Page 42 of Kraken Cove

“Everything OK?”

He brushes a hand through his tousled hair and looks up at me. “Yeah. No, it’s just Dad. With everything last night, I forgot to ask Mum about this appointment in Sydney. It’s probably nothing...” He trails off and I can tell he thinks it’s not nothing.

“Want to talk about it?”

He sighs.

I turn and pour boiling water into the coffee plunger to make his coffee, then fill the mug for my tea. By the time I turn back, he’s still staring at the toast.

“I just worry about him. He’s got this medical appointment in Sydney and he didn’t say a word. Left it to Mum to casually drop the information to me the other day. Only, I get the feeling she’s avoiding talking to us about it. It’s almost like she’s worried, but she doesn’t want us to worry, you know?”

I nod. My mother would never do anything like that. If there was a problem in her life, everyone would know about it straight away. She loves a drama.

But though I only just met her, I can guess Luke’s mum is nothing like that.

“What do you think it is?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I just hate not knowing. There can’t be anything good about the fact that he won’t talk about it.”

Wrapping my hands around my hot mug, I lean over the counter. “Why don’t you? Why don’t you take him for a drive or something and talk to him?”

“I dunno.” Luke takes a sip of coffee. “This is going to sound dumb, but I’m worried it’d be awkward. Mum is always the middle man on this kinda stuff. It’s funny, because Dad did most of the stuff with me and my brothers when we were little. He was always so affectionate. For us krakens, fathers are usually the primary carers. But you know since we’ve grown up, it seems to be harder to talk to him.”

I nod. “But if you’re really worried, maybe you should just ask him.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right.” He takes a big bite of the raisin toast I just made him, so I think he’s going to drop the subject. I’m certainly not going to keep going. I’m not going to be a nag.

Then he takes another sip of coffee. “I think I’m going to do it. Only let me procrastinate a little while first. Let’s talk about this front door of yours.”

We end up hanging out most of the day. We go back to the hardware store, but find nothing, so we spend a little while trawling online until I find a beautiful door with a glass panel with a sea monster in stained glass, and I have to have it. I picture the wooden facade and the renovations to the kitchen I’ve been dreaming of. Pretty soon I’m sketching plans, and Luke is nodding and doing calculations, and it’s all planned out. Months of stalling, unable to make any decisions, and suddenly I can’t stop. We order a whole stack of materials, and the project gets bigger and bigger, completely different from what Oliver and I had originally planned.

I’m excited.

I haven’t felt excited about anything in so long.

I could work remotely for a while. There’s no reason I need to be in the office next week, or the week after. The longer I get to avoid dealing with the Oliver situation, the better. So I leave a message for Dad, unable to face calling him. I let him know I’m going to work from home for a while. I leave out all the personal stuff and just give him the basic details. One day, I’ll go back to Sydney and face reality, but not today and not next week.

The more decisions I make, the happier I feel, and the easier the next one is, and the next.

By the time Luke leaves to go see his dad, I’m feeling positively blissful.

SIXTEEN

Luke

“You really oughta do something with this garden bed here, Lukey.”

Dad jerks his head at the bed which runs along the side of my house and is currently full of weeds and broken tiles. I should. I know I should. There are a lot of things I should do here, I just haven’t had the motivation.

Our hands are full. He’s helping me carry some rotten sleepers from the backyard out the front, so I can get rid of them. I’m taking it as a good sign he seems as strong as ever. My dad’s always been a monster of a guy in all senses of the word. I remember when I was really young, he’d toss me and mybrothers up out of the water one after the other so far it felt like we were flying before we hit the waves again. Thought of him that way until I was almost twenty. Like he was larger than life. Indestructible.

“Yeah, I know, Dad.”

I liked Mia’s idea about going for a drive. There’s something about not sitting across a table looking at each other that definitely makes it easier to talk to him. When I called him, though, he asked me how my garden was going, and I had to admit I haven’t done anything to it since the last time he was round. So we ended up at Bunnings for weedkiller and a new shovel. Then he decided I need to clear all the junk from my yard and pull out the old tree stump that’s been there for years.

I get the impression he’s trying to keep me distracted.

We dump the wooden beams and turn back to tackle the stump taking up half the yard. I grab the spade and Dad wheels the wheelbarrow behind me. “Hey, Mum says you’ve gotta go up to Sydney next month for an appointment.”

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