“Time to go,” Dot said.
“Pull me up,” Maggie asked Willow, holding up her hands. Willow took her hands and pretended to huff and puff with the strain of helping her mother to her feet. Once up, Maggie picked up the basket and Dot folded the blanket, shaking a bit of loose grass off first.
“Do we have to go already?” pouted Willow, holding the leftover fish n chips wrapped in what was now soggy and cold newspaper.
“Yes we do,” Maggie told her firmly, “you have school tomorrow miss, remember?”
“School ruins everything.”
“Yeah yeah, we’ve heard it all before,” Dot said, ushering her granddaughter along with a gentle hand on the back. “Coming?” she asked Maggie, who had stopped to linger. She was watching Jack and Amy, who were also packing up to leave. Jack folded the chairs effortlessly in one hand, and with the other placed in the small of Amy’s back he steered her in the direction of his truck.
“Mm? I was just making sure we hadn’t left anything,” Maggie replied. She was amazed that her voice came out so level, when inside her emotions were whirling like a mini tornado, uprooting and damaging everything in their path.
She had been right and Jack was nothing but a fickle bastard after all, she thought angrily. How quickly had he found someone else once he’d decided that she was too much trouble and not worth the effort? Less than a day, that’s all it took. She supposed that she should be grateful she’d found out the truth now before she’d made a fool of herself by letting him know she was actually interested. She wasn’t going to let him see that sight of him with someone else bothered her, so she marched determinedly ahead, leaving Dot and Willow in her wake, and she caught up with Jack and Amy underneath the big Angel Oak tree.
“I can’t believe how many lights there are, there must be hundreds,” Amy was saying.
“Thousands probably,” Jack answered.
“Surely it’s a fire hazard?” Amy frowned, her pretty little forehead crinkling.
“I’m sure they know what they’re doing, “Jack said, and then he leaned his head in closer to Amy’s as if they were co-conspirators. “Although after the fireworks fiasco, maybe I’m giving them too much credit,” he added.
There he goes again, insulting our town, Maggie thought angrily. Amy obviously felt the same way he did from the way she threw back her head and tinkled with laughter. Stupid cow.
Maggie wondered how she could have even thought for a minute he was a nice guy. She should have trusted her initial impression. Blinded by good sex, that’s what she’d been. Ok great, fantastic, toe tingling sex, but still. She stopped just behind them.
“Did you enjoy our little town’s Christmas get together Amy?” she asked loudly, and they both turned to her.
“Oh yes, it was just lovely thank you,” Amy answered, “very charming.”
“Charming? That’s good. The fireworks were grand enough for you?”
“Sure, they were nice.”
“Nice? Well isn’t that just lovely. Of course I’m sure it was nothing compared to the kind of events they put on wherever it is you come from, but we do our best. Where was it you said you come from again?”
“She didn’t,” Jack cut in amused. “Something wrong Maggie?”
“Wrong? No, why?”
“You seem a little upset.”
“Do I have any reason to be upset Jack?”
“I don’t know Maggie, do you?”
Amy looked back and forth between Maggie and Jack. The two of them were staring at each other and the intensity of their gaze was such that she felt if she were to wave a hand between them it would most likely burst into flames. She coughed, choking on the atmosphere and tension that was thick in the air.
“Am I missing something?” she asked, when she was able to breathe again.
Maggie finally broke off from Jack’s gaze. She had to, if she didn’t she feared she would do something to make herself look foolish, like throw herself into his arms.
“No,” she said, turning her head to Amy. “You’re missing nothing. You’re welcome to him.” Then she whirled on a heel and stalked off quickly towards where her mother, father and daughter were waiting under a lamp post, watching her curiously.
“You ok love?” Dot asked as she caught up to them.
“Just fine thank you. Come on, let’s get home.”
As they walked back to the car she was grateful it was dark enough so that the others couldn’t see the tears that welled up in the corner of her eyes and finally, like a burst dam, made their way down her cheeks and nose. She wiped them quickly with one arm and sniffed.
Then she felt a small hand worm its way into hers, the fingers threading through her own. She squeezed her daughters hand and was rewarded with a squeeze back.
Ah bugger Jack; she had everything she needed to make her happy right here.
Chapter sixteen
Maggie barely had time to spare Jack a thought over the next week. She was so busy in her shop with the lead up to Christmas. From the moment she opened the door at nine until the moment she shut it again at six, a steady stream of cars turned into the driveway with people wanting to buy her soaps for loved ones, friends and in some cases, employee Christmas gifts. There were two nights she had to stay up past 2am making more soaps as she had run out of some types.
One afternoon she bribed her mother, with the promise of a cooked dinner and a glass of whiskey, to sit behind the counter and man the shop. Maggie picked Willow up from school an hour early and they spent the afternoon at the lake together. Even though the water still had an edge to it they had a blast swimming and taking turns diving to the bottom to fetch more lake weed.
One night, using Ray as their getaway driver, she let Willow stay up late and they made a night time raid of the town’s only supply of mistletoe. It grew on a tree that was located on the sweeping lawns of the town’s museum/library. It was difficult to harvest and Maggie only bothered at Christmas time. She and Willow dressed head to foot in black, which probably wasn’t totally necessary but which made them feel like Ninjas. They made a game out of it, ducking behind hedges and trees and crawling army style along the grass, until Ray, fed up with being stuck in the car and missing out on the fun, tooted the horn loudly and yelled at them to “get a bloody move on!” Her mistletoe soap was popular at Christmas as it calmed hysteria, tension headaches, nervous attacks and anxiety, all common ailments of the holiday season.
On the Friday Willow finally finished school for the year and they went to Nick’s parent’s house for a BBQ to celebrate. Other kids from school were there with their parents, and a couple of the single dads flirted with Maggie as they always did at parent evenings and galas and such. But even though she had made a promise to herself to be more receptive to that kind of thing and to not say no so easily, she just couldn’t summon any interest in any of them.
Saturday night the four of them, Maggie, Dot, Ray and Willow, spent the night decorating the house. Dot had already put some decorations up earlier in December. Others stayed out all year round, like the sticker of a snowman in the front window that was faded from sun exposure and peeling back at one corner, and the small ornamental light in the corner that had a plastic candy cane inside. When you shook it upside down it glowed red, green and blue and glitter swirled up like a snowstorm and Willow had been utterly transfixed with it when she was a baby. Ray dug the boxes of decorations out from the cupboard under the stairs and they opened them up and spent time untangling fairy lights and tinsel and restringing cotton on the end of sparkly baubles. Ray had bought a tree off a guy on the corner somewhere, and he and Maggie dragged it inside, leaving a trail of pine needles in their wake. They wedged it into a bucket with bricks to help it stand and displayed it proudly in the corner of the lounge. They had to trim the tip of the top off as it was so tall it scraped the roof.
“It’s a beauty,” Dot declared.
“Smell that smell?” Ray breathed deep, “that’s the true smell of Chr
istmas. That and sweet sherry of course,” he added draining the small glass Dot had poured him. Luckily they all preferred a mismatched style of decorating, and so they randomly took turns draping the lengths of silver, gold, red, green and blue tinsel around the branches, and hanging a collection of homemade and shop bought decorations on the tips.
“Oh I remember when you bought this home,” Maggie said, her eyes misting over as she clutched a cardboard Santa that Willow had painted in her last year of Kindergarten.
“Yikes, not very good at painting inside the lines, was I?”
“I don’t care, it’s perfect to me. Oh and look at this one you made when I took you to baby art classes! It has your little hand print in paint on the glass.” She sniffed.
“Are you going to cry over every decoration mum? Cause if so this could take awhile.”
“Cheeky. Only the sentimental ones.”
When they had finished, a few hours and a few more sherry’s later, the house looked like Santa’s grotto. With the main lights off and only the lights on the tree and the candy cane light glowing the room was warm and cosy and magical. Tinsel glittered and the soft sound of old carols played softly on the stereo.
It was a truly wonderful night.
But even though she was busy and technically didn’t have the time to spare Jack a thought, when she did finally tumble into her bed, she would lie awake, staring at the shadows on her ceiling, and she remembered how it had felt to be with him.
Chapter seventeen
Meanwhile, across town, Amy was regretting her decision to leave her job as a beauty therapist for a career change as Receptionist/Office manager/Vet assistant at the Veterinary clinic. Admittedly, when she’d gone for the interview she had taken one look at him and decided then and there that if she was offered the job she would take it, no question. But working for him was like paradise gone wrong. He was moody and sullen at the best of times, and apart from gruffly asking her every now and then whether he’d had any messages he barely spoke to her. Her woman’s intuition told her it had something to do with Maggie, the lady who’d stormed off in a strop the night of the carols.
Jack, meanwhile, lay awake for much the same reasons as Maggie. That damn woman, he fumed, was annoying, frustrating and bewildering with her mood swings and childish behaviour, but by god she intrigued him.
He yearned for her about as much as he was determined to stay away from her.
Chapter eighteen
In hindsight Maggie should have known that bad news would shortly be forthcoming.
Certainly she knew something was up. From the moment she got out of bed and tripped on the corner of the rug, banging her shin on the dresser and watching in dismay as a large yellow bruise surfaced, to the moment she limped out to the kitchen and saw that someone had left bacon frying and small flames were licking at the air from where the hot oil had caught, she knew that something wicked was in the air.
“Dammit,” she swore, flicking the switch at the wall to turn the oven off. She quickly grabbed a tea towel and ran it under the tap, then wringing most of the water out she threw it over the pan. Then she grabbed another tea towel and repeated the process. Once she was sure the flames were contained she wrapped some of the damp towel around the handle and carefully carried the whole thing out the back door, throwing it down onto the grass well away from the house.
She went to unravel the hose and found it all twisted with knots upon knots, even though she knew for a fact that the previous evening after she had watered the vegetable beds she had wound it up tidily and in a neat coil.
Her dad popped his head out the back door.
“Ah,” he said, “Oops.”
“Oops? That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself? You could have burnt the house down,” she fumed.
“Nonsense. No harm done. I would have been back long before that happened.”
“It was only about ten seconds away from happening. Where were you?”
“I had to make an unplanned bathroom stop.”
“Christ dad, next time take the bloody pan off the heat. Seriously, this could have been really bad.” She finally got the hose to behave and turned it on, aiming the water at the pan.
Ray realised how upset she was. “Sorry love,” he said. “I promise it won’t happen again.”
“It better not. I’m not having Willow exposed to any danger. You start pulling crap like this and we’ll either move out or put you in a home, you got it?”
“Got it.” He saluted then disappeared back inside the house. Ten seconds later he re-emerged.
“Er, sweetheart, let’s just keep this between us, aye?” he fidgeted his feet nervously. “No need to tell your mother.”
Dot was famously scared of dying in a house fire. It was the one thing that terrified her, ever since she was a little girl and had been woken one night by screams as her neighbour’s house burnt to the ground. Luckily, the people had all escaped, but the family dog wasn’t so lucky. Dot had loved that little dog and she mourned him greatly. A fox terrier named Dash; he used to meet her at the gate when she got out from school and walk home with her. She considered him one of her best friends. Ever since his grisly and untimely death she had been extremely fire safety conscious. The wiring in the old house was checked every ten years and every room in the house had been fitted with a smoke alarm. Ray knew Dot would most likely kill him, or at the very worst seriously maim, if she found out what he had done.
Maggie gave him her most serious glare. “We’ll see. Depends on whether you pull any more stupid stunts like this.” Then something occurred to her and she frowned. “I wonder why the smoke alarm didn’t go off. We checked them all last daylight savings and the batteries were fine.”
“Ah,” Ray winced, “About that…”
“What have you done?”
“I may have pulled the batteries out last time your mother went bush and the boys came round for poker.”
“Oh for god’s sakes dad, why would you do that?”
“You and Willow were asleep,” he protested, “and some of the guys were smoking cigars. I didn’t want the alarm to go off and wake you.”
Maggie rubbed her temples warily and wondered if it were too late to crawl back under the covers and start this day again in another hour or so.
“Just fix them dad,” she said. “Replace all the batteries and make sure they work and I might not tell mum what you’ve been up to.”
“Righto. Thanks love.” He disappeared back inside the house again. She peeled the tea towels off the pan and realised they were beyond saving. Reluctant to throw them away she decided they’d be just fine as rags for her father in his shed.
“Ahem.”
Her father was once more hovering at the back door.
“What now?”
“Any hopes some of that bacon could be saved?”
“Oh for the love of…” She took a deep breath and counted to ten. “No dad. It’s completely charcoaled.”
“That’s a shame.” He vanished inside again.
Shaking her head she took a deep breath. “Give me strength,” she muttered. She walked over to the fence and draped the towels over it to air dry.
It was then she noticed how still the air was.
Not still like you sometimes get on really hot days when even the breeze can’t be bothered dragging itself out from the shady spot it was dwelling in. It wasn’t that kind of still.
It was more like the ominous still you get just before a really big storm hits, only today there wasn’t a cloud in sight. She licked a finger and held it out just to be sure, but as suspected there wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. It unnerved her, and she had a horrible feeling that she was being watched. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold.
Back inside her father was standing on a chair and slotting the smoke alarm back into place.
“All present and working again,” he said. Then he saw her face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing
,” she said, because nothing was wrong exactly, at least nothing that she could pinpoint, but she just couldn’t shake the ill feeling that had stolen over her.
Opening her shop, she flitted from job to job, but nothing went right. She swept the floor, making sure she got all of the dust out of the corners that had been dragged in over the previous few days. But just as she had it all gathered in one big pile at the front of her shop, the door flew open with a huge gust and all the dust went scuttling back to where it had come from. When she stepped outside though, the air was just as still as it had been earlier, not even a single leaf was rustling in a tree.
Despite being inundated with customers every other day that week, not a single car turned into their driveway that morning. She walked down to the end of the road, thinking maybe the sign had been vandalised or stolen like it had once before but no, it was hanging where it always hung, not a mark on it.
The letterbox.
She frowned at the letterbox. Maybe there was something bad in the letterbox. She closed her eyes and opened it quickly, like she was ripping a band aid off, and slowly opened one eyelid to peer inside. A pile of envelopes greeted her but flicking through them there was nothing to warrant the ill feeling she had.
Willow.
She closed the shop, calling out to her father who was watching Baywatch in the lounge to tell anyone who came that she would be back in an hour, and she drove to Nick’s house. Willow, lying with Nick on the trampoline, was alarmed to see her mother jump out of the car, flushed and worried.
“What’s wrong mum?” she asked, jumping down from the trampoline. Her mother gathered her into a tight hug and exhaled the breath she’d been holding the entire drive there.
“Nothing’s wrong baby. I just wanted to see my girl.”
“I’m almost eleven mum, not stupid. You promised no more secrets remember?”
Her mother smiled. “Right. Sorry. But I’m not lying, nothing is wrong. I just really wanted to see you.”
A Roast on Sunday Page 14