by Ford, Holly
Following Jim into the lounge, Lennie watched him settle back into his chair. He was still a tall man, her grandfather, still strong and lean, more than capable of the large-animal work that filled up most of his days. Jim O’Donnell had been responsible for the wellbeing of pretty much everything that grazed the Kimpton Valley for going on fifty years, and Lennie had answered the clinic’s phone often enough today to know that clients didn’t just call to speak to a vet. They called for Jim. The farmers trusted him. She could understand—unlike her grandmother, seemingly—why he wasn’t prepared to hand his business over to just anybody.
‘So,’ he said, with that uncanny knack he’d always had for guessing the train of her thoughts. ‘You’ve seen us in action now. What would you change?’
Apart from putting in a new operating theatre and a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment? Not much. Lennie smiled. ‘You’re doing okay.’
Oh god, she wasn’t looking forward to the first time she had to get out her rusty scalpel skills in what passed for Central Vets’ operating room, though. Nothing heals like cold steel, as her old surgical professor used to say. But surgery had never been Lennie’s favourite part of the job—that was one of the reasons she’d opted to specialise in internal medicine in the first place. It was the problem-solving specialisation, drugs, therapies, rather than rib-spreaders and hacksaws. Less work for the fingers, more work for the brain.
And ever since she’d started her internship in Atlanta, she’d had red-hot teams of surgical specialists waiting to back her up, a choice of orthopaedic or soft tissue surgeons, anaesthetists and radiologists to support them. Two months ago, before her grandfather’s call, Lennie would happily have told anyone who cared to ask that her days of opening up patients were over.
Jim nodded. ‘What would a small animal practice do that we’re not?’
‘Well, the waiting room could use an overhaul,’ Lennie admitted tactfully. ‘You know, make it look more welcoming. Put in a sofa or two, some comfortable chairs.’
‘The farm dogs lift a leg on whatever’s there,’ Jim said. ‘It has to be something we can wipe down.’
‘A coffee machine would be nice,’ Lennie continued. ‘Maybe some more interesting retail. Better treats. There are great organic bakeries out there for dogs these days. And a bit of bling on the walls wouldn’t hurt. Designer collars, bandanas, that sort of thing.’
‘Designer collars,’ her grandfather repeated. ‘Anything else?’
‘You could finally do something with the paddock behind the clinic.’
‘I am doing something with it. That’s the horse paddock.’
‘Grandpa,’ Lennie said, ‘when was the last time you admitted a horse?’
‘That paddock will come in handy one day.’ Jim sipped his Scotch. ‘You mark my words. That’s the thing about land. You never know when you’ll need it.’
‘You just can’t stand the thought of selling anything,’ Lennie teased him. Which might just be all his current dilemma boiled down to, she suspected.
‘It’s easy enough to let things go,’ he said, reading her thoughts again. ‘It’s bloody hard work to get them back again.’
‘I wasn’t saying you should subdivide.’ Jeanette the real estate agent had been suggesting that for years. ‘Just that you could use that space more profitably. Maybe put in a cattery or something.’
‘A cattery?’
‘It’s a good add-on for a clinic. People like to know their cats are in safe hands when they go away.’
Jim shook his head. ‘We don’t do that around here.’
‘You don’t go away?’
‘When people go on holiday, they get the neighbours to feed the cat.’ Her grandfather gave her another stern look. ‘It’s called a community.’
Lennie glanced over her shoulder at Peg. ‘Speaking of which,’ she said, careful to keep her voice casual, ‘is it still the same family out at Broken Creek Station these days?’ She cast her mind back fifteen or more years to a rangy figure in a checked shirt and a helmet whisking her grandfather away. ‘That man with the helicopter. What was his name?’
The flare of alarm in Jim’s eyes made her frown. Was there something wrong with her question?
‘Bob,’ Jim said, after a couple of beats. ‘Bob Whittaker. Bob and Kate.’
Relaxing, Lennie hid a smile. Her grandfather had always prided himself on an iron-clad memory. It drove him crazy when he forgot things.
‘I remember him coming to pick you up one day,’ Lennie said. ‘I don’t think I ever met her.’
‘No, you wouldn’t have. Kate died a long time ago. Before you came to live here.’
‘Is Bob still on the station?’
Taking another mouthful of Scotch, Jim shook his head. ‘No, Bob’s gone. The place got into a bit of strife for a while, changed hands a couple of times. It’s back with Kate’s son now. Got a pretty smart farm manager, too. The two of them are doing good things. Phasing out the crossbreeds, getting back to the pure merino Kate used to run. They’re making the most of the meat market as well. Building up their beef herd.’
Lennie sighed to herself. This wasn’t exactly the rundown on Broken Creek she’d been angling for.
‘The last pen they sent through the saleyards were some of the best-looking Herefords I’ve seen for a while,’ her grandfather continued blithely. ‘If those were their culls, I’m looking forward to seeing what they kept.’
‘I guess they must employ a few people,’ Lennie put in.
‘Nobody permanent,’ Jim said. ‘Well, apart from Stan, I suppose, but he’s pretty much retired anyway. These days they just hire in labour when they need it.’
Lennie nodded, her guess confirmed. So Mitch Stuart was just passing through. Picking up work where he could find it. On his way back to…where? To what? To somebody else, she reminded herself. And really, what more did she need to know?
This…this stupid feeling that there was supposed to be something between them—well, she’d be a whole lot better off using her energy to put out that particular flame, not fanning it higher. Wrenching her attention back where it belonged, Lennie watched her grandfather stare into his glass.
‘So,’ she began, trying to sound nonchalant, ‘have you spoken to Grandma lately?’
Jim’s mouth hardened. ‘No.’
‘Don’t you think,’ Lennie persisted, ignoring the warning, ‘that—’
‘There’s nothing to say.’ He took a mouthful of whisky. ‘She wanted to leave and she did. End of story.’
‘Just like that?’ Lennie studied his profile. ‘Grandpa, come on. It can’t be that simple. I mean, I understand her walking out of here must have hurt, I get that you’re angry, but don’t you—’
‘Your grandmother has decided to start a new life,’ Jim said firmly. ‘I wish her well in it. That’s all. I have absolutely nothing else to say about it. To her—’ he gave Lennie a long look ‘—or to anybody else. Alright?’ He rose as the beep of the oven timer drifted out of the kitchen, saved by the bell. ‘I’m going to check on the bolognese. When I come back I want to hear about a different subject.’
As he took himself off, Pesh arrived at Lennie’s feet. With a consoling look, she stretched up her muzzle to Lennie’s knee. Lennie sighed. Extracting the phone chiming in her pocket, she checked the message on the screen. It was Del.
How’s life in Hickston?
Idyllic, Lennie messaged her back. I milked a goat today.
She glanced up briefly at the stubborn old billy stirring his sauce on the stove beyond the open double doors.
Hey you’ll never guess who I—she began, as the dots of Del’s impending reply danced on her screen. Lennie stopped. Forget it. Just forget about that. She deleted her random encounter with Mitch Stuart letter by letter.
Have you found yourself a log cabin to rent yet? Del’s reply popped up.
Might have to put up a yurt, Lennie sent back. Jeanette had confirmed what Google had already suggest
ed. There was nothing to rent within half an hour of Kimpton right now.
Lennie looked around the big, familiar room—the wood-burner glowing in the schist hearth, the shelves of the built-in bookcases decorated with ornaments she and Julia had brought back from all over the world—examining the strange feeling of being back in her childhood home at the end of a grown-up working day. There was a lot to be said for it, that was for sure. Of all the things she was going to miss about Sydney, her rental pad wasn’t one of them.
She’d always just assumed, growing up, that she’d have a house like this of her own one day. A house with room to swing a Maremma sheepdog and a garden that went all the way round and windows on all four sides. A house where you could play a movie as loud as you liked without somebody banging on your wall.
Had she even set foot in that sort of house in the cities she’d lived in since she left Kimpton? The older she got, the more unrealistic her ever owning one seemed. Julia, in her fifties, didn’t have a hope. Even the partners at the hospital couldn’t afford one, not without a two-hour commute. Going round to her friends’ houses meant climbing over the floor sander to sit on an Ikea box and talk about potential.
But this place…this place was so finished. So comfortable. Lennie dug a toe into the plush pile of the carpet, once a deep forest green, now faded to sage. A complete home. A home that took a lifetime to make, the ‘proper house’ that Julia was still waiting for, that Lennie herself would still be waiting for twenty years from now.
How on earth could Lois bear to leave it?
Abruptly, she took back her earlier thought. This house wasn’t complete, not without her grandmother in it. As far as Lennie could make out, Lois had taken nothing with her but a suitcase. But other things were missing. The weight of the baking tins on the pantry shelves, the smell of lavender water in the laundry. For the first time Lennie could recall, the little cut-crystal vase on the kitchen windowsill was empty of flowers.
She bit her lip as the sense of absence around her continued to grow. Without Lois, this place was a lot like that ostrich egg over there on the shelf. Nice to look at, but not itself anymore.
And her grandfather? Was he the same? She had a pretty good idea that if she could just get a tap at that brittle I-don’t-care shell of his it was going to sound equally hollow.
Lennie massaged the point between Pesh’s closed eyes. ‘Fools rush in, eh?’ she said softly. ‘We’ve only been here forty-eight hours.’ Not for the first time, she wondered if the real reason Jim needed her here was to fill the void her grandmother had left. Because he was lonely…
She deepened the pressure, feeling Pesh’s forehead loosen under her hand. ‘Easy does it,’ she said.
She was missing something, Lennie knew she was. But she had a whole six months ahead of her to work out what it was.
Five
Three days later, Lennie found herself enjoying the unaccustomed luxury of an afternoon off in lieu of the half-day shift she was down to work on Saturday. Leaving a much-improved Peg stretched out in the conservatory, she took herself outside. The day had been slow to warm, but now a treacly sun was streaming into the garden, dappling the lawn below the trees, shafts of low light spreading into the bush across the paddock and catching the feathery heads of the tussocks along the fence line. Lennie could remember when those tussocks had been little more than fly whisks, her grandmother heeling them one by one into the muddy ground.
‘I’ve moved on,’ Lois had insisted on the phone just an hour ago. ‘I wouldn’t come back now if he begged me to.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘He isn’t, is he?’
‘Isn’t what?’
‘Begging me to.’ There’d been a noise that might have been Lois blowing her nose. ‘No. I mean, it’s Jim we’re talking about here. He probably didn’t even notice I’d gone till he ran out of socks.’
‘Grandma, you don’t really think that. I know you don’t.’
They can’t keep this up, Julia kept saying. They have to crack soon. One of them, anyway. But much as Lennie would have liked to believe her mother, after nearly a week with her grandfather she was feeling less sure.
Jim never mentioned her grandmother. Not at all. He never even so much as said her name. And Lennie had started to avoid doing so herself, as if Lois was one more four-letter word she had to remember not to use in her grandfather’s hearing. It was crazy. Jim had never been a cold man. But it was like his life with Lois was a book he’d closed and put away.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lois had told her. ‘I know this is upsetting for you and Julia.’
‘Grandma, it’s not about us.’
‘I’ve already wasted most of my life on that man. I’m not going to waste whatever I’ve got left.’
‘Are you honestly saying you feel like your life’s been a waste?’
‘Not all of it,’ Lois had admitted grudgingly. ‘It was different when you girls were at home, of course it was. But…well, I’ve spent a lot of years waiting for things to be different. I’ve finally realised they never will be unless I do something to make them that way.’
Perched on the edge of a sun lounger, Lennie took a deep breath of clean air. She had the house—the whole valley, it seemed—to herself. The silence was massive, broken only by an occasional bleat from the paddock, the distant clank of a trailer out on the road.
‘What about you, Len?’ her grandmother had wanted to know. ‘Are you missing Sydney?’
Yes, and…no. She missed cherry brioche. Avocado toast. Ubereats. But so far, she was missing work at the Royal less than she’d expected. It was nice to see healthy, happy patients, animals who just needed a pat and a worm pill, clients who weren’t at their wits’ end. Nice to deal with some conditions she could actually cure.
‘Have you been meeting new people?’ Lois had asked.
‘Yeah.’ Lennie had tried to banish Mitch Stuart’s face from her mind. ‘Everybody at work’s really nice.’
And the truth was, she liked coming home to Jim, to their evening whisky in front of the fire, talking through the day, going over each other’s cases. That gruff camaraderie they’d always shared. Lennie hadn’t realised how much she’d missed it. If it wasn’t for the fact she kept expecting her grandmother to walk through the door…
‘What about Benji Cooper?’ Lois had asked, a smile in her voice. ‘Have you seen much of him?’
‘No,’ Lennie had told her, smiling too. ‘Benji hasn’t been in.’
‘It would be so funny, wouldn’t it, if the two of you ended up together after all this time?’
‘I’m not really planning on “ending up” with anybody in Kimpton, Grandma.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ A pause. ‘You’d have to be staying for that.’
Pesh padded after her, following the direction of Lennie’s gaze. Back in the day, Jim had run his own stock on the land. But a couple of years ago he’d decided, finally, that one job was enough for a man his age. Now the lambs fattening on the other side of the wire belonged to somebody else, and all he had left was old Alice munching away there under the trees.
She could practically hear the rip of the grass, the grind of what was left of Alice’s worn-down teeth as she chewed.
Lennie found her mind ambling with the lambs, taking her a couple of kilometres back towards Kimpton and the For Sale sign she’d spotted yesterday outside the old Rogers place, the elegant old weatherboard villa she’d coveted through car windows as a child. A view of the mountains, a lawn big enough for Pesh…Even fixed up, made just how she wanted it, the mortgage on a place like that would cost her no more a month than she spent on dog day care in Sydney.
Straying into a Country Living fabric-swatch fantasy, Lennie shook her head at herself. Really? The life she’d dreamed about as a twelve-year-old? Was that what she wanted now?
‘Hey there.’
Jesus Christ. As Lennie whirled around, Pesh leapt in front of her, tail up, barking that big stranger-danger bark that had always bought them quality time alon
e in the dog park.
Across the lawn, Mitch Stuart froze in his tracks. People usually did.
‘It’s okay,’ Lennie called, hoping she was the only one who could hear the slight shake in her voice. Recognising who it was hadn’t lowered her pulse rate nearly as much as she’d like. What the hell was he doing here? ‘She won’t hurt you.’
Mitch remained motionless, staring at Pesh as if he’d seen a ghost. Another far from uncommon reaction, but still, Lennie was a little surprised. He hadn’t seemed like somebody who’d be afraid of a dog. Even one Pesh’s size.
As Lennie walked to meet him, Pesh trotted ahead, approaching Mitch with her usual suspicion. Sniffing from the greatest possible distance, she circled his jeans. Gradually, her tail lowered. Mitch reached out a steady hand to her neck. To Lennie’s astonishment, Pesh allowed him to rub her ear.
‘She likes you.’ Lennie frowned. Pesh didn’t usually like men. Especially not big ones.
With no more than the length of the dog between her and Mitch, Lennie felt her colour rise. If she wasn’t mistaken, he was wearing the same shirt he’d had on in the Glenmore Hotel. She could remember the feel of the fabric, the shoulders below it flexing under her hands as he pulled her close. He’d obviously had more luck getting the bloodstains out of it than she had with the one that was—for reasons Lennie didn’t want to examine too closely—still occupying the bottom of her suitcase.
‘I knew a dog a lot like this once.’ Mitch’s voice was thoughtful, his fingers moving absently in Pesh’s long fur.
‘Yeah?’ You didn’t see a lot of Maremmas this side of the world. ‘Where was that?’
‘A place called Helmand.’