Marcus gathered cutlery for dinner and pulled plates from the cabinet above the dishwasher, realizing too late he’d collected four of everything out of sheer habit. With a stab of grief that hit him in the sternum and slid down into his gut, he put the superfluous knife, fork, and plate back in their proper places.
In truth, he wasn’t sorry she’d dismissed their idea out of hand again. It was too soon to leave this place, to walk away from his dad’s beloved home. Whoever bought the house would knock it down and build something totally obnoxious in its place. He pictured the faceless, charmless white edifice he’d passed on his way down the hill and shuddered.
After he’d set the table, he opened the back door and stepped out onto the verandah, where Davo stoked the fat barbeque coals with obvious frustration. From behind, he looked strikingly like their dad. He looked like him, was in the same line of work as him. And he’d inherited his spot at the barbeque.
Davo kept stabbing at the coals as Marcus joined him next to the bulbous old grill on its rusted, spindly legs. Their father had refused to upgrade to a newer gas machine, insisting the meat wouldn’t taste as good without the charcoal.
“She’ll come around,” Davo said eventually.
“I mean, it’s fine if she doesn’t, isn’t it?” Marcus replied.
Davo gave the coals another shove. “She can’t stay here forever.”
“Yeah, but you heard what she said. Where would she go?”
“I dunno.” Davo closed the lid of the barbeque with a scrape and clang. “But if she stays here, she’s gonna hurt herself. Maybe she already has.”
“You said that last time, but she’d tell us if something had happened, and—”
“No,” Davo interrupted, “she wouldn’t. She’d keep it to herself and keep telling us everything was fine.”
Marcus paused. It was true that their mother was a stoic, uncomplaining woman. He’d seen her cry right before and after their dad had died, but since then, she’d done her best to carry on with life as usual, taking her daily dip in the ocean pool at Freshwater Beach and meeting her girlfriends for morning tea at the same local café once a week. She liked her routines, she said. She’d been living with her osteoarthritis for nearly a decade now, he reasoned. Maybe it had simply become part of her routine, too.
“I just don’t think we need to rush this,” Marcus said to his brother, fiddling with the hem of his sweatshirt. “It’s her home, after all. Our home.”
“Your home,” Davo snapped.
Marcus stared at his brother, taken aback. His instinct when Davo got stroppy was to cut the tension with a joke, but his brainseemed to have frozen. He was about to ask what he’d meant when their mother rapped on the glass sliding door, beckoning him inside. Not sorry for an excuse to leave Davo alone with the barbeque, he went in, feeling the boot scrape against the wooden slats of the verandah as he went.
“What’s up?” he asked as he slipped back into the kitchen. His mother had donned an apron and stood at the counter, chopping vegetables and tossing them into a large salad bowl.
“Spin the lettuce for me, would you please?” She gestured over her shoulder where a pile of wet green lettuce sat in the salad spinner next to the sink. Marcus put the lid on and realised instantly why she’d ask him to do this for her: her hands and shoulders couldn’t manage the motion. Was that a new development?
“Mum,” he started, but she interrupted him.
“I’ve already got the update on your brother’s life,” she said breezily over the sound of her knife dismantling a red capsicum. “As much as he’ll tell me, which is not much.” Once finished, she shook out her hand and joined him near the sink. Marcus nodded, unsurprised. Davo had never been one to volunteer information about his life.
“So,” she said, reaching for the tap and running her hand under a stream of warm water, “now it’s your turn. What’s going on? Physio’s going well, that’s good. How’s Alice?”
“She’s fine,” Marcus said with a small smile. “She’s Alice. She’s been great with...with all of this.”
“And what about your love life?” His mother turned off the tap and dried her hand gently with the bottom of her apron. “Are you seeing anyone?”
Marcus paused. He thought about yesterday, about Heather’s lips, soft and warm and parting against his own. Then about how stupid and risky it had been to kiss her in the first place—how much it had stung when she herself had pointed that out.
On the bus today, he hadn’t been able to resist pulling up the shop’s Instagram account to see the photo Izzy had taken. Perhapsit was the angle or the way Izzy had edited the shot, but Heather looked even stronger and more graceful than she had when she’d posed for it. Her legs were long and powerful, and the shadows that wrapped around her left foot as it pointed and curved around her right ankle made her arch look steep and dramatic. The sunlight from the shop window turned the tutu into an ethereal disc encircling her hips and ...
She was stunning. Stunning and perceptive and endearingly awkward when flustered, which was fairly often. And not for him.
Then, against his better judgment, he’d clicked on Jack Andersen’s profile, again. His most recent post, a video taken after a company class, showed Heather’s ex completing a series of should-be impossible jumps, which he landed cleanly, before flashing the camera a devastatingly handsome grin and bursting into photogenic laughter.
Marcus cleared his throat.
“No one to speak of,” he told his mum. It wasn’t really a lie, he reasoned. But then, judging from the look she gave him as she returned to the chopping board, she didn’t really believe it.
Chapter 9
Heather spent the weekend exploring her new neighborhood on foot. On Saturday morning, once she’d bought herself a flat white from a café on the main drag, she’d wandered the leafy streets of Kirribilli, taking in the grand old mansions that dwarfed her little row house and catching glimpses of the glittering harbor between their roofs.
