Where There's a Will

by Virginia Hale

  Beth’s eyes widened.

  Dylan turned, tripping up the stairs in her haste to get inside. She could feel Beth’s eyes on her as she unlocked the door, and as she closed it behind her, she hoped to god that Beth wouldn’t try to follow.

  And Beth didn’t. Her headlights illuminated the kitchen as her car turned a circle and headed out. Then, there was darkness, floodlit shadows dancing across the fridge, on the wall above the stove. In the hallway, the grandfather clock struck the half-hour.

  Dylan flicked on the kitchen light, pressed her back against the door and exhaled shakily. It was done. Over. Months of friendship, gone in a blink. It was life’s special brand of unkindness made just for her—an offer of love and permanency, then snatched away so quickly she almost had to wonder if it had existed in the first place.

  Her eyes caught on the laptop on the table, and her groan echoed through the house. At some point, Beth would have to return.

  Beside Beth’s laptop was Elma’s old notebook, splayed open to a middle page. Elma’s handwriting was so lovely, her practised cursive that of somebody who had grown up knowing only ink pots and dip pens.

  With spite spiralling, Dylan removed Beth’s bookmark. Her eyes stinging with tears, she peeled the dozens of perfectly placed sticky tabs from the notebook and stuck the coloured strips of plastic to the screen of Beth’s laptop. If Beth didn’t want Elma’s homestead, if she didn’t want to play the part Elma had so kindly offered, then she didn’t get to keep any of it.

  Dylan slammed down the lid of the laptop and swiped up the notebook. All was fair in love and Clause Fourteen.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Six months later

  I have never done anything like this in my life, Dylan thought as she waited for her nine-dollar Tropical Crush. Over the low wall of the juice kiosk, pineapple churned in the blender, the loud rumble echoing throughout the tiled shopping centre. Sunlight beamed through the glass ceiling and settled upon her bare shoulders. Nine dollars. For juice. The regret was all encompassing. Should have just gone to Woolies and bought an orange juice. Same thing, only a fifth of the price…

  She’d just lodged her claim in the Medicare office. Although January’s rebate had been somewhat kind in what the government chose to give back, February’s was a colossal disappointment. Elma’s money really had come in at the right time. She had no idea how her parents would have found the funds to afford her father’s recovery on their own. Heart attacks, as it turned out, cost a hell of a lot, even with subsidised health care.

  So the rebate wasn’t what she’d hoped—Dylan wouldn’t be telling her parents that. She didn’t plan on telling them she’d taken care of the final payment anytime soon, either. The due date wasn’t until the eighth of March—she had a good five weeks until they’d try to pay it and get a surprise. Hopefully when that happened, she’d be on the other side of town and somebody else would have to bear the brunt of her father’s proud outburst. In January, when her parents had found out that she’d taken it upon herself to pay the first bill, her father had been cranky for a good couple of days.

  The girl behind the kiosk counter looked apologetically to Dylan as she delivered the customer beside Dylan his order. Her cheeks were flushed pink—she was understandably flustered by working the lunchtime rush singlehandedly. She barely looked nineteen. Dylan was almost compelled to jump the counter and give her a hand. “I’m so sorry, you’ve been waiting, like, seven minutes,” she said to Dylan. “I promise it’s on the way.”

  Dylan waved her hand. “Take your time.”

  She was in no hurry to get home—although she had plenty of reason to. Most of her moving boxes still sat unpacked. The box of underwear in her hallway-cum-changeroom was the least of her worries, though. Why the hell had she thought it a good idea to buy a fixer-upper? It hadn’t been a problem on week one. In just seven days, she’d achieved enough to give the Book of Genesis a run for its money. She’d torn up the front path and repaved it, yanked out a few panels of the picket fence to cement the toilet letterbox beside the path. She’d planted roses and repainted the pool fence.

  And then, on the seventh day of re-creation, barefoot at midnight, she’d ripped up the carpet in the living room and discovered the art of refurbishing floorboards. No, I can do this, she’d told herself, and a second later, a nail had sunk so deep into the flesh between the balls of her feet that it had almost come through the other side. The next day, when she’d woken to find her foot the colour of van Gogh’s The Starry Night, she’d decided that, sometimes, jobs needed to be outsourced.

  But somewhere along the line, she’d given up on the renovations entirely. After her dad had come home from hospital, she’d started painting in the kitchen, but that had come to a halt when she’d discovered a height chart on the pantry doorjamb. She couldn’t bear to paint over Emma and Siobhan’s rise to the door handle, and so she’d just stopped. She’d move on to the rest of the house if she ever had a spare moment. Not that she was complaining about the long hours at the club. Although she was working her ass off for her parents, she knew she was lucky to have the job. With the way her ADHD was having a field day with the stress of her father’s illness, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold down anything else.

  Dylan’s phone beeped with a new text, confirmation of her father’s final Medicare claim. Below that text was Beth’s message thread. Twelve unanswered texts, including the most recent from three days ago. Dylan slipped her phone into the back pocket of her shorts.

  She hadn’t answered any texts since Beth’s first, the morning after their argument telling Dylan that she planned to collect her things between nine and eleven. Fine, she’d written back, and then she’d driven over to Cessnock cinema, bought a ticket to a morning session of a four-week-old action movie, and had a cry in the front row. When she’d returned three hours later, all traces of Beth were gone. The research papers, her laptop, her containers in the fridge, her blankets, her scarves, her UGGs by the back door. All of it. Gone.

  A week later, they’d had a short, terse conversation over the phone about the settlement. At the end of the call, Beth said she’d call back the next week—that call never came. After that, all contact had been through their lawyers and Brian. And when Dylan had moved out in early October, she thought that would be the end of it.

  So why, six months after they’d last spoken, was Beth asking her to call her?

  She’d even left a voice mail in early January. Dylan, it’s Beth. I’d like to speak to you, I…If you could give me a call that would be great. I’d really appreciate it. I hope you had a nice Christmas. Happy New Year. For a brief, senseless moment, Dylan had considered picking up the phone. But what was the point? She had no interest in playing niceties.

  Ever since she’d listened to the voice mail, she’d dreamed about Beth more often than usual. There had been the one where Beth was mugged in the middle of Jembala Lakes in broad daylight, her purse snatched outside the post office—except it hadn’t been Beth’s purse, it had been Dylan’s mother’s purse. That had been odd. The strangest, though, had been the one where everything was normal—they worked together, had never sold the homestead—but out of the blue, Beth had come to work one day, suddenly six months pregnant. There were happy ones, too. Dylan’s secret favourite was the one where she’d gone on a weekend trip to Sydney, wandered into a random café near Central Station and found Beth as her barista. They hadn’t known each other, but with a counter between them, they’d flirted so freely and with such unrestrained intensity that Dylan had woken to the feeling of her heart trying to break from her skin.

  The girl behind the counter looked up. They locked eyes. “Tropical Crush for Dylan?” She took a sip. Damn, she thought. Worth every dollar.

  She headed back to the car park, placed her drink in the cup holder and tossed her medication onto the passenger seat. Just as she clicked her belt, her phone lit up. She put it on loudspeaker and put the car into reverse.

  “Hi M
um.” She slipped the parking ticket between her lips as she rounded the car park to the exit.

  “Hello, Dylan.”

  She raised an eyebrow. What was with the formality? “Yes, hello Margaret, darling.”

  “I just got a text that said you filed another claim with Medicare…”

  The ticket fell from her mouth to her lap as she cursed. “You did?” she asked tentatively.

  “I told you to stop making payments.”

  She rolled down her window and inserted the ticket. The boom gate went up.

  “Dyl?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “I’m miffed about this, and Dad will be, too. I really—”

  “Mum, it’s fine. Look, can I call you back? I’m just leaving Westfield in Newcastle and I’m trying to get out of the car park…”

  “You’re not tailing people out again are you? If you’ve gone over your free two hours for parking, you need to pay the fine. Jenny McArthur’s son did the same thing driving out after people when the boom gate goes up and I’ll tell you, the boom gate came right down on his bonnet and crushed the whole—”

  She groaned. “Mum. I’m not tailing people. I haven’t got reception, can we argue over this tonight?”

  “I can hear you perfectly fine.”

  “Really? I’m having trouble.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “My phone is also on five percent.”

  “Liar.”

  Dylan grinned.

  “Well, are you still coming for dinner?”

  “Yep.” As the afternoon heat hit her, Dylan pressed all four windows down and wiped at her top lip. She really had to get around to getting the aircon fixed in the Jeep—or buying a new car. “Before you go, how’s Dad?”

  “He’s in the treatment room right now, but Anna’s happy with how he’s doing, considering how hot it’s been.”

  Her dad was constantly joking with the nursing staff at the clinic about the fact that he couldn’t have gone and had his heart attack in the middle of winter rather than the heat of summer. Dylan had heard him repeat the same joke all six times she’d driven him to the clinic for a check-up. Each time, Anna would glance over to Dylan perched on the opposite treatment bed and they’d roll their eyes at each other. “How about no major heart attack at all?” Anna would say, “Sounds even better to me…” and each time, without fail, her dad would make the same untasteful joke about his near-death experience being almost worth it to get the entire summer off work.

  As Dylan headed northeast to the Finger Lakes, she listened to her mum chatter on and on about her father’s ballooned ankles and the cardiologist’s treatment regime. She navigated the tight turn of the off-ramp as it spiralled onto the main road, muttering about how she was going around in circles in every aspect of her life.

  “What did you say?” Maggie asked.

  “Nothing…” As she took the end of the bend and her lane merged with the traffic, Dylan’s eyes landed on the giant billboard above the overpass. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she groaned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s another billboard out by the off-ramp.” She wished she’d gotten a better glimpse of it. It had to be the biggest yet.

  “They’re certainly spending a bit, aren’t they? Two billboards in town, that one on the motorway you spotted on the way to the hospital last month. Now one on the off-ramp…”

  She’d seen the new flyers on the rack outside Woolies, too. Elma hadn’t believed in flyers. Anybody coming to Jembala Lakes was coming for the house anyway, she’d always said. If Brian and his minions were investing so much in advertising in Jembala Lakes, Dylan could only imagine the campaign in tourist bureaus in Sydney. Surely the homestead would be experiencing a sudden influx of customers, and it filled her with a smug satisfaction to think about the new staff struggling while inundated with guests, school and bus tours.

  On her way home from the bowling club each night, she passed the homestead. For months workmen had been building an entrance to the driveway, a low wall in rectangular blocks of masonry that ran about ten metres on either side. Dylan didn’t like it. It looked like a fort. Unwelcoming. But that wasn’t what pissed her off most. It was what was stamped in bold print beneath the gold lettering of The Blaxland Homestead on that new bloody sign—The Sydney Historic Preservation Association Welcomes You. Just the thought of the fancy fucking logo turned her stomach.

  “Speaking of the homestead,” her mother said, “You’ll never guess who I saw stopped at the lights outside Woolies on our way to the clinic.”

  Distracted, Dylan scowled up at the board. “Who?”

  “Your Beth.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Beth shucked off her blazer and strung it over the back of a kitchen chair as she pinched open the top button of her shirt. She’d spent the last twenty minutes outside chatting with the last foreign bus tour of the day and the newly installed air-conditioning system was a welcome reprieve from the February heat.

  She pulled her shirttails from her skirt and fanned her belly. It was hard to believe that six months before she’d sat in the very same kitchen each morning, swallowed up in jumpers and scarves, dreading the moment she’d have to swap her sheepskin slippers for her boots. Some mornings had been so cold that she’d lost feeling in her toes. Now, standing in the kitchen in the middle of summer, her feet swollen in her too-high heels and her toes pinching, she longed for those winter days.

  The scent of vanilla surged from the kitchen cupboard as she reached inside for a glass. She had to hand it to Brian and the cleaning crew—the house smelled incredibly fresh. As she placed the glass on the counter and unpacked the remaining five from the box—a new set provided by the Association—she wondered what had happened to Elma’s short and tall mismatched glasses. Had Dylan taken them with her when she’d moved out? Had she taken the frypan, too? The house had been minimalistic back in the winter but now it was barren. The pantry had been cleared of all condiments—cooking oil, cling wrap, foil, Dylan’s expired peanut butter, which she had continued to eat much to Beth’s aggravation. There was a single bottle of dishwashing detergent under the sink, but other than that, only a matching stainless-steel toaster and kettle sat on the counter for the staff. “Staff” comprising just herself.

  When Brian had asked her what she needed to get started, her first order of business had been requesting a second-in-charge. With all the promotion the Association was splurging on, employing additional staff only seemed logical. At first, Brian had been hesitant—the other museums were much larger and only run by two people at a time. Beth had only needed to remind him that she’d uprooted her entire life to take the position—that she was accepting a pay packet she knew she had every right to question—for Brian to submit to her request. A new trainee was supposedly coming in a month’s time. A month too long, she thought.

  It had been a frustrating first ten days. She wasn’t used to taking such large tour groups through the house. How Dylan had done this by herself, Beth couldn’t understand.

  She poured herself a glass of water and stood watching out the kitchen window as the last tour van of the day drove out the new gates. The wall looked fantastic, Beth thought, relieved it was finally finished. If she’d had to endure one more day of those workmen leering at her when they came into the homestead for lunch, she would have sent them packing and finished building the goddamn wall herself.

  The heat of the afternoon sun poured through the kitchen window. It was odd, she thought, closing up at six, leaving during daylight, the sun still high and scorching.

  The glass halfway to her lips, Beth’s hand stilled. Her skin spiked, her pulse roared in her ears. She squinted against the sunlight, her eyes growing wide as a very familiar white Jeep pulled through the new gates.

  She swallowed. This is what you’ve been anticipating for weeks, she reminded herself. She’d wanted it ever since she’d made the decision to leave Sydney for good, rehearsed so many
conversations in the shower, played out every way their reunion could possibly go just in case they ran into each other at the service station, the newsagency, the supermarket. She’d made more trips for groceries in the past two weeks than she had in her thirty-seven years, glancing down each aisle before she’d pay for her few unnecessary items and give up. Bumping into Dylan was inevitable—Beth just didn’t think it would happen here, or so soon.

  For God’s sake, pull yourself together. Quickly, she tucked her shirttails back into her pencil skirt and tidied herself. Licking her lips, she checked her reflection in the glass of the stove door. She cringed. Her eyeliner was smudged, the perfectly pencilled line made smoky-eyed by the humidity. Fantastic. How long had it been like that? She’d spoken to at least fifty people that day and not a single person had told her.

  Anxiety rising, she pushed open the back door and stepped onto the veranda, her heels tapping on the tiles.

  Dylan’s car pulled to a stop beyond the turning circle, having roared in at such a speed Beth worried she might take out the new box hedges that lined the path to the veranda. The driver’s door slammed shut. Dylan halted in front of the car, pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and glared up at Beth on the veranda.

  They locked eyes. At Dylan’s hard stare, Beth’s stomach churned. She felt the way she had that night at the bowling club when Dylan had tried to initiate a discussion and Beth had charged to the bathroom to lose her dinner.

  In a baby-blue polo shirt tucked into denim shorts, and with her golden hair pulled back into her omnipresent bun, it was clear that Dylan had just come from the club. Denim shorts were rolled to mid-thigh, her milky-white legs seeming to go on and on until they finally met clean, white sneakers. God, she looks so young, Beth thought. Like somebody else entirely…