“Tomorrow!” Cami jumps up and down.
“Tomorrow is Boxing Day,” Danika tells her. “We’re going to see Granny and Gramps.”
“The next day then.”
“Bella and I are going out with Jorie and her mum—we’re taking a ferry ride to Queenscliff.”
They bat days back and forth until they settle on six days’ time, New Year’s Eve. Kim and Bella will come to Danika’s house, and the kids will play soccer. Danika doesn’t know what she and Kim will do. Drink tea and eat scones, maybe. Whatever. This is about the kids.
But as she ends the call, she realises Cami is not the only one excited about the day.
Chapter Sixteen
Kim
Bella is insufferable and won’t stop talking about Cami. Kim feels sorry for Jorie, whose envy of the Mary Fowler jersey is thick and green.
But finally, Kim and Bella stand on the wooden porch outside Danika’s blue front door, where Cami’s soccer boots nestle up to a pair of bright-yellow Crocs that, going by the dirt on them, Danika uses for gardening.
If Kim has taken any care with her appearance, she’s told herself it’s to make Bella proud of her, to not let Bella down. But that’s a crock of shit. She knows that somehow, she’s done it for Danika. That Danika might notice she looks nice. That she might be someone Danika would call a friend.
Cami answers the door before the echoes of the chimes have stopped. She’s dressed in a Matildas shirt. Bella’s wearing the Mary Fowler shirt again, but Kim has another one in her bag—Bella’s under-10 team shirt. Bella has realised the wisdom of not wearing the Mary shirt too often, because wear means dirt, and dirt means laundry, and laundry means the signature will wear off.
But she has to show Cami. Show her sister, she said.
Cami’s face lights up when she sees them, and she makes a quick move forward, as if she’s going to hug Bella, then stops.
“Hi, Kim,” she says, and flicks her a glance, then returns her focus to Bella.
Bella reaches out and grasps Cami’s hands. “I missed you.”
Cami’s tension dissolves, and the next thing is the girls have linked arms and Cami’s dragging Bella off to the back of the house to show hersomething—Kim doesn’t know what—and Bella goes willingly without a backward glance.
“Cami missed Bella so much.” Danika has appeared in the space where her daughter was until ten seconds ago. “It was so hard not to call.”
“Thank you for respecting that.” She sets the basket she’s carrying down at her feet. “You said picnic food. I included a bottle of wine. Mainly so that if our daughters end up fighting, we can drink pink wine and maybe not care as much.”
“Not much chance of that,” Danika says with a laugh. “The fighting, that is. But there’s every chance you and I will enjoy a glass of pink wine. Come on through.” She leads the way to the kitchen.
A ceiling fan turns slowly, stirring the dry air. It’s a hot Melbourne summer day, not so hot that it’s unpleasant, but enough that the fan is welcome. There are bushfires in the western part of the state—Kim heard that on the news. Every year, more fires.
She puts the basket on the counter. “Do you have any room in your fridge?”
Danika pulls the door open. It’s a huge fridge, double door, American style, maybe twice the size of the smaller one in her apartment. It brings home sharply how different their lives are—and how similar too. Danika shifts some Tupperware to another shelf and gestures.
Kim unloads falafel, salad, and spinach dip and puts them on the only shelf with space.
Danika opens the wine and pours two glasses.
Unsure of what to do next, Kim looks at Danika. As her gaze drifts from the top of her shiny dark hair down over her plain t-shirt and navy drawstring shorts, she thinks Danika is doing okay.
There’s a fullness to her cheeks that wasn’t there the last time, as if some of the worry and sadness has drifted away or been pushed into a deeper corner of Danika’s mind. Danika’s bare brown thighs draw Kim’s gaze as if on strings. They’re slender—she almost certainly has the sought-after thigh gap—but it’s not the leanness that comes from exercise, more from being too busy or distracted to eat.
She traces the line of them with her gaze and for a fractured second wonders what they would feel like under her palms. Soft she imagines, not muscle-hard.
Then Danika pushes her hair behind her ear, and Kim becomes aware she was staring.
Danika looks out through the wide glass doors to the rear, where Cami and Bella are already taking it in turns to tackle each other. “Thank you,” she says. “I’m sure you had some hand in Bella’s change of heart.”
