Page 57 of Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society
‘Ah – no.’ Kathy smiles apologetically. ‘We’ll probably both get a lecture. Let’s get stuck into that pile of sticks, shall we?’
‘Sure.’ Cynthia smiles. ‘I’ll go first.’
As Kathy watches Cynthia hauling out small and large fallen branches she doesn’t feel the relief she’d expected at keeping her secrets to herself. Instead she feels as though something is starting to curdle within her, and it’s not last night’s wine. But she doesn’t know how to identify it, and this is not the time or the place, so she takes the sticks from Cynthia and puts them in a pile on the lawn, over and over again.
The repetitive actions of their work are soothing; Kathy’s noticed this before. They don’t so much free her mind to wander as allow it to empty completely. Jemima used to rave about meditation and Kathy thought it was silly, but maybe this is what she was talking about.
‘You have a daughter, don’t you?’ she says after a while. She might not be willing to offer up details about her own life but she can at least ask Cynthia about hers.
‘I do,’ Cynthia says. ‘Odette.’
The clipped nature of Cynthia’s answer makes Kathy wonder if she should ask anything more. It’s hard to work out what other people want. Maybe Cynthia wants her to stop talking. Or maybe she doesn’t want to talk too much so she’s restraining herself. If neither one of them talks, though, they’ll never get beyond a certain point of knowledge about each other, and Kathy is pretty sure she likes Cynthia, so she wants to know more. She’s quite aware she’s being hypocritical but it’s not going to stop her.
‘Why don’t you tell me about her?’ she says.
Cynthia stops work and sits back on her haunches, her face serious. ‘We used to be close,’ she says. ‘She came with me when I moved to the States. She was five then. Her father, Pat, is from here, so he stayed here.’
From that description Kathy can’t work out if Cynthia wanted him to come and he refused, or if they were never really together in the first place.
‘I married Max when she was twelve, I think,’ Cynthia continues. ‘He was fine, at first. To her. Not to me. Once we were married, he thought it meant he could control everything I did and he was outrageous …’ Cynthia squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them again and clears her throat. ‘Then once Odette went through adolescence and got a bit rebellious, he hated that he couldn’t control her either.’
There’s a throat-clearing noise from Shirl and Cynthia starts picking up sticks again.
‘So they fought. It was awful. A few years ago Odette decided to move back here to live with her father.’ Cynthia sighs. ‘I stuffed it up. Stuffed her up. I should have left my husband instead of letting her go, but …’ She pauses. ‘It was complicated.’
Kathy thinks about leaving her children in Melbourne and how she’d rationalised it away because they’re adults. Yet there’s Michelle feeling abandoned and Grant not that wild about her leaving either.
‘It usually is,’ she says. ‘But here’s how I see it: mothers put their children first so often that if there’s the odd time they don’t, the kids can act like it’s a huge failure. Sometimes it’s just because we don’t have it all figured out either and we’re trying our best.’
Cynthia stops what she’s doing and turns around. ‘Thank you for saying that.’
‘But don’t you think it’s true? We’re all just trying our best. Most of the time, anyway.’
A weak smile from Cynthia indicates her agreement. ‘I’ll tell myself that,’ she says softly.
They go back to the sticks and the tossing, and after an hour has passed they’ve cleared enough of the garden to be able to make out distinct shapes of bushes and shrubs.
Kathy feels something like satisfaction, and it’s not all about the gardening. She knows Cynthia better than she did at the start of the day, and that’s a reward in and of itself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘Therehave been mornings – several of them, in fact – when Elizabeth has sat outside the doctors’ surgery in her car and cried. Not because she doesn’t want to go inside, because she doesn’t mind it in there. Not because she doesn’t want to do her job, because she quite likes it and it’s paying her bills and for that she is very grateful. It’s because the tears come whenever she has a few moments to herself.
As soon as she wakes up she gets herself ready for the day, and Charlie ready for school, then she puts him in the car for the short drive to the school entrance, then off he goes to his day and she drives on to Sunrise Beach and pulls up outside the building where she will spend her day, and if she’s not quick enough at exiting the car – if she takes even a minute to turn off the radio and the engine because she’s thinking about something or trying to remember something – she starts crying.
The tears aren’t caused by anything in particular, although grief is the obvious culprit. It sounds so offhand now, though: she’sgrieving. She’s awidow. Actually, yes, that’s the word that can start her off if she lets it creep into her mind. She can manage the grieving part just fine when there’s not a noun attached to it.
The other day at church, as she was trying to make a fairly quick exit, waving at Reverend Willoughby, one of the congregants grabbed her arm – a little forcefully, causing Elizabeth to frown.‘Oh, it’s so sad. I heard that you’re awidownow,’ the woman said, and Elizabeth could see that she enjoyed performing pity. It was surprising that she hadn’t accosted Elizabeth before.
Elizabeth had stared at her, mainly because that word,widow, hadn’t yet been used in her presence. Her parents hadn’t said it, nor had her friends. The people who were the most understanding didn’t say anything at all about Jon being dead, they just kept him in the conversation in small ways that Elizabeth would only appreciate later, by referring to things he’d said or done. As if there might be more stories to tell about him one day, even though the subtext of every conversation is that there won’t be. In short: no one who loves her categorises her as being anything other than Elizabeth. Certainly not as a widow.
Yet there the word was – in her face, literally. She tried to swallow it. To chew on it. After a few seconds she realised it was stuck in her throat and she wasn’t going to be able to get rid of it, and for that she would never, ever forgive this woman she didn’t know and hoped never to see again.
‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ she said, then she gripped Charlie’s hand tighter and walked away.
That’s what pops into her head in silent times now: that woman giving her a label. And Elizabeth really wishes she could get it out of her head but she has no idea how to do that, and so here she is, crying in her car, and her mascara will be running and she doesn’t have a tissue to wipe it off her cheeks.
A knock on her window doesn’t even make her jump because she’s so caught up in being that awful W-word.
