by Jenny Plumb
“Really? Not Catholic then?”
“I guess not!” She actually laughed, for the first time that day she saw the humour in something. “My sisters are, well, straight as a die. My mum and dad are bat shit crazy. I’m sure when they’re alone they’re probably even weirder, very free love and kind of hippieish. I bet when we’re not around they probably don’t even wear clothes.”
His mouth literally dropped open. “You’re not serious?”
“I sure am serious.”
“Wow.”
“Yep, conservative kids versus strange, strange progressive parents.”
“And the grandkids? How do they fit into all this?”
“They love it. It’s a house of no rules and they get to run absolutely wild while they’re there. Best Christmas a kid could ask for.”
“Where does Father Christmas fit in?”
“Santa? Santa is alive and living happily in Hillblend.” He looked confused so she clarified. “My parents love the allusion of Christmas and all that goes with it.”
“Okay then.”
“So where are you spending Christmas?” She waited for an answer, watching his face and then it dawned on her; that’s why he didn’t mind driving her. He wasn’t having Christmas with anyone.
Rowan had a bag, packed and waiting to go, in his work van in case he changed his mind about the trip down the coast he had been invited to. “I’m just gonna play it by ear, so I am. I do have invitations, you know. It’s just not the same, spending time with friends at Christmas. You always wonder do they really want you or do they just feel sorry that you have no one. Christmas to me has always been about family.”
Well, he could go with her, if that’s what he wanted. Maybe he was her answer to her predicament with her mum and dad. “About that… I have a bit of a dilemma that you could maybe help me with. Actually I have a proposal for you.” She didn’t get to say any more because the tow truck arrived.
They had been on the road about half an hour and Candy was struggling to keep her eyes open. It was then that Rowan remembered her earlier statement. “You said something about a dilemma?”
“Oh yeah,” Candy said, sleepily.
“Am I not already helping you with your dilemma by giving you a lift?”
“Yes, of course you are and I appreciate it, but getting home isn’t the only dilemma I’m dealing with.” Candy blinked and yawned and her eyes stayed closed a lot longer than she expected them to.
“Candy? Tell me you didn’t just fall asleep mid sentence.”
“No, of course I didn’t. I was just resting my eyes. I’m not feeling the best.” She really wasn’t. The night before while contemplating the upcoming trip home, she’d drunk more than she usually would. Coupled with the fact she hadn’t eaten, stirred in with a hefty dose of stress and an awkward rescue by her arch nemesis and the result was? She felt like crap.
“You are a little pale.”
“I’ll be fine. I had a couple of drinks last night and I didn’t eat breakfast.”
“Well, that wasn’t smart, now, was it? What if you were still over the limit?”
“I wasn’t, I’d know.”
“I doubt that.” Rowan clicked the indicator and pulled into a rest stop, which, as luck would have it, was also a restaurant.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re stopping to get some food.”
“You’re looking a little better now.” Rowan had watched her devour a toasted sandwich, a plate of chips and a chocolate milkshake.
“I do feel better, thank you. Well, I wasn’t thanking you for buying my food. I meant thank you for stopping in here so that I could get something to eat. I don’t expect you to pay for anything. In fact I’ll pay for yours too, to make up for the fact you’re stuck with me.”
“No, you won’t, my mammy didn’t raise a chancer. I will pay the bill.”
“No way! I pay my way and you’re helping me, so that means I take care of you.” She reached out to pick up wallet that held their itemized account and made to stand.
“Candy, I said no.”
She lifted it anyway. “Ouch,” she yelped. Rowan actually slapped her hand and took the bill from her.
Candy wanted to stand up and tell him to bite his bum and snatch it back but she didn’t. Sitting before her could be the answer to her problem, and she needed to hook her fish before she started an argument that made him dump her at her parents’ house and run. She held her hands up in surrender. “Okay, I’ll let you have this one.” It was a miracle she managed to get out a sentence that made any sense at all. All she could think about was the tingles on the back of her hand. It was nothing really, a friendly tap, but combined with the accent and the bossy attitude, well she was finding it all kind of hot. That was until she looked back into Rowan’s eyes. His smug look made her want to slap him. “You shouldn’t have smacked me though.”
“What? It was a tap, just a tap. Sometimes you need to put a full stop on something, make your point. At the home where I come from, the man pays and the woman lets him.”
“At the home where I come from, it’s pretty much an even-steven’s free for all.”
“How about you tell me about these other dilemmas?”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“I always find the beginning is a good place to start. Pardon the pun.” Rowan grinned and his blue eyes sparkled.
It was the first time she had seen him in such an attractive light. She found herself grinning right back at him. “I was confused about this trip.”
“Oh? What’s confusing about a trip home for Christmas? Your family is alive and kicking and close enough that you can get there for a few days. There’s nothing confusing about that.”
Candy sighed. “Have you ever been somewhere where you feel like everyone is all coupled up and you’re the odd one out?”
“Like the fifth wheel?”
“Exactly.”
“I have, but not with my family. Neither should you. Maybe if you were with a group of pals and they were all married I could understand it, but families are different.”
“They talk about me; say things about me not bringing anyone home and stuff. Last Christmas my mum asked me if I was gay.”
“And you took that as an insult?”
“No, of course I didn’t take it as an insult, but the fact that she asked me means that they’re talking about me, wondering about me. I see it in their eyes. So, I was wondering if you wanted to spend Christmas with my nutty family and me, and pretend to be my boyfriend. That would shut them up once and for all.”
Rowan’s eyes opened into huge round circles, but he didn’t say anything. He looked like he was measuring his words.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m just trying to figure out how to put what I want to say.”
“Just say it, say something at least. You’re making me feel weird.”
“All right then, I will say what I’m thinking. Are you feckin crazy, woman?”
“Tell me what you’re really thinking! I didn’t think spending a couple of days with me would be so repulsive to you. You needn’t bother yourself with me any longer. I’ll just hitch a ride back home to Sydney and ring my parents and tell them that my car broke down and there’s no way I can make it.”
Rowan grabbed her wrist. “Just sit yourself on down there. No one is going to be hitching a ride anywhere, you didn’t even let me finish what I was going to say.”
Candy summoned all the maturity she could muster and folded her arms, sticking her chin out to show her displeasure. “I don’t need a dumb ass man to tell me what I can and can’t do.”
“On this occasion it appears that you do. Number one? Even though you are a pain in the ass, I’m not just going to see you ride off into the sunset with someone that could very well be a mad throat-cutting axe murderer and number two, living like we’re boyfriend and girlfriend would be just plain weird. We hardly know each other.”
“Whatever.” Candy found it hard to cover her disappointment. They would only be there for a few days and then they could come home and go back about their lives. What was weird about that? Okay, it was a little weird, but this was her family they were talking about.
“Candy, there’s no point getting the hump. You’re acting like a two year old who just heard her daddy say no.”
“You’re not my daddy.”
“Luckily for you I’m not.”
Outwardly, she ignored that remark, but she would be lying if she said it didn’t have an effect on her. Luckily, she was able to hide that reaction. “What do we do then?” She looked at her empty plate, too embarrassed to look him in the eyes.
“I happen to have an overnight bag in my van, I could take you to your parents’ house and stay a couple of days as your friend, from work. Only if though, you phone your mam and ask her if it’s okay.”
“She won’t care.” Really, she won’t mind, she’ll be over the moon.
“Good, then there’s no reason not to do the polite thing and phone.”
“Fine, I have to go to the bathroom, I’ll call her from in there.”
Chapter 3
“So you rang your mam?” He looked at her with eyes narrowed.
He doubted her and was making sure that she had indeed given her mum a heads up about her bringing a friend, that was obvious. “Yes, I rang.”
“You actually spoke to her and she gave you her answer already? You didn’t just send her a message that she might read, sometime after we get there and it’s too late for her to say no?”
“Rowan, I said I did, why don’t you believe me? I actually spoke to her and she was excited.” She was excited, over the moon in fact, as she’d predicted. If her mother came to her own conclusions about how close the friend was that she was bringing, she couldn’t be blamed. People were able to come to their own conclusions.
“I guess then I’m coming to Christmas. You better tell me a bit about your family then.”
“Well, there’re my parents and my four sisters. I’m the youngest. Mum and Dad are lovely, if a little strange these days.”
“Strange?”
“Yeah, it’s hard to explain. We didn’t grow up here. We grew up in the suburbs. Dad took an early retirement and they moved here. That’s when the transformation from normal parents to the current hippie-like parents began.”
“Really?” He chuckled. “At least they’re not dull.”
“Hmm, I suppose.”
“Okay, so if they’re all live and let live kind of hippies, why do you think it matters to them that you don’t have a partner?”
“I don’t know. I think it might be a bit of a guilt thing, because they moved from Sydney. Maybe they think if I had someone they wouldn’t have to feel guilty for selling the family home and taking off.”
“How old were you when they moved?”
“I was twenty. Believe me, I didn’t mind at all. I could have come to the new house and commuted, but I wanted to stay in the city. They paid the bond and the first six months’ rent on my apartment.”
“Wow, I call that spoilt.”
Candy shrugged. “I didn’t ask them to do it, but I do appreciate how nice it was.”
“What about your sisters?”
“Okay, well there’s the eldest, Rachel. She’s thirty-one, I guess you’d call her conservative or bossy might be a better description. We love her to death but she can also be a pain in the proverbial. She’s married to Charlie and they have two girls, six and eight, Crystal and Topaz, I know, I know. My favourite sister and I, Andy, call them the gemstones. The gemstones can do everything from dancing to playing the violin and all that’s in between. They are always wearing brand names. That irritates my other sisters.”
Rowan grinned. “That’s funny, mean but funny, the gemstones thing. Rachel is the eldest; she has people that look up to her. That’s why it matters to her what people think.”
“You’re not the eldest in your family.” Of course he had already told her he wasn’t, but he should have been. He could give Rachel a run for her money in the bossy stakes.
“I’m not, but there’s enough under me that I can relate to your sister having to be bossy. Who’s next?”
“Jamie; she’s twenty-nine and married to Nathan. They have two kids, a boy and a girl, Jackson and Lydia. Next is Becca. Becca is married to Thomas and they have three little boys: Tommy, John and Hunter; two, four and six. Becca is under the thumb, she does whatever her husband says. The last one is Andrea, Andy. She is my closest sister. She married Will, who is best friends with Thomas, Becca’s husband. So yeah, there is that, the worry that she’ll end up being just like Becca. They don’t have any kids yet.”
“So you’re jealous then,” Rowan said, as more of a statement than a question.
“I am not jealous. I just miss my mate, that’s all. We used to do really cool stuff together, now she has Will.”
“What kind of cool things did you do together?”
“I don’t know, sister stuff. We used to sneak out at night and get drunk in the shed after Mum and Dad were asleep. Once we even… never mind.” Her memories had run away from her and she didn’t want to reveal too much. These weren’t just her secrets. She wasn’t going home to start a war.
“Come on!” Rowan said grinning. “You have to tell me now, it’s the law!”
“What law?” Candy found herself smiling.
“The law that says you don’t leave someone hangin’ in the middle of a story.”
“You have to promise not to say anything. It was a sore point for a long while.”
“I can keep a secret. I have to say I’m intrigued.”
“I guess I can trust you. I just want you to remember we were only like fifteen and sixteen years old at the time. We made some dumb choices.”
“Just get on with the tale, will ya?”
“Okay, okay! So we were in the shed drinking and we got hungry,” she said, trying not to smile. Her adult self knew there was nothing to be proud of in this story, but the little piece of child that was left in her soul could still see the funny side. “We had a lot of crap stored in the shed: a fridge, a big old freezer and a lot of camping stuff.”
“Go on, go on.”
“So amongst the camping things was this little camp stove thing.”
“Oh hell no. Hunger, drunkenness and fire. This story isn’t going to end well, is it?”
Candy giggled. “Where was I? That’s right, Andy and I had gotten into my mum’s passion pop stash in the shed, when we got the bright idea of cooking up some sausage rolls on the camp stove. Now, there are several things wrong with doing this idea.”
“One you were drunk.”
“Exactly, and the food was frozen. Did you know that pastry doesn’t fry too well in a dry pan?”
“Yes, I did that.” He winced. “So what happened?”
“To cut a long story short. We put some oil in the pan because we thought that would make them cook and thaw at the same time.”
“Did it?”
“Um, no it didn’t. We knocked over the frypan and the oil caught fire. Then the curtains caught and then the old bookcase.”
“Shite!”
“Yep, we panicked and ran.”
“What happened? Did the place burn down?”
“The shed did, almost. There was only really a shell left. They had to knock it down.” It hit Candy, telling the story as an adult, just how bad it had been. “No one was hurt though.”
“I bet your daddy thrashed the skin off both your asses.”
“Of course not. My dad never hit us. He wasn’t happy that he lost his shed but he didn’t hit us.”
“Hmm. That could be why his daughters were silly enough to burn down his feckin shed in the first place.” He wasn’t laughing. “It was the man’s shed, Candy, and I assume it was close to the house. What if the house had caught fire?”
“The house didn’t catch fire and it
was an accident. Why would my dad whack us for an accident? You don’t believe in corporal punishment do you?”
“I do, as a last resort. I mean, if you hadn’t been allowed to run wild, the fire may not have happened. At the point of you being so careless, yes you should have been spanked. You and your sister could have been killed.”
Candy rolled her eyes. “I was almost sixteen, already too old to be smacked like a child.”
“Is that what you think?” Rowan asked with a smile.
“That isn’t what you think?” Really? Was he actually saying that it was okay to spank a young woman like a child?
“No, I don’t think sixteen is too old to be spanked. As a matter of fact, I’d be less likely to reason with a woman that was old enough to have sense to reason with herself, than I would a child. You have to teach a child. I assume you already had been taught, or at least you should have been. You just wanted to mess about anyway. I would have tanned both your backsides so shiny that you could have seen your faces in them.”
“I say that’s a barbaric way of thinking!”
“Oh, well then; I say, if you don’t want to be treated like a child then don’t act like one.”
“Your arrogance never ceases to amaze me.” Candy shifted in her seat, she needed to try and stop the inappropriate feelings that were tingling down there. She was also moving closer to the window to show him her displeasure.
Rowan sniggered. “Look at the puss on you. Why don’t you take a little nap? Seems you didn’t get enough sleep last night, little girl.”
“I’m not tired, well I am, but I’m not sulking because I’m tired. I’m not sulking or pouting or whatever you want to call it, at all.”
“Aren’t you then? Okay, if you say so.”
“I do say so. You just irritate the daylights out of me, that’s all.”
Rowan threw his head back and laughed. “You’re kind of cute in an irritating way, you know.”
She didn’t answer but leant her head against the window and closed her eyes, finally allowing herself to drift off for a quick nap. Their conversation must have still been on her mind because as soon as she closed her eyes she drifted into a dream…