’t like me as much as he liked Jake and Brix. I was always the black sheep. Every time he must have looked at me, he’d have thought of Mum with her Belgian chef.’

  ‘That’s not your fault, Abe,’ Taylor said.

  ‘Try telling that to Dad.’

  CHAPTER

  27

  In the morning they walked along the lane at the back of Taylor’s place to the Swan River, and then by the river to her favourite café, holding hands, Bruno on his leash trotting importantly between them, cyclists and joggers flying by. City people doing city things.

  Their mood was easy, like the morning.

  They settled in an outside seat where menus were handed to them by a waiter who greeted Taylor by name. The waiter could teach Abe a thing or two about customer service. He could have written the book.

  She had her sunglasses on. Big ones that covered eyebrow to cheekbone. Dark enough so he couldn’t see in.

  It wasn’t early. Taylor wasn’t the type to be ready with a ten minute window—she had a skincare routine that quite fascinated him to watch—but Abe didn’t mind waiting for her, watching her rub lotions and potions into her skin.

  He didn’t mind about anything much when he was with Taylor. She relaxed him. She drew him out like an old elastic band that had lost all its spring and wasn’t about to snap back at you. With Taylor there were no nasty surprises, only good surprises, like being a demon with a pool cue in her hand.

  He ordered the café’s all-day big breakfast. Taylor ordered her usual. She said it like that to the waiter: ‘I’ll have my usual.’

  The waiter brought their coffees. Double shot
flat white for him, soy latte for her. They both needed the caffeine hit. It had been a long night.

  His appointment with Dr Palmer chewed at the edges of his mind, but he wasn’t worried. If anything, he looked forward to it. Hopefully, she could help him set a few things straight.

  ‘You didn’t bake me anything last night,’ Taylor said, giving him a hit of her eyes over the top of her sunglasses. ‘Don’t you love me anymore?’

  ‘Sure I love you, Doc.’ He said it light, because she’d said it light, so that was right. But he’d seriously been starting to consider it. He’d seriously damn well dared to imagine that maybe this was it. She was the one.

  He liked her a lot.

  ‘Here you are, sir.’ The waiter put a huge all-day breakfast in front of him. ‘And the croissant, Taylor.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She dimpled at him.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ Abe said.

  The waiter moved away.

  ‘You sure never smiled like that at me when I brought you your focaccia,’ he said to Taylor, watching her chew. She had the sexiest lips he’d ever seen. Fat on the bottom, plump on the top. Her lips felt like silk pillows.

  Her boot nudged his shoe beneath the table. ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Nah. I bet he’s never been on the end of the Taylor Woods’s theory of de-sensitisation.’

  ‘I don’t pull that theory out for every Tom, Dick and Harry.’

  ‘Keep it for the Abes, baby. We’ll be fine.’

  She dimpled at him, and copping that smile was like taking something soft and heavy to the chest. A big explosion in his sternum; a rose petal bomb.

  Yep, he had it bad.

  ‘I forgot how much I miss all-day breakfasts,’ he said, cutting a slice of bacon on toast, rubbing it through a mushroom, brushing it through a caramelised onion relish—

  ‘You trying to get every single thing on your fork in one go?’ Taylor asked him.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Can I try some eggs?’ Her fork snaked towards his plate before he could answer.

  He tackled her fork with his own before she could get there, stabbing down, wiser now.

  ‘Man. You’re protective,’ she grumbled.