‘It signals quality. And craftsmanship.’
‘Why do men get all the credit for doing the craft?’
Roddy pauses, his brain stumbling momentarily. ‘I … they …’ He thinks. ‘Craftspersonship? Is that better?’
‘Sounds dumb.’
‘Does a bit,’ says Roddy, more cheerfully than he feels.
‘Fourteen an hour is going to be a stretch,’ she says, ‘if I’m going to make enough cash by Mum’s birthday.’
‘Eight hours a week should do it. Four weeks until she turns fifty. Easy.’
Sienna had spent the trip down telling him about the pair of boots Donna kept looking at online. They were three hundred dollars—her mum was never going to be able to afford them—but Sienna wanted her to have them. It was a big deal, turning fifty (like,ancient!) and she needed to earn money to buy them for her mum.
Roddy had offered to lend her the money, but she had lookedat him and said (a little too scathingly for his liking), ‘How am I supposed to pay you back?’
She could clean his car for cash again, but it was already clean. Then the bookshop job had occurred to him. Lottie could use a hand and Sienna could use some time off her phone screen. And if she were also off Roddy’s hands, that would be just fine. Three birds, one stone. He’ll pay the fourteen an hour himself if he must.
Sienna stares out the window at one of the new housing developments that has sprung up on the side of the freeway. Roof after grey roof, not a tree in sight.
‘They all have the same house,’ says Sienna. ‘What if you had dementia and walked to the shop and couldn’t remember which house was yours?’
‘There are no shops to walk to. You’d have to drive. So, probably not ideal housing if you have dementia. And terrible for heating and cooling too. Those places have no eaves.’
Sienna turns and he can feel her stare boring into the side of his head. ‘What happened to make you so, like,negative?’
‘I’m not negative.’ Roddy has the urge to bang his head repeatedly on the steering wheel. For a whole hour he has been asking questions about her favourite things; offering snippets of pop culture, podcasts, his favourite musicals. And in return he’d got exactly nine words, none of them consecutive. And nowheis the negative one? He takes a deep breath and reminds himself that Sienna’s life stage is far more depressing than his, given she is an actual teenager.
‘You kind of are,’ she says.
They lapse into silence until they reach the road that leads to Brookbank.
‘You’ll like working with Lottie,’ says Roddy.
They pass a paddock of horses and he remembers how much Sienna had loved them when she was small. ‘Do you ride horses?’
‘Nup.’
‘It’s popular around here.’
‘It’s kind of expensive.’
He hears a note of disappointment and chides himself. He hadn’t taken the time to think through the likelihood of Donna being able to afford lessons, or the costs of owning and stabling a horse.
‘Like, horses are probably fine, but I’m not into them. And you have to wonder if they like being ridden. It’s kind of animal cruelty.’
Roddy wonders how Donna manages to front up to these conversations every day. Is there some sort of wisdom that is automatically bestowed on you when you become a parent? A new inner Zen that means you learn appropriate responses to deal with hyper-critical aliens?
Sienna’s feet are still planted across the dashboard, and she holds on to the dead phone as if it is a beloved pet. ‘How do you know Lottie?’
‘She’s a friend of my Aunty Mary and the granddaughter of Phyllida, the lady we visited in hospital. Your mum and I also went to school with her dad, who was Phyllida’s son.’ He slows as they reach the outskirts of Brookbank. ‘She’ll be good to work with.’
‘Why’s it called The Bookshop of Buried Pasts?’ asks Sienna. ‘Sounds weird.’
Roddy ponders this. ‘I guess because it’s an antiquarian bookshop. That means every book has a past buried inside its pages.’
They fall into silence again. Native forest gives way to a scattering of colourful exotic trees as they reach a settler’s hut that marks the entrance to Brookbank. On the main street, the early nineteenth-century courthouse gives the whole place the quaint look of a movie set. They pass a pretty sandstone cottage, its garden awash with summer roses. There is a weatherboard pub, a windmill that must be sixty feet tall and a leafy park near the attractive shopfronts on the main street. Maybe he’ll look here to buy a house, rather than Bowral. It feels comforting and familiar.
