Page 21 of Just Say (Hell) No
“Easy for you to say,” Jakinda said. “When it could have been done and dusted already and everything back to normal.Say what you like, it would be better than this. She’s sixteen.”
“Not so easy for me to say,” he said. “I’ll be the one dealing with it, won’t I, while she’s here. But it’s for, what? Five months?” he said to Ella as much as to his aunt. “You can do anything for five months. Anyway, this is her choice, not mine.”Or yours.
“Youcan’twant to take that on,” Jakinda insisted. “And I certainly can’t come stay with her. I can’t leave the practice, not during breeding season.” His aunt was a vet tech for a large-animal clinic, and there were a lot of sheep in the Southern Alps. “Maybe one of the girls could have her stay. Otherwise, she’ll have to come home. Like it or not, uncomfortable or not. If this is her choice, it is.” She didn’t say,You made your bed, you lie in it,but he had the feeling it wasn’t far off.
“I’ll check about the girls,” Marko said, although he doubted that his sisters would be volunteering. Terese, four years younger, was remotely possible, he guessed. Living across the Ditch in north Queensland with her husband and two little boys, she had only two bedrooms and the noisiest flat in Australia, but she’d know heaps more than Marko did about pregnancy and girls. Sabine, third in line, was studying to be a doctor in Dunedin. Probably not an option. Sabine was very good at focusing on one thing at a time, but not so good at paying attention to anything else. “If not, we’ll cope.”
“You wouldn’t have the first idea,” Jakinda said.
He knew better than to react out of male ego. He did anyway, of course. “Oh, I dunno. I expect I could figure it out. The occasional man has hung around to help a woman during her pregnancy before. It’s only for a few months.”
“If it’s hisbaby,”Jakinda said. “What reason would you have to do it?”
Marko took a breath before he answered. Always wise. “That she’s my cousin. That she’s sixteen. She needs a place to stay and somebody to stay with, and here I am.”
A textbook example of how a man got in over his head.
By the time he rang off, Ella was hugging her pillow to her midsection. Marko couldn’t tell how much chubbier she was there. Must be a fair bit, if she couldn’t button her skirt.
“All right?” he asked.
“Yeh,” she said, but she didn’t sound it. He sat still and waited, and she finally said, “I should’ve asked first. I didn’t think of everything there’d be. When I was thinking maybe I was pregnant, I tried to put all the things in order like I’d normally do, the baby and school and all, but there are just… it’s somany,and…”
She’d started to rock with the pillow. He thought for a minute, then said, “Can you use the internet?”
“Wh-what? Yeh. Of course.”
“Use a phone?
“Uh… Marko.” The panic had receded. “I justuseda phone.”
“Then I reckon you can do this. We’ll make a list, add things to it as we think of them, and you’ll use the internet and the phone, make some calls, and start ticking them off, the most important ones first. One at a time. If you can’t find the answer, you’ll ask me, and we’ll look for the answer together. But you’ll look first, because it’s your life and your choice.”
She swallowed. “Yeh. It is. My choice. But…”
“Yeh?”
She hugged her pillow more tightly. “What about money? For the clothes and all? I used most of my money to get up here. I started thinking about it on the plane, though, and I think… I’ll need a whole uniform. And new jeans and all. And if I have to go to school on the bus… Fares. All that.”
“I think I can run to a few clothes, and whatever else you need.” That was enough of that. He stood up. “We’ll start getting that list sorted tomorrow morning. I’ll wake you at six.”
Suddenly, she looked like every teenager in the world.“Six?That’s, like, barelymorning.”
“Can’t be helped, though. I’m at work at eight, and I have a routine.”
“But you don’twork.Not at a realjob.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. Unfortunately, it startled the kitten enough that she dug her claws into his skin. “That’d be a nice idea if you could get it. The trouble is—you can’t get it.” He headed to the door, taking the furball with him. “Six. No worries. You don’t have any curtains, and that window faces east. I’m guessing you’ll be awake.”
Nyree may have watched some rugby on Saturday night, even though it was only Week Four in the season and nothing but a match against the Chiefs was on the line.
On the other hand, Victoria had it on the TV. If she glanced at it from time to time, that was because TV was distracting.
At this particular moment, Marko was hitting the ball carrier so hard, the other fella bounced off him and went down in a heap. Considering that the other man was Samoan and had thighs like trees, that was some feat. Afterwards, the color commentator shouted “Boom-fa!” exactly as Nyree had known he would. She’d watched enough rugby by this point in her life that the soundtrack played in her head automatically.
The camera lingered on Marko, standing up again from a ferocious contest of bodies and wills at the breakdown, and it stayed there as he wiped an enormous hand over his jersey, set his black-shadowed jaw, and readied himself to go again while the announcers kept talking about him. Specifically, about his “massive engine.”
“. . . a bloodyenormousprick,” Victoria said beside her.
