One Summer Between Friends

by Trish Morey

  And that was when she’d been skinny. Having babies had put an end to that. She’d been hovering five to ten kilos over her recommended weight ever since. She really should say no to those chocolate chip biscuits in the office.

  But cute? Was there still a shred of that going on under the lack of sleep? She angled her face this way and that and pulled free the blonde shoulder-length hair from its scrunchie, fluffing it around her face, batting her eyes and pouting like she’d witnessed guests and even Annie do for a selfie.

  What did Matt Caruso see when he looked at her? A weary, heading-for-middle-aged manager of a guesthouse who was running a few kilos overweight that he just wanted to shoot the breeze with? Or could he see some remnant of cute?

  She turned away from the mirror, tying her hair back in its ponytail again. It was all kinds of pathetic, but she kind of hoped he did.

  18

  Sarah shut up shop, feeling a sense of optimism. She was getting an idea of what was needed in the store and had begun making plans. She’d ordered orange oil to treat the timber shelves after they’d all been emptied and wiped down, and was drawing up plans to turn the little deck into a proper outside eating area, with café-style tables and chairs rather than just long benches against the wall. She’d order in some gelati rather than the bog-standard ice-creams the shop had always stocked and have a look at installing a decent coffee machine for real espresso coffee—although she knew that expense was going to meet with some resistance.

  But overall, small changes, small improvements, and all without affecting either the core integrity or the retro charm of what was essentially a general store supplying the basics to those in self-catering accommodation, plus a few treats for cyclists passing by. The visitors who came to Lord Howe weren’t short of a dollar and were used to the best of everything, especially their coffee, and in peak tourist season there were more than enough tourists to go around. It could work, she knew it could.

  Feeling more optimistic than she had for weeks, Sarah was heading into the kitchen to check the slow cooker she’d put on this morning when she heard her father’s voice. ‘Jesus. That’s rough. All right, then, I’ll have a word.’

  ‘What’s rough?’ Sarah asked, looking from Sam to Dot as she lifted the pinny from the hook on the back of the door and slipped it over her head. It couldn’t be the curry that was causing ructions; that was smelling amazing.

  Her father shuffled his feet, looking like he’d been caught in the act, but she could make no sense of her mother’s expression. Dot looked like she was almost in pain, her lips tight, her eyes almost accusatory.

  ‘Your mother had a call just now,’ Sam said, ‘from Pru.’

  ‘Oh?’ Sarah turned and picked up the wooden spoon from the rest where she’d left it. ‘I didn’t realise you were still friends with Pru.’

  ‘Pru and I grew up together,’ Dot snapped. ‘Why wouldn’t I still be friends with her just because you had a falling out with her daughter?’

  ‘Oh, give me a break!’ Sarah said, spinning around. ‘It was hardly a “falling out”!’

  ‘Sarah,’ Sam interrupted. ‘It is actually about Jules. She’s got breast cancer.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sarah blinked, myriad thoughts flashing through her brain, not all of them entirely sympathetic, at least one of them featuring karma in a starring role.

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ Dot said.

  Sarah turned back to the slow cooker, lifted the lid and sniffed appreciatively as she gave the rogan josh a stir. Just about there. The lamb was falling apart, and a swirl of yoghurt and a sprinkle of parsley and it would be ready to serve once she’d steamed some rice. She replaced the lid and set the wooden spoon down on its rest.

  ‘Well?’ prompted her mother.

  Sarah had been brought up with the principle that if you couldn’t say anything nice, then you shouldn’t say anything at all. But this was probably not the time to remind her mother of her own (do as I say, not as I do) teachings. ‘Yeah, Dad’s right. That’s rough.’

  ‘That’s it? When she’s got a four-year-old child to think about!’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’

  ‘Then you could try to be a little more sympathetic.’ Dot sniffed. ‘It’s a very trying time for Jules and Pru. First losing Greg and Richard in that terrible boating accident, and now this—it’s just one thing after another.’

  Sarah sucked in a deep breath—still better to say nothing—and went to the pantry to find the rice. ‘Anyone hungry?’ she said, putting it on the bench and digging out the steamer. ‘Dinner won’t be long. Nothing better than a warming curry on a winter’s day.’

  ‘Oh, I give up,’ said her mother, struggling to her feet and shuffling towards the bathroom on her walker. ‘You talk to her, Samuel.’

  ‘What?’ Sarah said, catching sight of the look of resignation on her dad’s face before she bent down to search for the yoghurt in the fridge. ‘What does Mum expect me to do? Bake Jules a cake or something?’

  Her father curled his hands around the back of a chair and shook his head. ‘Nobody expects that. But it’s Jules—she’s asked to see you.’

  An electric snake slithered its way down Sarah’s spine before suddenly snapping tight. ‘But you said that was Pru.’

  ‘Jules asked, via Pru, via Dot. She thought it might be better coming that way.’

  Sarah made another attempt at finding the yoghurt, succeeding this time. She snatched the tub out from the depths. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to Jules.’

  ‘That may be true enough, but from what I gather, she’s got something she wants to say to you.’

  ‘Tough.’

  ‘Would it be so hard to hear what she has to say?’

  She found a spoon and put both it and the yoghurt down on the table, and set about straightening the knives and forks on the placemats. ‘Actually, yeah, it would be.’

  ‘Sarah—’

  Her head jerked around. ‘She’s made no attempt to reach out to me before now, not once. But suddenly, because I’m back on the island, she feels a desperate urge to talk? What’s so different that she has to seek me out now? And why would I want to listen to anything she has to say? There’s nothing she could say that would undo what she did to me and to my marriage.’

  Sam shook his head, straightening from the chair where he was leaning to go to the window and pull down the blinds. ‘I can’t answer that, or talk for her, but I can imagine that, given her diagnosis, she’s had a bit of a wake-up call. Health scares, and thinking about your own mortality, can do that to a person. After all, grievances and resentments are of no use when you’re dead.’

  Maybe not, Sarah thought, but they were pretty damn inescapable when you were alive.

  She raised her chin. ‘She’s got no reason to have any grievances or resentment against me. I’m the injured party here, remember?’

  ‘I remember. So maybe it’s something else she’s looking for.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows? A chance to clear the air? Maybe she wants to explain her side of the story?’

  ‘Her side is hardly defensible.’

  ‘Then maybe she’s looking for forgiveness.’

  ‘Forgiveness? How could I ever forgive her after what she did, not just to my marriage, but to me?’

  ‘You keep asking me questions I don’t know the answer to. But for what it’s worth, I reckon it’d be tough. But they say there’s five stages of grief, so it makes sense there’d be a similar few stages to forgiveness. I mean, it doesn’t just happen, does it? You don’t say to an arsonist, oy, you bastard, you’ve burnt down my house, but whacko, I forgive you. It can’t be that easy.’

  Normally her father’s homespun way of explaining things would leave Sarah smiling. Normally. But this time his wisdom had one huge flaw.

  ‘The trouble is, Dad, I don’t want to forgive her. And even if I wanted to, I’m not sure I could.’

  ‘Well, love, you won’t kn
ow if she’s even looking for that unless you talk to her. Would it be such a stretch to at least meet up and listen to what she has to say? It’s not a sign of weakness to talk to her. It’s not like you’d be letting her off the hook.’

  Sarah tossed and turned in bed that night, and it had nothing to do with either the curry or a mattress that was more a Volkswagen than the Porsche she slept on at home. But she’d promised her dad she’d think about Jules’s request, and now she could think of nothing but. It was three and a half years since she’d seen Jules. A good three and a half years of shoving her past into an iron box she’d welded shut with white hot tears and hidden away, never to be opened. Forgetting had been getting easier this last year.

  But now the iron box refused to stay shut, and the life she’d thought she was finally getting back to rights had started unravelling all over again.

  Sarah rolled over and wrestled with her pillow. Outside a gusty shower of rain sent palm fronds slapping into each other, much like the thoughts slapping inside her head. The last time she’d seen Jules had been at Richard’s memorial service in Goulburn.

  A memorial service.

  There was no coffin. No interment and no cremation. There was no body.

  Sarah hadn’t wanted to go—Richard had left her more than a year before—but her mother had said she should, and reluctantly, Sarah agreed. Because whatever Richard had done, he’d been her husband—and a good husband at that—for ten years.

  Besides, it was only a couple of hours’ drive down the highway from Sydney and Richard’s parents would be there, and they’d been good to her. They’d lent her their support when she and Richard were undergoing IVF. They’d been there with words of sympathy when it had failed time and again to produce the grandchild they were hoping for. They’d told her that it didn’t matter, that she shouldn’t keep trying for their sakes, although she’d seen the same yearning she’d felt reflected in their eyes. She knew that it did matter, and that they wished things could be different.

  So Sarah had gone, only to feel that she didn’t quite deserve to be there, because Jules had turned up. Jules, with the dark circles around her eyes because she hadn’t just lost the father of her child, she’d lost her own father too. Jules, with a six-month-old baby in her arms.

  And when the eyes of the two women had met, nobody looking on could have said which woman was the sadder.

  How was the wife of a dead man supposed to react to the presence of his lover and his child at his memorial service? What was the protocol? Where were the guidelines for that? This was a time to respect the dead. A time for serenity and peaceful reflection. But how did you show respect? How did you remain serene when you wanted to scratch out the eyes of the woman who wasn’t his widow but his lover? The woman who made it look so easy to bear someone else’s husband’s baby?

  And even though Richard’s parents had told Sarah time and again that they didn’t care if she could never have a child, that it didn’t matter, clearly it did. Because there they were, clustered around Jules and her baby—their grandchild—cooing and clucking. How could they not be, when Jules’s baby was like a gift from the gods? When she’d delivered them a miracle, and given them something of their lost son, something they’d all but given up on. The child her once-best friend carried like a trophy.

  It had been impossible to watch. Each and every gesture had taken another slice off Sarah’s bruised and battered heart, another brick in the wall separating her from her former in-laws, while her empty womb ached for the child she would never have. So she’d fled, leaving the service early, slipping away without saying goodbye to anyone. It wasn’t like she was needed, and she’d paid her respects, hadn’t she?

  So what did Jules want now?

  Forgiveness?

  Absolution?

  Fat chance.

  She sniffed. Her father had likened forgiveness to grief. Wrong again, because grief was something Sarah knew all about. She’d lived every one of grief’s five stages during every failed IVF cycle and through the months that followed. The threads of denial, anger, bargaining and depression were woven through the fabric of her life. There was even acceptance there too, but that was the flimsiest thread of all, the thread that threatened to snap and unravel at the slightest hiccup, the thread she had to fight with all her might to keep together, lest she fell apart with it.

  And as if that hadn’t been enough for one person to bear, then had come betrayal of the worst possible kind, and the frayed and fractured fabric of her life had been indelibly stained.

  She’d had so much stolen from her. The thought of giving something away now was anathema to her. She had nothing left to steal. Nothing left to give.

  Least of all forgiveness.

  19

  Life seemed so much easier when Andy was working on the supply ship. So much less stressful. The mornings ran more smoothly, the kids fed and off to school before she did the housework and checked out guests and cleaned rooms in preparation for incoming guests. It was so much better than spending her days angsting about what Andy had or hadn’t said or done the night before. Besides, cleaning rooms and changing sheets gave her time and space to put the various pieces of her life together and work out the bigger picture.

  So she was married to a man who couldn’t see the point of travelling and wouldn’t even consider going somewhere new with her, not even to celebrate an occasion as special as their twentieth anniversary. A man who preferred to read a book in bed than make love to his wife. A book about the history of the internal combustion engine—Floss had checked in case he was getting his thrills there. A man who didn’t seem very interested in being married and who was becoming more distant and short-tempered by the day.

  She’d tried to be a good wife and, for the most part, she thought she had been. Okay, so they’d had that one big slip-up when she’d found herself pregnant with Mikey when they’d settled on having four children, but what was one more when you already had four? For the most part, she’d been a pretty decent wife. She’d cooked and cleaned and managed the guesthouse, and if she had to give herself a ranking out of ten, she’d probably be around a seven-point-five to eight. But only because nobody was perfect and you had to take marks off for something. Even if just for her few extra kilos or a less than perfect nose.

  But what would Andy say if she asked him if he still wanted to be married? Would he admit the very same question had been playing on his mind, and maybe they should talk about where things were going wrong so they could fix them? Or would he be relieved and simply say, no—he didn’t want to be married anymore, but he simply hadn’t known how to tell her?

  After the past few weeks and months, she didn’t put much hope in the first option. When Annie had asked her if she and Andy were going to get divorced, Floss had been blindsided, the idea too ridiculous to contemplate. But the more she examined their relationship, the more she could understand why Annie would have thought that.

  But the really scary thing? The prospect of him saying that he didn’t want to be married to her anymore didn’t frighten her half as much as she thought it should. On the contrary, it would kind of be a relief. Like getting a diagnosis on a tricky medical issue and finally knowing what you were dealing with. Because it was never the disease itself that was the problem, it was the not knowing.

  She finished the room she was working on, gave the bed cover one last tweak, and arranged a welcoming assortment of fresh hibiscus on the dining table. She looked at them, their bright colours mocking her mood. She turned away.

  The flowers wouldn’t last of course.

  They never did.

  Floss never went for a walk after dinner, she was always too busy doing the dishes, but tonight she surprised her children by saying she was going out. Someone else could worry about the dishes for a change—if they did.

  ‘Mum?’ said Annie.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Mikey demanded.

  ‘Just out,’ she said, wrapping a scarf around her neck befor
e pulling on her jacket. ‘If I’m not back, Annie will put you to bed.’

  Annie pulled a face but Floss ignored her and headed out the door. She turned into the wind, pulled her jacket hood closer around her face and walked down the driveway. Today’s revelation had rocked her, then haunted her. It had played on her thoughts and tugged on her heartstrings all afternoon long. Was she really ready to be done with Andy? High school sweethearts. Marriage. Five kids. And then, bam! The world blows apart. Even just thinking about it seemed like sacrilege.

  But was that the problem, being together since high school? Never being with anyone else? Tying yourself to just one other person and expecting it would last the distance? Floss marched down the road feeling lost and out of her depth, while the wintry wind flipped back her hood, snatching at her hair.

  Because there was definitely a problem. And if she didn’t figure out what it was, and find a solution, she might just go mad in the process.

  20

  It was quiet in the shop, so Sarah had let Deirdre go home early to help out her daughter with the witching hour. Sarah wasn’t entirely sympathetic. More than anything, she was baffled that anyone who had been through the disappointment of miscarriages would be complaining about a little disruption and inconvenience in your day when you finally had the children you wanted. Sarah had sworn black and blue that she’d never complain about a little upheaval in her day, if and when she finally had a baby. She’d promised the IVF gods that she’d never whinge or make a fuss, she’d be the perfect mother, a picture of serenity. Not that any of her promises had made a shred of difference, but still …

  Tammy, though, didn’t seem to mind calling on her mother for help. But maybe when you were on to your third baby, you could forget how much you wanted even just one. God, how amazing would that be?