My Fair Aussie

by Jennifer Griffith

  “Go ahead. Call that doctor. There’s no sense waiting any longer. I’ve already delayed your meeting for a full week.”

  “Well, yeah.” Henry’s mouth tugged to the side in a smirk that made me ache to kiss him again. “I would call him right away. In fact, I probably would have taken you up on your offer to let me try him using your phone; however, I don’t have his contact number.”

  “Oh.” The fishiness started to reassert itself again. I tried to bat it away.

  “Could we look it up once we get onto the mainland?” I said, and then hated myself for it. People who are lying or spinning a fantasy life don’t really want to get caught. They want to be left to dwell in their pretty, cotton-candy haze. I thought again of my great uncle with dementia.

  “That’s the problem. His name’s David Smith. Does a name get any more generic than that?”

  “No. You’re right. That’s the pinnacle of typical names, at least in America.”

  “What’s worse, for the life of me I can’t ever seem to recall the city he’s in. California has too many ‘San’- and ‘Santa’-type names.”

  “That’s for sure.” A common name like David Smith in a city that started with San? There could be ten thousand of those to filter through in California. Maybe more. No wonder he hadn’t pursued looking it up.

  “But wait.” He stopped walking. I stopped too. “That’s genius of you, Elizer.” He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I can just get it from Jonno.” He started texting as we walked back toward the car I’d be turning in the keys of soon.

  Who was this Jonno he kept mentioning? He’d spoken about his brother Frank once before, but not since. And it sounded to me from his stories like his parents and grandpa had passed away some time ago. Did Henry have some kind of friends or family who could have been helping him through his rough time? Maybe Jonno was his sponsor at one of those twelve-step organizations.

  “Ah, got it.”

  “Already?”

  “Sure. Jonno is very efficient. I asked him to help me with a ride home, too. You won’t have to worry about that.”

  “Uh—from L.A.?” Because San Nouveau wasn’t exactly a stop on Uber’s radar. “I can get you back to Los Angeles. And to the bus station, if that’s where you’d like to go.”

  “I’ll arrange for the trunks of clothing to be either returned or else paid for. I can pay Burt directly, or the studio. Which do you think would be better?”

  “Uh, returned?” Paid for? What? “We’ll just return them. I can manage that.” My brain was like one of those computers in 1960s movies, when it got overloaded with information it started smoking and saying, Does not compute.

  “Got it.” Henry sent another text. “I’d like to head up to the cliff overlook one last time before I take off. I know we were just there, but I liked it a lot. Plus, it’s close to the helipad.”

  Again with the helicopters.

  “Of course, I’d better call Dr. Smith immediately, so it will be a few minutes. I feel bad for making the geneticist wait all these days without word from me.” Henry’s demeanor had changed the second he’d texted Jonno, or whoever. The transformation took him from beta male to alpha male, with a side of contagious enthusiasm. He was all action and drive. If I liked previous Henry, this one was positively irresistible.

  Henry was going on about David Smith, the geneticist as he dialed.

  “He’s worked so hard to help me identify whether our genetics research is going to be patentable in the American breeding market, I’d hate to leave him hanging.”

  Genetics research? In the American breeding market? Boulders of confusion slammed into me. It felt like my brain was banging on a closed door behind which lurked all the answers to a puzzle I couldn’t solve over the past week.

  “I hope he’ll understand.” As the phone on the other end began to ring, Henry cupped a hand over the receiver and said to me, “Jonno wasn’t half sorry to hear from me, either. He said once I get home they’ll kill the fatted calf, and all that. Probably literally.”

  He then held the phone up to his ear. The ringing continued. We altered direction. We’d been walking toward the Bainbridge house, but if Henry wanted to see the breakers again, I didn’t imagine Mo-No would countenance our borrowing any of her cars. It was quite a way from here, but we could walk it and take the shorter path than we’d used to ride Trafalgar and Chantilly earlier and get there in twenty or thirty minutes. It would give me more time to try to figure out Henry and who he really was—and maybe sort out this thing that was going on between us.

  The tingles from his true love comment came prickling back through me again momentarily.

  “Hi, Dr. Smith. Yes, this is Henry Lyon. Right. Cherrington Downs Station. Or, yeah. I forget. We say station in Oz, and you’d say ranch, over here in the States. Yes, I’m sorry about the delay. I met with a little hiking accident in the Grand Canyon on my way to California to meet with you.”

  Hiking accident!

  I hung back as we walked and gave him the polite physical distance etiquette required while someone made a phone call. All the stuff he’d just said swirled in my mind—particularly the blitz that lit my mind with his words station—or, you’d say, ranch. He owned a ranch? Was that some kind of Australian lingo I’d never bothered to sleuth out?

  I was the dumbest linguist on the face of the earth. Possibly if there was life on other planets, I’d beat their linguists out too.

  It made sense, though. Marbling, as in the way beef has fat running through it to give it flavor. Patents and geneticists and DNA, as in cattle breeding. Even the mutants thing made sense, when I thought about it as a genetic mutation that would allow beef cattle to grow in a certain way based on a given type of grazing.

  I blinked in an effort to comprehend it all. Henry had even referred literally killing a fatted calf. Well, as the daughter of a church-going cattle rancher who thought veal was morally off-limits, I sort of hoped no one would be killing a baby calf, fatted or not. However, the things he was saying about research and markets and…

  If he had a big ranch in Australia, maybe he did have an assistant, like a ranch foreman, named Jonno. And maybe he did have a plane. And a helicopter. Of his own.

  I staggered and had to grab onto a low-hanging tree branch for a second to keep myself steady.

  Despite my step away, Henry’s voice still came to my ear loud and clear. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on his business, but he made it impossible for me not to.

  “Right. Yeah, I know it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow, but if you could spare an hour today, I have a really decent proposal for you. Really? You’d do that? Well, that’s right kind of you, Dr. Smith. We’ll be talking Simmentals and Murray Gray—plus, what my dad and granddad have done to improve the genetic cross.”

  He paused, and I found myself listening with brand new ears. Simmentals and Murray Gray were two breeds of cattle I’d heard my dad talk about at the Circle G. We mostly had Black Angus, because that was what sold best around here, but my dad liked to know about what the latest herd research said. He even consulted a freelance geneticist named Dr. Smith from time to time, a guy who came around and talked to the ranchers in the inland ranching areas of the state.

  “Yes, it has, actually. Right. Exactly. It’s revolutionized the beef market in Australia, and I am dying for my granddad to get credit for it worldwide. The top six stations in Aus have completely switched over to the Lyon breed, but we are wanting to take it to the world. It’s exciting. Yeah, well, you’re right. It wouldn’t hurt if it takes a multi-million dollar operation into the billion-dollar zone.” He gave a jolly laugh, almost like the gut-busting guffaw of earlier. Meanwhile, I had to put a death grip on a nearby jutting boulder just to keep myself upright.

  Henry was a millionaire? On the cusp of billionaire?

  The treetops above me started spinning in wild, kaleidoscopic patterns.

  “Right,” Henry said, signing off. “Two hours. See you then.”

&
nbsp; Two hours! How could he get from San Nouveau to anywhere in two hours? That question crowned the one zillion questions now blossoming in my mind.

  Before I could process any of them, though, Henry came walking back toward me.

  “Great news. Dr. Smith is good to meet, and Jonno texted that my ride is on its way.” He was grinning. “You want to come along with me, seeing as how you’re all full-up on strikes and all out of jobs?”

  This was a newly relaxed Henry, as if he was in his element and in possession of, well, the world. His kingdom. No more was he the Woo Mo-No with the lines guy, or the one who made everyone on San Nouveau fall for his act anymore; instead, here stood a more mature, real, settled, confident guy.

  The skyrocketed confidence propelled him to fifty times the dangerous attractiveness he’d had before.

  Man, I should have gotten him a phone days ago.

  All my pistons were firing, and I found myself nearly saying yes to his invitation to…whatever it was.

  “I’d better not. It’s Christmas in a couple of days.”

  “Right. You going home?”

  Home for Christmas. Yes. That was a good idea. Home to the parents, to the horses, to the outdoors and the ranch and the love.

  “Now that I won’t be in charge of Sylvie’s holiday cheer, maybe I could spread some out at my parents’ ranch. I like baking, and they like eating.”

  “Ranch. Your father’s in the cattle business! It just dawned on me,” he said as he dialed and put the phone to his ear, “he might be up on the genetics of cattle as well. Or have an interest in it.”

  “Definitely. He always wants the top breed, whatever it is, even though he puts them on the range, rather than massaging them and feeding them mash and beer in Japanese stables.”

  “You’re talking about Wagyu beef, sure.” He rolled his eyes about the meat that cost several hundred dollars a pound in some places. “But what we’ve developed at Cherrington Downs makes Wagyu taste like yesterday’s hamburger from Macca’s.”

  “Macca’s?”

  “McDonald’s, you Yanks say.”

  Oh. If only I had just asked questions at any point during this week, even merely along the lines of what’s Macca’s, I would have been so much less dense about all this. It wasn’t like Henry had been hiding things from me. I’d been jumping to erroneous conclusions, obviously from day one. I’d seen the signs; why hadn’t I trusted any of them?

  “Who’s your Dr. Smith? Is he really a geneticist? My dad’s ranch has a herd health consultant by that name, I think.”

  “Oh, right. I’m sure he does some of that on the side. Consults with the ranchers, as you’d call them. Don’t tell me you know him.”

  “Well, like you say, there are probably a thousand Dr. David Smiths around, but it does sound like the name of a guy my dad knows, one who comes to our ranch now and then.”

  Henry tipped his hat back. “Well, how about that. I guess in this business the world shrinks. The experts will be known everywhere across the world.”

  “So you’re in this business, Henry? Don’t tell me you really are the cattle baron we told everyone at the Frogs in the Sand premiere you were.” A lump the size of Australia was forming in my stomach. “So, we didn’t lie?”

  We’d walked a long way and were standing at the rocky cliffs now, and he took me by the hand toward the breakers. They crashed below, and for a moment, I felt my pulse rise. But with Henry’s hand gripping mine with its firm strength, somehow, the roar of the waves didn’t bother me. In the dappled sun coming through the clouds, I could appreciate the foaming white of each successive crash against the gray-black rocks. Power, strength, majesty—those were all I felt.

  And Henry’s solid presence. He had cured me.

  “Back when we first met and you gave me dinner, I told you about the Lyon family’s station, Cherrington Downs. It’s not the largest cattle operation in Victoria north of Melbourne in the Alps there, but it has by far the best beef, and every larger station—including MaryAnn Downs, the largest cattle operation in the world by acreage—has bought into the Lyon breeding stock. My brother Frank and I are poised to bring it to America, which was one reason I left Jonno in charge and came over here.”

  “When you said station, I thought you meant the bus station, as I’m sure you divined from my outburst with Mo-No a few minutes ago.” That tirade flowed back to me in all its murky horror. “I told myself you were delusional and that you thought you owned that bus station where we met you in downtown L.A. Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you just slap me awake?”

  “I’d never slap you awake. You look pretty when your eyes are closed. I’ve seen them flutter shut, like when you kissed me this morning.” He grinned, an infectious quirk of his lips that showed all those beautiful white teeth. “Besides, we do call them stations in Oz.”

  Oz. No wizards required. If it wouldn’t make me look even stupider than this conversation was already making me look, I would have slammed my palm into my forehead.

  “Of course you do. In Australia.” That was Australia, as he’d said before. And no, if he called it Straya, it still wasn’t anything to do with Strayer College, like I’d mistakenly believed when we were first putting together a back story for him.

  Henry Lyon was everything he ever said he was. None of it was pretense—from the Aussie accent to the claim of being a big-time cattle baron who owned the station, possibly down to the story of riding a horse through the snow, à la Man From Snowy River.

  Waves of confusion and shame and attraction and fear and excitement as well as an earth-shattering crush on Henry Lyon all converged on the cliffs of my soul and broke at once. Dizzy and trying not to pant, I had to stop walking and take a seat on a rock.

  “Did you ever actually ride a horse down a nearly vertical incline through snow to rescue a stray calf?”

  A low chuckle rose up in his chest, vibrating in my own heart. “You heard that?”

  All I could do was nod and watch in melting dazzlement as his grin pulled back to reveal those excellent teeth again. The teeth that caught me in his net from day one.

  “Elizer, I will admit—that little yarn I invented based on a movie I’d watched as a kid.”

  I knew it! “I saw that movie, too.”

  “You caught me red-handed. Or, would that be red-tongued?”

  Suddenly I found myself staring at his mouth. Thrills sailed through all my extremities as I remembered how delicious it had been to kiss this man. My skin tingled and pulsed with longing to experience that again.

  One last time, before he left me here. Without him.

  However, the biggest question of all remained. It had to be asked, and much as I hated to find out the real reason, for fear it might not coincide with the secret wish of my heart—that he’d come along because of an interest in…me, I had no choice but to clear it up once and for all.

  “Henry—why did you ever agree to help me with—?”

  But before I could ask the rest of my question, a low pulsing cut through the wind, and I glanced up to see a helicopter approaching, quite close, and aiming for the landing pad.

  “I think that’s the ride Jonno sent.”

  His…ride…was a helicopter. I might have felt my jaw scrape the rocky ground beneath us.

  The sound grew deafening, and we had to shout, and even then we couldn’t hear each other. I tried again to ask him—why, why did he go through with it? But with the extreme noise, he couldn’t hear me.

  Instead, he took me by both shoulders and looked down into my face. In spite of my alternating emotions of shock and wonder and embarrassment, I let him lift my chin, then cuff my ear to press back the wildly blowing strands of my hair, and kiss me—kiss me until I floated up above the breakers and the cliff and the vast ocean and the foes and the whole of San Nouveau and the world.

  I let him kiss me goodbye.

  ACT II: Scene 14

  Why Can’t the English [Australians]?

  CIRCLE G
RANCH, MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, INLAND CALIFORNIA

  Wherein our heroine mopeth. Because she hath been stupideth.

  Two days of packing up and traveling to the mountainous inland part of California later, I pulled up at the ranch.

  “Mom? Dad?” I pressed open the front door of the farmhouse, and with a loud clunk dropped my duffel bag on the tile floor of the foyer. Christmas lights and garlands and spicy-sweet smells filled every corner of the room. “Are you here?”

  A clattering came from the kitchen, followed by my mother’s soprano gasp.

  “Eliza?” Mom came dashing to the front room where she embraced me. I hugged back, hard. It’d been far too long. “You’re here. I had no idea you were coming home for Christmas. I mean, I’d hoped, but we assumed you were at the mercy of your job and they’d never let you off when they could use your services on a holiday.” She hugged me tighter. “Your dad will be so happy. He’ll even saddle up Black Jack for you, if you want. The horse has missed you, too.”

  My horse. I could hardly wait to see him. It’d been far too long. Mom was right.

  “Do you need help with things? It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m still all right with baking.”

  “Let me call your father.” Mom stepped out onto the wraparound porch and pulled the rope to ring the old iron bell. “Jim! Your girl is home. Jim!”

  Dad’s head popped out of the barn a few seconds later and he came jogging across the gravel drive to meet me.

  The rest of the welcome was just as warm, from the hugs of the smattering of ranch hands still around despite the holiday, to cheers of joy from a parade of neighbors who dropped in with plates of baked goods. Welcome home took the better part of the afternoon.

  But when the hoopla settled, I still had some explaining to do, and Mom led me to the family room to wring it out of me.

  “So she fired you. For…what?” Mom sipped her hot wassail, her legs curled up beneath her on the couch. I did the same trick with my own legs over on the recliner. There was a crackling fire in the grate, and the room smelled like everything good and home. “I thought you were the only person who cared about her child. Why give that up?”