Page 53 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon
Josie is smiling as she comes back inside, and Trudy is somewhat startled when she’s given a quick hug.
‘Thanks so much,’ Josie says. ‘She’s really happy.’
‘Excellent news. Now.’ Trudy peers into the book. ‘I have time for a ten-minute break. If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be out the back.’ Out the back with a coffee, of course, but she doesn’t need to say that.
For the next ten minutes – actually, fifteen, because her client is running late – Trudy thinks about mothers and daughters, about whether she would have been like Erin if she’d had a daughter, and indulges in a few more what-ifs before she emerges again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The winter sun casts a rich yellow light across the water at Killcare as Josie stretches out her legs on the towel and squints as she looks out to the tinny with two fishermen in it, their rods propped up.
‘Tell me if you’re cold,’ Brett says as he spreads out a towel for himself and sits beside her.
It was his idea to come here for their second date. He didn’t use the word date, but that’s what it is. Josie’s friend Sue was really firm about it when she told her.
‘Did he ask you or did you ask him?’ Sue said.
‘As if I’d ask him!’
‘All right, all right.’ Sue had kept chewing her gum, then nodded enthusiastically. ‘Definitely a date. Where’s he taking you?’
‘He said it’s a surprise.’
‘Just as long as he doesn’t take you somewhere weird.’
‘Like where?’
‘That rollerskating rink at Long Jetty.’
‘Why would that be weird?’
‘Do you know any blokes who rollerskate?’
Sue had looked so serious when she said it, but Josie couldn’t take her seriously – why would Brett want to go rollerskating? Except afterward she found herself worrying about it, which just went to show she was gullible like her mother always said, so maybe that means she’s gullible enough to think it’s a date. Except Sue was really sure it was.
Brett had wanted to pick her up at home but as it’s a Sunday she told him not to – that would involve her parents looking out the living-room window and seeing her getting in his car, which she’d have to explain later, and it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Instead she said she’d meet him at the nearby jetty at Brisbane Water. Well, actually, first she said she could meet him wherever he had planned to take her, but he insisted on picking her up because it was a surprise.
The surprise, it turned out, was that he’d bought prawns and some bread rolls, and he brought a lemon from home and a knife to cut it with, then he picked her up and drove her to Killcare, taking towels out of the boot, and now they’re sitting in the warm sun and he’s peeling the prawns, which is really such a nice thing for him to do.
‘Thanks,’ she says, gesturing to the prawn-shell carnage on the paper. ‘You had to get all messy.’
‘No worries,’ he says with a grin, then he walks to the water’s edge and rinses his hands. ‘Easiest place in the world to peel prawns,’ he says as he returns, shaking off the water.
He cuts open the bread rolls then tucks prawns inside, squeezing lemon over them, before handing a roll to Josie. It’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for her: so simple yet caring. Thoughtful, that’s what he is.
She knows what Sue would say:He just wants to get in your pants. She knows what she would say back:What if I just want to get in his?Except she wouldn’t say that, because even the thought of it makes her blush. And feel curious. And, sometimes, giddy. It’s not as though she hasn’t had crushes on boys, and wondered what it would be like to … you know,do things. But she hasn’t done things.
‘Pretty good prawns,’ Brett murmurs. ‘Salty.’
‘I wonder where they caught them.’
‘Tuggerah Lake. That’s where he usually goes.’
‘Oh?’
The casual way he says it, the ‘usually’, suggests he’s familiar with this prawn catcher and that intrigues her. She wants to know the story. She wants to know him. It feels comforting and strange and exciting and settled all at the same time. Is this what falling in love is? Sue couldn’t tell her because it’s never happened to her, she said. Once she thought she got close but the bloke got back together with his ex and moved to Newcastle.
‘Yeah.’ Brett grins. ‘My neighbour. Terry. He catches them at Tuggerah and sells them out of his garage. Everyone knows about it, so he does well.’ He keeps grinning as he takes another bite of his roll.
