Page 23 of Wings Above the Mallee

Her heart was pounding, the blood buzzing in her ears and she felt sick. Heath thought she had a motherly nature. But if that was true, she wouldn’t be alone now, would she?

A commotion a few feet away snatched their group’s attention: a chair lay on its side, a man on his knees beside it.

‘My God, Gavin!’ Amelia pushed past Heath. ‘Are you okay?’ She was overreacting, she knew it, but the emotion of a few seconds ago made her response uncontrollable.

‘Chair jumped in front of me.’ Gavin chuckled as Heath helped him up.

‘You tripped? It wasn’t … a turn or something?’ God, she didn’t want to know, didn’t want to ask, terrified of the answer. But how could she turn a blind eye?

‘Hush, there. Can’t admit to a fall at my age. They’ll have me in God’s waiting room quicker than a feed of stewed prunes going through.’

‘God’s waiting room?’ Heath said.

‘The bloody nursing home. Or, in my case, palliative care.’

‘No!’ Amelia blurted. He’d said the words. Admitted he was going to die. She dropped her hand from Gavin’s elbow. ‘No, Gavin, you can’t—’ Or, more correctly, she couldn’t. She couldn’t deal with this again, couldn’t lose someone she—no matter how reluctantly—cared for.

Gavin caught her hand and patted it. ‘Steady up there, love. It’s all right. We’ve all got to go sometime, you know.’

She was trembling, her lips numb.

‘I’ve a few weeks left, in any case,’ he said, as though the timeframe should placate her.

‘No, not yet, not yet,’ she whispered, although it wasn’t truly Gavin she pleaded with.

With the rest of their group—even the irrepressible Lynn—stunned to an uncomfortable silence, Gavin gave a shrug. ‘It’s not so bad. At least I got a heads-up, which gives me a chance to do all the important things: catch up with everyone I want to see for one last meal, one last drink. This is the way it should be, dying in the autumn of my life.’ He nodded as though he truly accepted his lot. ‘It’s like everything is soft and muted, the colour slowly slipping away. I don’t fancy holding out for the winter. Dying in cold, stark loneliness. Nothing could be worse than that.’

He was wrong.

Noah had died in the spring. Permanently in his youth, never aging, never ailing. Just gone.

11

Sean

‘Just caught me, lovey.’ Lynn turned from chatting with Tracey as Sean plonked his groceries on the counter.

‘Wish I was that lucky, Lynn,’ he said with a grin as he used the carton of milk to slide his bread and vegies along the counter toward her register. Streaks of dark wood showed through where decades of shuffled groceries had rubbed the cream paint away. ‘Didn’t know you closed up early on a Tuesday.’

Lynn examined each of his items as though checking on his diet. ‘Not closing; Chloe will be here to take over in a couple of minutes. Second Tuesday of the month is for line dancing.’

‘Ah, I saw something about that on the noticeboard outside the post office.’

Tracey executed a little jig, which he assumed were steps from the dance. ‘You should come along. You and Heath.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Lynn agreed, smoothing her apron across her stomach. ‘We were just saying that it’s nice to see you both in town a bit more often now.’

‘That might be pushing it a bit for Heath,’ he said carefully. ‘Both the dancing and the socialising.’

‘Not for you, though?’ Lynn said, and Sean recognised his mistake. He should have led with a regretful excuse. ‘I tell you, we’re awful short of men at the dance, aren’t we, Tracey? Well, not that you want one, or that we actually need them—it’s not a partnered kind of thing. But it’s always nice to have a bit more balance.’

‘Ladies, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were propositioning me.’

Tracey tittered.

‘You hardly know me at all, lovey,’ Lynn retorted, then surprised him by blushing as Tracey gasped.

‘You’ve not persuaded Ant to go along, then?’ Sean said hurriedly. It hadn’t taken him long to catch up on that bit of local gossip: apparently Lynn and the owner of one of the two pubs had been having something of a slow-burn relationship for years.

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