Page 36 of Back in the Saddle

“Remembering the happy times isn’t a good thing?” Lorraine asked, breaking the silence.

“I enjoyed it too much. But I can’t live in the past. Too much has happened since then.”

“Tell me about that. Taylor hasn’t said much.”

It didn’t surprise me. I was the talker in the family these days.

“She’s been so focused on the farm she has practically forgotten we exist.” I let out a breath. I’d thought about this so many times, and yet it was hard to release those thoughts. “There were so many things. Isabelle fell behind at school and was struggling. Her friend choices weren’t great.”

“What about Callum?”

“Callum was Callum—chill. I felt so bad that he wasn’t getting as much from me as Isabelle. And then I found him growing a couple of marijuana plants in the top paddock.”

“Oh. A bit too chill then.” She chuckled. And now, I could see the humour. Not so much back then, though.

“Oh, alright. He thought it would be good for him and Isabelle. They’d been smoking for a few weeks before I found out.”

“How did you find out?”

“The smell gave them away when they made weed brownies.”

She laughed.

“Lucky they just kept it to themselves.”

“Their friends probably had their own plants. Callum must have got the seeds from somewhere.”

“Yeah. I had that conversation with their friends’ parents. That was fun.”

“Youhad the conversation with them? Alone?”

I shrugged. There was so much to say, but it boiled down to one thing. “Taylor didn’t care. It was all left up to me.”

I stopped walking and went to a fence, resting my forearms on it, looking towards the river. The river was shallower now,and it had shrunk away from the riverbanks. We were lucky there was water still in it. Some rivers had dried up altogether.

One town close by had run out of water completely and the council had to truck water in every day until they could build a pipeline. And there were reports of many other towns in the same situation.

Lorraine glanced at me. “But that wasn’t the only reason you broke up, was it?”

“No. We stopped talking. She made decisions about the farm without discussing it with me. She was angry all the time. Even the kids felt it. I thought it was the stress from the drought, so I didn’t say anything.”

I kicked at the dirt below the fence. Dirt where once grass would have been. When the drought was over, how long would it take for me to get sick of spraying the fence line?

Lorraine was silent beside me, waiting for more.

“On top of that, she’d question me and my decisions in front of the team, putting me down and making me feel incapable.” I let out a huff. “Ididn’t matter anymore.”

The truth hurt as much today as the first time I thought it. All my life, until I’d met Taylor, my needs didn’t matter. My mother only thought of herself, and that meant I had four brothers to think of. What I wanted or needed was irrelevant. Months ago, that feeling had creeped in again until it settled, like the dust around us had settled.

No point stopping there. Time for the killer blow. “Then at parent-teacher interviews, she accused me of cheating. We’d broken up by then, but the accusation…”

Lorraine swung her head to face me, the whites of her eyes increasing with every centimetre.

I met her eyes.

“Taylor accused you of cheating?”

I nodded.

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